Mary’s Morning Musings: Easter Weekend
Hi there — welcome to Mary’s Morning Musings, my timebound experimental writing series and my stream-of-conscious public journal to the universe, God, inner child, late Mom, etc.
👾 Time & space context:
- Start time: 7:45am
- Hanging out in a messy casa before a 10:00 am basketball game
Mindfulness body check-in:
- Overall energy check: Good! Breathing well, resting decent, a bit tired. Day three of my period, so there’s that.
- Rest-check: A little tired but only because I stayed up late inspired to work ha
- Nourishment-check: Not home-cooked meals yet, I am eating. Lots of food delivery but we’re working on that. It was a pre-period week, what can I say.
- Cleanse-check: Spatially messy. Internally, decent.
Mary’s Morning Musings TLDR —
We have time & Happy Easter!
Mary’s Morning Musings Unfiltered Cut —
Yesterday, as part of her 100-day gratitude challenge, my friend Nivi challenged me to live “100 days of something.”
I picked “100 Days of Intentional Healing.”
I kind of joked to myself that I feel like I’m on my day 700 of healing since I’ve really been trying over the last couple of years, but the word intention is the differentiator here. I can always be more intentional and bake in a little more time to honor and acknowledge this intention.
Life is so fast, and I’ll be honest — I get lost in the sauce a cool amount.
Maryboo, aka me ages ~6–12, got lost in the sauce a lot, too. When I was in the third grade, the only blemish on my near-perfect report card was in “listening” — I got an A- lol.
Later as an adult in therapy and psychiatry, I learned I had ADHD and that I am a pretty textbook case for undiagnosed ADHD because I did well academically as a kid. Looking back, having ADHD on top of my cultural socialization and upbringing makes a lot of sense. And I’m still working on slowing down through mindful breathing, which helps to create space in my brain.
It’s all a journey, and we’re growing our mindfulness muscles by the breath. Working in client services and finding safe spaces and safe people continue to help.
Anyways, a big piece of getting lost in the sauce comes back to my perception of time. Really only recently, as in the last few weeks, did I really understand that I have time.
I actually move and bend time — but that’s another topic.
But truly, for the last 15 years, I operated under the belief that I didn’t have nor deserve the luxury of time.
Lots to unpack here as a 1.5-generation American.
And much of this belief stemmed from how much grief my body carried without me even realizing it. At the age of 12, my body began carrying a decade of unprocessed grief — excluding intergenerational grief — when my family lost my first uncle, Uncle VJ, my mom’s brother.
Since then, it felt like La Madrids and Serafins were prematurely dropping dead at a scheduled cadence like dominos perfectly spaced to fall one by one every year or six months — etc. Growing up, it felt like our family was a set of just chickens at a trap shooting contest — helpless, flightless targets left behind while other families are free-flying doves. And this was just my experience of losing family, not yet including losing close friends.
I never processed this collective grief. And I never really learned how to grieve or heal because of how quickly they all came when I was so young.
When I juxtapose the cavalcade of grief with the pace of life in my adolescent years, it makes sense that I did not really have time or space to grieve and heal.
So much of the immigrant mindset is to survive, and so I proceeded to try to survive. I don’t know — such is life. Go to college to liberate myself via financial freedom — per Mama Aries’ guidance. Only later did I learn that I did not really have an internal concept of thrive — yes, I had a lot of fun and made time to play but it felt like my primal motivations were subsistence, which again makes sense.
For those who knew me during college and growing up, this may sound confusing — it’s confusing for me, too. And I am still trying to understand who I was at different periods of time and which specific life experiences or moments narrate the energy I bring into my everyday experiences. More to come here more broadly.
I am trying to unlearn my unconscious habit of constricting grief and healing to periods of time and the subconscious belief I developed that I too am destined for a short life since the primary adult models for the life, including my Mom and her six siblings among other family and friends, did. And it’s not an unfounded narrative or belief too because of shared genetics — but it’s not helpful in any way, nor is it a truth — it’s just a thought.
Thankfully, as an adult have I had the time and space to realize that the cavalcade of innumerable family and friend deaths that followed was abnormal.
The silver lining is that because I had so much experience and time reflecting on death during my most formative years — I’m currently 27, and I feel my hippocampus (or w/e) still forming lmao — I so often narrate daily my life with my obituary and eulogies in mind — for better or worse.
Maryboo wanted to live a life that inspired, spread love, that made people want to show up to life, too. And so why deviate — despite age or lived experiences?
During the week that I had a personal belief breakthrough on my relationship with time, I was asked to give a 10- TEDx-style talk at a conference, entitled “Connecting the Dots Looking Forward.”
A reframe is: How might we think about the story our life is telling?
I’m going to wrap this up soon to start heading to my basketball game, but the short of my talk was — losing my mom was been really rough.
TLDR here — I lost my superhero badass mom very slowly in a very gruesome 3-year cancer battle, and I suffer from caregiving PTSD — so won’t elaborate much.
Growing up, she was a key influence — among a lot of my spiritual besties like priests, nuns, and countless angelic humans — who cemented my early belief to use my life to serve and share abundance in any way I can — money, time, attention, knowledge, whatever.
Sidebar: Maryboo used to run an anonymous faith-based Tumblr lol and stopped when I “got caught.” SMH. More to unpack there.
Basically, I spent a lot of time reading and reflecting on my Catechism Bible. And my core guiding belief is love and giving without the expectation of receiving anything in return. The guiding Bible verses or quotes were Luke 6: 28–36 and the Deepest Fear quote by Marianne Williamson from Coach Carter.
I can expand on my faith journey another, especially as a college-educated queer-identifying Catholic ENFJ.
Oop, we’re out of time! This story will make more sense later I’m sure. Peace out.
👾 Time & space context:
- End time: ~9:30 am
- Feeling food. Game time.
Per usu — I welcome your outreach —
“Usu” = my new shorthand for “usual,” if that caused you pause lol.
If your body, heart, mind, or soul reacted to this piece in any way, at some point please let me know somehow. I get and interpret information via digital mediums like likes/comments either on Medium or on Instagram, texts, phone calls, emails — and human mediums such as just letting me know the next time you see me. To me, it’s all data and means something different.
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- Email: For anything else, send me an email at mary.c.serafin@gmail.com.
With love,
Mary Catherine La Madrid Serafin
