Episode 268 Minisode: County Roads Take Me Home (5): A new angel earns her wings
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All right, I’m about to tell you the coolest fucking story ever. And it is the perfect ending to my Take Me Home Country Roads mini series. Now, anybody who knows me knows I don’t believe in omens or let random crows decide my next move. But sometimes life hands you a moment that is so precise, so wild that it gives you goosebumps. There’s no denying that it’s a God wink. This is a happy story about my sister-in-law, Laura.
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her voice, her love, and the way she reached across the veil to remind us that our needs, our desires, and our truth matter. It’s also about my daughter, Anna, a last minute flight glitch and the unmistakable message that came through. When you silence your own voice, the people who love you will find a way to hand it back. Buckle up, because this one gave me chills.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober, it’s not about the alcohol.
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I have to say I am not overly spiritual or attached to signs, but I do say that when I place my attention on searching for mystical signs that sometimes I find them. As a point of reference, I will admit that I’m mostly skeptical. Like I’ll believe my sign, I ain’t gonna believe your bullshit sign, no offense. And I tend to believe signs are for entertainment purposes only.
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I don’t make a lot of decisions based on, you know, the flow, the crow that flew by or something, but I do allow signs to inform my thinking processes. And I do invite some magical thinking into my mind because it’s all magical thinking. I mean, when you really think about all the mental constructs that we exist in, in our society, where it’s all being made up. So I might as well make up something that is meaningful and that
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connects me to joy and happiness and actions that I need motivation and energy to go and change the world in and move through my fear because I feel called or certain about something like it’s all you get to pick, right? You get to pick what you make significant meaning is made in the mind. Nothing means anything. Meaning doesn’t exist out in nature. It’s a human construct. You just got
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the three dimensional world out there doing its thing and us humans that decide what things do or don’t mean. So warning, there is a human, me, that is about to make some fantastical meaning out of a situation that someone else might dismiss as a simple computer glitch. So my sister-in-law, Laura, was the youngest of three. She was the only girl. She had two big brothers and
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Dad was kind of straight out of 1950s. And when the kids were growing up, he was pretty overbearing, pretty, you know, male patriarchy dominant with the expectations and the aggressiveness and the disciplinary, you know, and just the beliefs that all of those kids were programmed into. And then mom was kind of the submissive housewife sort of gal. She’s amazing. And I absolutely adore her. But Laura was raised in a home.
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where she earned her points in life by people pleasing and approval seeking and making sure everybody around her was happy. Even as a teenager, I met her when she was 13. She spent most of her time trying to figure out what other people thought and where she fit in their thoughts and was just always hyper-focused, very sensitive, highly empathic, able to read people and
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because of that kind of suffered a lot of internalized anguish because if everybody around her wasn’t happy, she couldn’t be happy either. As the third child, she was the peacekeeper and the fixer and the one that performed when other people were upset to take attention off of the negative emotions. She was taught and rewarded for worrying and having high levels of anxiety.
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And she was an amazing person, but for sure, that stereotypical third child, the female role, yeah, that was her. And I have four children and my third child is also a female. And I will say, I see a lot of the same characteristics exhibited. I never actively expected my daughter, Anna, to keep the peace, but she just has always been the one flying under the radar.
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You know, with her sister, I always say the youngest of four, Kate, she’s always buzzing the tower. Like, I never for 30 seconds don’t know where Kate is. Anna, very self-sufficient, never wants to ask for anything, never wants to be a bother. She’s the only one out of all four of my children that consistently did her homework and graduated high school with all of the accolades that would prove that she’s a good girl.
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you know, all the AP courses and academic honors and band leadership positions and high recommendations from all of her teachers. She was always kind of a go-to. If the orchestra needed a fill-in, she’d drop what she was doing on a weekend and go and do a performance with them, even though she wasn’t even in the orchestra. You know, just really helping people, solving problems, and internalizing all of her own stress.
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Like if you ask Anna what’s wrong, even to this day, she will immediately start to cry, which she finds very embarrassing. She’s actually working with a therapist because she wants to be able to tolerate conflict. And she has a boyfriend that she’s in love with. I think he’s gonna be a keeper. And they even role play where he brings something to her and says, hey, I don’t like that you did this. And they...
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create a safe environment so that she can respond and use her own voice and speak up for herself and engage in conflict in a healthy way. So she is aware of her subconscious programs and the limitations and she’s actively working to move beyond that and I couldn’t be more proud of her. And so with that background, here’s the story. We found out that Laura was gone.
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late Friday evening and Anna is in Key West for the summer. She’s working on a dive boat. She just became a dive master. She’s working six days a week, has gained tons of experience and doing it, know, the boyfriend isn’t with her. She’s independent and strong and pursuing her goals and has met amazing connections and I’m just so proud of her. Anyway, Friday night we call and we’re helping Anna process it, me and my youngest daughter, Kate.
