Introduction

A bit about me... A pact with some angels...The book... A low point last year and why I'm here (on Substack mainly but also in general!).

Hello! 👋 My name is Elizabeth and I am from Ireland. Sort of… I was actually born in the UK and spent much of my childhood in Alberta, Canada. My family moved to Dublin when I was 9 and Limerick when I was 11. I then moved back to Dublin when I was 18 and to London when I was 21… I am telling you this now because “Where are you from?” is usually the first thing people ask me… I think partly because my accent is quite mixed up and it unnerves people when they can’t place it. And partly just because people just like to know where people are from… Or where things are made… Anyway, I just wanted to get that information out of the way before you read any further. Although it is common, I find it quite a troubling question… When you lived in 14 houses, 9 different towns/cities and 3 countries by the time you are 12, there isn’t a simple answer and so I just hand over that brief summary and hope people are satisfied and we can move on to more interesting things.

The truth is, I feel as though I am from all the places I grew up and nowhere at the same time. And so I connect deeply with present but fleeting moments and hold onto memories of people and places so dearly for fear of being blown away. These are the bricks that create the house within. I can also feel at home just about anywhere in the world and I would say that I’ve lived long enough to observe that where you are from certainly doesn’t define you. But growing up as some kind of rolling stone with no idea when or where I’d be sent off to next has a lot to answer for the way I am and the way my life has continued to unfold. I’m pretty sure of that… Is this why after about 18 years in London, I uprooted and replanted myself in Lisbon? Does the familiar become too uncomfortable? Am I more comfortable with being the new girl in town? Do I secretly crave the existential isolation that comes with the territory of being l’Etranger? Possibly… But also it was an energy thing… This city of warm terracotta rooftops and the most beautiful light had been calling me for about 6 years before I started making the move. And there have certainly been challenges beneath the great beauty of this great city but I am still here. Stronger, if nothing else.

The second question people often ask is “What do you do?” Again, I find that difficult to answer as I do many things… Sometimes I just name one thing from the multiple choice under my job description but for full transparency, I’ll often hand over the full list. And some people get uncomfortable with that too… But how do you do all these different things? They ask. The answer to that is that the guidance and energy is all from the same source - it’s just channelled through different mediums… But I also get confused and uncomfortable with it all sometimes, I must admit. When I wake up in the mornings, my mind pulls me in so many different directions. Some of my friends tell me to try focusing on one thing for a while. I try but that never goes very far. When one thing stops, all things stop. I need to be doing all the things at the same time because one thing fuels another but I received some important guidance during the summer. Hence, I’m starting writing on this platform. 

You see, this summer was quite difficult. I suffered a terrible injury at the end of June and was incapacitated for much of July due to the pain and exhaustion from the injury and a heavy load of medication. I remember the first morning towards the end of July when I woke up beginning to feel like myself again. Was my energy finally coming back? I sat up and did my morning meditation to give thanks. When I meditate, I travel up and up - up to connect with the bright white light - it is the place where the Creator of All That Is resides. Some may call this God. Others may call it Source. I call it Source - because it feels like a place more than a person - when you arrive, you are simply plugged into pure white light but the light speaks and it is here where I receive guidance and messages, healing and love. And it is here where I travel to when I am doing energy healings for people. And so, when I went up that morning to connect and give thanks, I asked them for guidance on what I should do now? Now that my energy was coming back… I had lost so much time. There was so much to catch up on! But where to start? And they told me very clearly that there are 5 things I should be doing in order to fulfil my soul’s purpose in this lifetime. And they stressed that they would give me the order in which they wanted me to prioritise these 5 things.

1. Writing
   

2. Energy Healings
   

3. Music - the djing and music production
   

4. All the design and branding work that I do
   

5. Real Estate and Interior Styling
   

They stressed that I was already doing these 5 things but in the opposite order. And they said I must flip it. They reminded me that I had come here to write and that I had been barely making any time for that… Apart from writing copy for clients’ websites and the odd personal caption on Instagram… It was true what they said and it is in my soul contract to write a book. I have known this since I was a teenager and I used to write a lot then - poetry, short stories… I was blessed to have Eddie Lenihan, a famous Irish storyteller as my English teacher when I was around 14. He used to tell us the most wonderful tales, taking us to other worlds and veering quite far off-piste in terms of the Junior Cert curriculum but what he gave us was so much more special. He read one of my stories to the class one day and giving me back my copybook, he told me that he thought I was very good at writing an awful lot about nothing but he stressed that I must not take that the wrong way because it’s writers like that who write great novels. With encouragement like that at the back of my mind, I did start the book a couple of years later. It got written in spurts in various notebooks that would inevitably get misplaced but the guides told me I wouldn’t have to really write the book until my forties because I still had a lot to learn before I was in a place to share anything of note. Saying that, any time I’ve had what feels like a “close brush” - whether it’s bad aeroplane turbulence, a car knocking me off my bike or another thing that happened once (that was the scariest but won’t go into it now) the biggest fear I have is that I’ll be taken away before I’ve carried out my duty here - to write the book… This sense of obligation has always been there. The guides started reminding me about this yet-to-be-written book in my late 30s. They tapped me on the shoulders and I turned around and told them that they had said it wouldn’t have to be done until my forties and they laughed and said yes but that is just around the corner… Start preparing now. 

The thing is, it’s always felt like a mammoth task to write the book that they originally wanted me to write. Something I’ve always thought I’d have to go and take 6 months out in Mexico or India to complete. But I’ve never had 6 months to devote solely to my own project in some faraway land… And so it just ended up on the long finger. The Some Day List… That was until last summer… And I’ll save this story for another time but basically some angels came down and conducted a miracle one night before I moved out of my apartment in Cascais. It really was amazing what happened... In the end. But it was a terrible thing that happened on top of all the stress in getting ready to move just before that. When I discovered what was wrong, I crumpled into a heap on the sofa in the living room and I sobbed. I cried and cried. I was exhausted and I just couldn’t take any more. Why did this disaster have to happen? Hadn’t life been hard enough? And that was when I suddenly felt the angels come down into the room around me.

