The Emmaline - Maditas Blog

LIFE LATELY: KARNEVAL 2020

When you do the inner work and start getting your physical strength back you can celebrate Karneval as you want to 🙂 At times I am still overwhelmed and feeling very unsafe but knowing that already makes a ton of difference. Last year I had not even the strength to stay for the whole Karnevalszug but also couldn’t articulate what I needed and wanted and had the hardest time saying no to spending time with friends. This year was so much fun!

Especially spending it in our new hometown. It truly is a small town and in a good way “everybody knows everybody”. Katharina, Annalena and I dressed up as Grandmas and braved the unfamiliar crowd. Very scary at first, but the people made it easy and it ended up being such a fun evening with LOTS of singing und dancing 🙂 🙂

The next day, Saturday, our town had their own Karnevalszug and while waiting for it, we were invited by our neighbours. So fun. Not pictured are my parents who also were in town on Saturday. So fun dressing up as contraction workers – the easiest way to convince Jan and Albrecht to join the celebration 😀

Even Ilse joined. With all the people staying at our place and us coming and going she always gets very unsure and anxious and scared to left behind, so she joined us 🙂

We had a whole fun day planned in Düsseldorf for Sunday but then another storm came and everything was canceled. Annalena, Katharina and I spent the rainy day at home and had a relaxing Sunday and met up with everyone else on Monday in Kempen.

The costume turned out to be so good because a) when it started raining our heads stayed dry lol b) it was very easy to dress warm in it c) without much effort we looked very coordinated and lastly d) a few times candy just straight up hit as at the head – it would have hurt quiet a bit without the helmet 😀

The Karnevalszug in Kempen had so many cool costumes parading and wagons. Also, so fun to spend that time with everyone while singing to the music and dancing.

Can´t wait for next year and am looking forward to making this a tradition!

TRAUMA MAKES ME FEEL….

Trauma feels like this long endless road of only hard days. Where you read inspirational quotes of „its ok to have a hard day and feel lost“ and you so badly want to apply that but it feels like your life is an endless amount of hard days and feeling lost. 

You want to constantly scream „THIS IS TOO MUCH“. Let me deal with one thing. One thing at a time and let me have and experience some joy in between but not press every single button and let me think of every single situation in a constant never changing loop of things that traumatised me. And when I then start to write and go deep to resolve whatever trauma I can resolve at the time, it always always starts with a feeling of „I have already dealt with this a thousand times“ and only then I remember that I have never cried about it, been truly mad about this specific thing and never truly processed it. This is the circle I live through with every single situation/emotion/thing that is stuck deep inside my body and mind. 

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Pain goes where I will notice it…

I had this epiphany last night of “ohh this is why I got headaches and not back pain/gut problems”. It really discouraging if you are trying to figure out why you have all this pain when someone goes “oh you must think too much”. Like what? that seems a little too easy.

There are all kinds of different types of pain and reasons for it. Nicole Sachs talks about how stuck negative emotionals can cause real physical pain. Which has been SO true for me! Pain is always always there to help us and never to harm us. It actually tries to protect us. Even though it almost always feels like it hinders us from exactly the thing that we need/want/enjoy. Why though does it not always show up in the same place? Always the back or gut or head but is different from person to person?

It goes where I will notice it! I had all these negative stuck emotions, hurt und trauma in me but was so unaware of it and was truly, with all my selfawareness that I possesed, not seeing it. So pain showed up and all of the sudden I was forced to look at that pain and really myself. Which at first will look like the reason for my pain is a physical cause but if I am lucky I will figure it out sooner rather than later that the cause is something else.

I was always big on my gut feeling/intuition but everything I excelt at in life at that point was driven by my head and my thinking. Take that away it stopped me dead in my tracks almost literally. My emotional pain was screaming at me “NOTICE ME” but I still went “I DID NOTHING WRONG. MY LIFE WAS SO GOOD, WHY DO YOU TAKE EVERYTHING AWAY NOW? WHAT IS THE LESSON TO LEARN HERE?”

It forced me to stop, put everything on hold and look at the pain that I was unintentionally trying SO HARD to not see. It took me years of utmost pain but once I grasped this concept I was “oh this was there all this time?”

For someone else it might me the gut and you start having food allergies and because of that you lack the capacity to concentrate or strenght to do your work – you are forced to look deeper into what wants to be seen and healed.

It seems like a logical thing but I really had this moment of “ohhh I see” yesterday so I wanted to share it 😀

SOMEBODY TO MAKE IT BETTER

Janis and I had a beautiful long conversation about life and pain and how you sometimes just want somebody or something to come and fix the problem for you and take your pain away. If only the painkiller will take away my physical pain so I can get back to living my life. If only someone would make me feel better when I am emotional. If someone would just save me and solve all my problems…

Numbing, supressing, distracting ourselves in all sort of forms is often our way to face pain and suffering.

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CONTENTMENT?!

"Manchmal spricht ein Baum
Durch das Fenster
Mir Mut zu

Manchmal leuchtet ein Buch
als Stern
Auf meinem Himmel

Manchmal ein Mensch
den ich nicht kenne
Der meine Worte erkennt"
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KITCHEN!

We built in our kitchen! The wall looks gross in this picture and I would love to say it does not look that bad in real life, but it sadly does haha. I just doesnt notice it that much. Maybe thats also because of the joy to have a kitchen. For a long time we just had a stove in one of the rooms and it grossed me out immensly. To now have our own clean-ish stove and kitchen again feels like a big luxery!

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LIFE LATELY

It´s been a while since I wrote about our life lately. So we need to do a little catching up. On the 15th of July we handed the keys to our flat to our landlord and with that another chapter closed. We were a bit early so we spent our time waiting lying on the floor and watching Tour de France.

Afterwards we went to Fräulein Kreuzberg 🙂

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CONNECT!

CONNECT has been a wonderful but very suprising gift to me! And I truly dont know how to capture what the last four weeks have been for me in words.

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LIFE LATELY

The last few weeks were so hot here that all the farmes brought in the crop and its been so cool to be so close to fields and farms and truly see the season changing.

Moving can be super exhausting!

Both scenarios did truly happen 😀

Man sometimes things dont go according to plan haha I was dying new sheets for our bed and I was going for a reeeally subtle pink/rose/pastell tone and this is what I got hahaha

Poor Albrecht! Its kind of a lot! I mean, if I was going for a really girly bed and room this would be PERFECT lol but I was not. Oh well…Albrecht doesnt really care though – thankfully 😉

LOVE our hammock and spending my afternoons in it!

Ilse LOVES to sit at the gate and watch whats going on on the otherside. And apparently you can see quiet a lot – according to Albrecht who at some point joined her haha

Thats been life lately!