A few things happened over the new year. My birthday follows the new year by one week. This year, I turned 50. 

When I turned twenty, I became pregnant with my only child. In my twentys, I fell in love for the first time. In my twentys, I married my husband. I was waiting for the right man to be my daughter's father, antithetical to my father, who remarried the stepmonster so he could have a wife, not so I could have a mother, which he actually told me. 

In my thirtys, I was a wife. We had a lovely little family. We had a few homes, several dogs, we took in my daughter's boyfriend when his mother hit the skids. We really had a nice, domestic life.

On my forty-first birthday, my husband cheated on me. In my fortys, I learned how to live my life in basic solitude. I wasn't a wife, I wasn't a mom, I wasn't a daughter. My daughter was having her own babies, my husband was basically screwing a baby, and I had not spoken to my ex-father in ten years. In my fortys, I began to search for myself, my authentic self, who I really am when I'm not busy being someone else's something. In my fortys, I met my soul mate, that person who magnifies the darkest corners of your soul, shows you who you truly are and all the demons you've been holding at bay all your life, that person who has been through exactly what you've been through, but has handled things so differently than you, you both have to stop and observe deeply one another, so as to attain the tools you've been lacking all this time. It was an arduous journey, in my fortys, however necessary. 

As my fiftys approached, I knew I had to utilize all I had learned throughout my life, so I could finally breathe. I wanted, and still do, my fiftys to be MY decade, so I practiced a little magick. I bound those who had displayed so much control over my emotions, my thoughts, my behavior. I wrote their names on parchment paper and wrote a spell, in which I prayed for the permanent extrication of their toxic existence in my world. I've been practicing the same theory in weekly therapy sessions, as well. On new year's eve, I watched those people go up in smoke, I flushed the ashes down the toilet. I made plenty of room in my life for all the goodness I have deserved all along, but was denied because of the behavior I displayed ancillary to said aforementioned demons. In my spellwork, I kept only the things I know I cannot live without; my soul mate, my spirit guide, myself.

In only the two weeks since the new year, those things I let go of have disappeared, and the things I hold so tightly have reappeared. That's magick; when you're a good practitioner, be careful what you wish for, nevertheless, this weekly Horoscope I just received in my inbox really says it all:

Blessed be my wishes and my hard work; may they continue to be the catalyst for the life I crave...in my fiftys. 

-Deannalynn Arzola