There were four of them and they told me not to worry, that they would take care of the thing that I was so worried about but I must promise them one thing in return… What was that? To start writing the book… The book I had been putting off for too long now. I was now in my 40s, they reminded me. There was no excuse anymore. They were frank, straight-talking, no-nonsense angels but they also reassured me that it wouldn’t have to be this vast complex Ullyssesesque task that had formed in the mountainous backdrop of my mind. They told me that it could be much simpler and that they would give me the structure - and even the chapter titles. They told me to take out the notes app in my phone and write down everything they told me. And so I did. Then they told me to go to bed and leave the disaster in the kitchen to them to sort out. That I was not to go back in there until the morning… I obeyed their orders and when I woke up and went out to the kitchen the following morning, I discovered that they indeed had taken care of the thing which caused my meltdown the evening before. They really had pulled off a miracle. But that’s what angels can do… Relief is all I felt. I would have to write the book now. But that was ok. They had given me the plan to follow.

After that evening, I proceeded to fold down life as I had known it that summer. Forced out of my home in Cascais by a horrendous and relentlessly disturbing Airbnb above, I was worn down by compounded sleep deprivation and had no energy to even think of trying to find or establish a home again. I packed up most of my belongings into storage in Lisbon and I took off to Marbella at the end of July. Why Marbella? Having had no particularly significant place in my heart as long as I had known it, this little corner of Spain suddenly called me. That would be the place I could live and rest with ease for a while I sensed. Besides, I had my friends’ wedding to go to there in September and with lots of old friends coming over for it in August, I may as well station myself there beforehand. It was a practical choice. And it turned out, it was the right choice.

I started following the angels’ plan and writing the book in Marbella but there were lots of distractions there… Apart from all the work I had to catch up on after the upheaval of moving out of my place, there were new friends to hang out with, people and places to see... I then went through a long overdue yet painful breakup with the man who had promised to join me there (but didn’t) just before the old friends flew in, followed by lots of get-togethers and celebrations. And then my family arrived for a couple of weeks. It was an emotionally turbulent but overall happy summer. And I was too at peace and busy to write most of the time. After Marbella, I spent some time in Ibiza and Paris but the real writing didn’t start until I crash-landed in my sisters’ place in Luxembourg because that’s when the depression caught up. The depression was always going to catch up… It was just a question of time. Because there was so much loss I hadn’t processed with all the distraction. And there I was, washed up in my little sister’s home with no home of my own. No boyfriend. No money… No appropriate clothes for the Luxembourg winter that was quickly setting in. I felt so lost and empty. And the rain there was relentless. Too much to take for somebody who had been mainly based in the sun since the beginning of 2022. 

My arrival in Luxembourg was also overshadowed by the October 7th attacks the day before and I knew the world was about to tip over into some very dark times. Somebody I knew had family members who were kidnapped and her heart not only broke with worry for them but also for what was about to be done in their name… I fell down dark rabbit holes on Instagram and got into lots of arguments with figures of the Zionist agenda. Some of my more academic friends and family members told me I must be careful about what I was writing and sharing on Instagram… That I couldn’t really understand - I wasn’t from there, I hadn’t read enough history books and how that region was very complicated. But they didn’t understand what I already saw and sensed - the horrors upon horrors that were about to be unleashed on the Palestinians. Every morning I woke up with a weight on my chest. A heavy weight of great injustice and suffering. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t my direct suffering. I could still feel it. I couldn’t breathe and it was difficult to move. 

My sister was worried about me. She would ensure I’d get up to have breakfast with her before she went to work and more often than not, I would sneak back to bed after she left. To sleep and forget… And then to wake up and attempt to convert some of the unawakened on Instagram. The brainwashing and hate out there was quite astounding. And the chauvinism. There was quite a lot of that out there too. Many settlers and members of the IDF accused me of being a “privileged white woman” sitting in Europe or the USA with no right to voice an opinion on matters. Well they soon got an education on Irish history… My German cousin up the road from my sister’s kept checking in and my older and wiser psychic healer friend in Northern England was also worried. She told me to stop worrying about things I couldn’t control and in a healing session, she told me that my attachment to the region was due to my many past lives over there… I knew that already but really, if you understand all human lives to be of equal value and importance, then you can’t see others suffer - even in faraway places and not let it affect you. I didn’t understand how not everybody was pulled down by this. The cloud of depression hung over me for more than a few weeks in Luxembourg but one morning during that time as I opened my eyes in dread of another day and a voice told me to open up the note I had taken down from the angels and make a proper start on the book. That that was the only way through these dark days… And so that’s what I did. Every morning I wrote and life began to feel somewhat lighter… More manageable at least. And I learnt that no matter what happened in life, no matter what I lost or what sort of forces destabilised my life, I would still have the written word. It was that that carried me through.

The writing continued, albeit less consistently under sunnier skies, when I returned to Cascais in November. And the book has progressed on an intermittent basis since. It is still there. It is still being worked on but I think I will need a whole month or 6 weeks to work on it full-time to do the home run… A period no less elusive than the 6-month stint I had originally envisaged. But then that guidance came in late July that I have to prioritise writing - to make it my no. 1 thing… And so I thought, if I write little and often here, I won’t have to wait for the book to be finished before I start sharing. It will also help me get back into the flow of words as there is an element of accountability when you start a blog and who knows, if I get enough subscribers here, it will allow me to devote more time to finishing the book.

Thank you for reading.