Don’t we live in a wild, wonderful, weird world full of connection, manifestation, and magic?

After I wrote the last piece, The Word Gods Have Spoken/Written, after I emotionally stood my ground, no more Substack for me!, the writing muse — to paraphrase Stephen King — came and shat on my head once more.

And suddenly, I got the urge to write again. To maybe join all of these musings together into one cohesive volume, a combination of medical and spiritual memoir with no ending written in stone, because I’m still changing and growing all the time, as we all are.

And it all came from not being a Very Good Fairy.

It’s true. I’ve dedicated the past seven months or so to learning how to fuse sparkle into hair, thanks to the wonderful fae folks of Finklepott’s Original Fairy Hair, truly a magical company run by a magical team.

I’ve been getting the FOFH sparkle in my hair for years, and people freak when they notice it. It seemed like a good idea (at the time) to learn how, and offer this service in Costa Rica. Probably would only take a couple of weeks, right?

Wrong. Instead of earning my wings, I was gifted instead with a heaping spoonful of humble pie.

Let me put it this way: say you wanted to grow up and be an Italian teacher. You loved pasta. You loved Fellini movies. You’ve read every history book about the Fall of Rome. And yet, when it came time to learn the language, it just didn’t stick.

So you tried even harder. And still, not so good. And again. And still, not good.

The company was incredibly nurturing and supportive. It was me, I, Bridget, who finally hitched up my courage to the sticking post and offered up the truth: I truly suck at this.

(And just to give this example, in case you remain unconvinced: My daughter-in-law, Kiara, learned how to do this in one weekend. She’s already on her way to being a top New York fairy!)

So here I am. A fairy school dropout.

All of this is to say that when I let go of that dream, and embraced the reality of what I’m good at and what I’m not, writing rushed back in like a warm breeze.

“How could you let me go?” asked the muse. “This isn’t just what you do, it’s who you are.” And she put her hand in mine once more.

Looking over some of the things I’ve previously shared here, stories from the open wound when writing was the only analgesic that took away the pain, I feel shame. Some of it isn’t very good, but I needed to spew it out to let out the toxins dissipate. Most of the time, at the beginning, there wasn’t even a choice. It had to get out of me.

But from the depths of my despair, I produced some 80,000 words.

And now I need to mix together something that might be helpful to others. A dash of this one, a little of that, creating a cocktail of creativity that might be just the medicine someone else could use.

Stay tuned.