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In West Virginia are on the phone with Anna. She’s walking around kind of you know She couldn’t be she’s in a dorm room sort of situation with a bunch of people so she’s out walking the streets and Just an absolute mess. You know, Laura was precious to all of us and Laura and Anna had a very special connection for a variety of reasons. They even kind of look the same
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And so obviously we were discussing when Anna’s gonna come back. And I said, when do you think, you I can’t imagine the funeral will be anytime, you know, within the next few days, it’ll probably be next weekend. When, what do you need? She’s like, I wanna come back as soon as possible. I wanna be there for dad. I wanna be with the siblings. I wanna be there for grandma Nancy and everybody. And I said, okay. uh
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And so I got off the phone and within an hour I had booked her on a flight for the next evening. That would give her enough time to notify her bosses, get some stuff packed, get to the airport and get home. Now here’s where it gets super fucking cool. So I’m sitting there booking the flight. My daughter and I are looking at them and this was the only nonstop. Plus it was later in the day. So we’re like, okay, let’s do that.
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And so we booked the flight. We booked the flight, confirmed last seat on the plane. And as I always like to do, I want to double check to make sure all of that just happened. And I didn’t get any emails. And then I was like, oh, well, that makes sense because I put in Anna’s email so she would get the notification. So I texted Anna and I said, hey, check your email. Confirmation for the flight will be there. You should be able to do your boarding pass through your email.
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And she texted back and said, I haven’t gotten anything. And I went back to the website and it said, there’s all these technical glitches and uh it may take some time for transactions to post. So I said, well, just go to bed. By this time it was 1230 in the morning. She had to work at six. And I said, go to bed and then let me know in the morning that you got the email. And so we all went to bed. Next morning, she sends me a text that says, I didn’t get an email. And if for some reason,
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It didn’t go through because she knew it was the last seat on the flight. If it didn’t go through, that would actually be okay because tomorrow night is the event that I have been looking forward to all summer. We’re doing a night dive at 90 feet deep to see a shipwreck with phospholuminescence all over it. And if I can’t fly out tomorrow, I’ll still be able to do the dive and
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That’s kind of one of the reasons I took the job in the first place because this is such a cool experience. And it immediately occurred to me that she hadn’t said that because she hadn’t wanted to be a burden or to take up space or to be delayed when she should just drop everything and get home to help and care and be a part of everything. She immediately dismissed that thought from her head because
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what she wanted and needed would not be a priority. She’s not used to asking for what she wants. She really isn’t. I am constantly coaching her to stop feeling bad when she tells me she needs a new pair of running shoes or she’d like some new shorts for the season. I’m like, girl, I want you to have those things, but she’ll go and be painfully frugal even when I’m giving her full permission. know, now her younger sister does not have that problem. She good.
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blow through any budget I give her and double it. But Anna, she won’t even buy herself food and I have to force her, I have to ask her, hey, do you have enough money in your account? Because she won’t even ask if she’s running low. And so it occurred to me, because I also experienced things like this myself, she is my daughter, she didn’t get this from nowhere, I’ve been a part of it, of how when I was booking the ticket, the cost of the ticket and finding the cheapest ticket.
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and finding the easiest thing for everybody because she has to be picked up two hours away and her car isn’t there and all of the things. I, so I just know that she just, when I said, when do you want to come home? She just said, do whatever is cheapest and best for everyone else. But Laura was like, no bitch, you’re going on that dive. So when I called the airline to see what was up with the flight indeed,
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The flight she was supposed to be on was not confirmed and it was full. And so I booked her on the next day’s flight and the only one that was available was later in the evening. And of course I had feelings of like, oh I feel bad for her, it’s gonna be late. Like all the feeling of the bad is like, we gotta get over that ladies. Anyway, so I booked the flight and I call her back and led with the apology that it’s so late. And she goes, actually mom, that’s perfect.
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That’s the only way I would actually have been able to dive anyway. I forgot to mention that there’s an 18 hour gap from when you get out of the water and a 90 foot dive and when you can get on an airplane. And we looked at it, it was exactly 18 hours. It was exactly 18 hours of when she’d be getting out of the water to when the plane would take off. And I thought in the moment, this could be Laura, but at the time I didn’t know that the note she had left behind.
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that said, I’m tired of not having a voice. And in that moment, it all came together. And I was like, she was giving Anna her voice for her, literally glitching up the damn airline. I mean, that’s never happened. I completed the transaction. The airline confirmed that I had booked the flight. It just didn’t stick. Like, when does that happen? Well, it happens when you got yourself a new angel on the other side.
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Committed to making sure that her niece learns that her needs are important and that you have to balance between taking care of everybody else and taking care of yourself and that Sometimes you do have to take a plane flight home and miss the dive you are waiting for all of the summer But that it is okay to speak that truth Speaking the truth changes the truth. It allows you to release it because when you suppress
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the desire that you want under the guise that somehow it’s not important, you’re not important, other people matter more, it becomes stuck and it corrodes into a toxic relationship with self where the only way for the brain to make sense as to why your needs aren’t being met is to project that on other people and blame them for not seeing your needs, respecting your needs, giving you.
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what you need. Suppressing your truth disconnects you from your own body, from your own humanity. It requires you to deny the one person who you are responsible for worrying about what they think and what they feel and what they need. And it traps you in your head where your brain is trying to figure out how to solve for the feelings instead of the facts. And that is an exhausting
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debilitating downward spiral. And so I just want to leave you with a question. Where are you suppressing your voice? And what would it look like to allow the truths that you’ve locked away to come into the surface of your consciousness so they can coexist peacefully with all of the truths so that you can choose which truths define you, choose which truths have meaning for you.
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Choose the truths upon which you want to act and then release the truths that don’t serve you by using your voice to set yourself free.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80%, so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.