I have been asked to expand a little to explain how I arrived at the place I’m in now. I will, however, try to condense it as it has taken me years to arrive at this place!

From my childhood to my early teens I was sexually “tampered” with by my father. I told no one and my mother missed all the signs I was so desperate for her to pick up. At the age of 24, unhappily married and with a child of 4, I had become so depressed I attempted suicide by overdosing. I received counselling for years as the skeletons came out of the closet. I took antidepressants for a year or so – they just made me sleepy all the time, the same issues were still there, just a bit more “fuzzed” over.

By this time, I was into my second marriage, always needing validation from someone else to justify my existence. I spent much of my 30’s feeling depressed, but I had a great family doctor who allowed me an hour to just talk, with no prescriptions (I asked him not to). It helped at the time to talk about it.

However, the emphasis with all the counselling I received was on the fact that “I was the victim”, and that it was not my “fault”. I have come to realize how unhelpful that was when what I really needed was to empower myself, and not to wallow in a victim status, remaining ever powerless while the “perpetrator” held all the power as to how I felt on a day to day basis. A glimpse of my father while I was out shopping (he stopped speaking to my when I was 18) had the power to send me into a complete state of fear.

I threw myself into raising my growing family, but depression was always there, lurking in the background, never far away unless I obliterated it with non-stop activity. My life felt flat and barely worth living. I felt everyone would be better off without me. I tried to take my life once more after that (and contemplated it other times), it just seemed the only way of stopping how I felt.

Then something happened that changed the way I viewed things, it was something I have no other word for than supernatural, not of this world. Previously, I believed there was nothing after death. You were born, life seemed to have no point, you died – end of story. Previously, I held no belief in the supernatural world. I won’t be able to go into as much detail as I would like to since so much happened over a 3 month period of “activity”. The strangest things I have ever witnessed happened – Objects dematerialized and rematerialized elsewhere in the strangest of places, objects got stacked in groups of three right in front of my eyes, faster than I could blink, and my daughter communicated with the spirit of a boy as it was independently confirmed by three different spiritual mediums. If you knew all the details of the whole story, you would find it more credible than it may sound here.

To cut a long story short, all this events eventually brought me to realize that death is not an ending. It also led me to think that if “stuff” can happen in the afterlife, then maybe death was not an answer. Would the issues that are dogging you in this life just trail round with you in the next? With these realizations, and a few years in between to assimilate all I had experienced, I came to another realization. If death isn’t an ending, and I now believed it isn’t, then what if birth isn’t the beginning? What if life truly is cyclic in all ways and we have choices at either end of these physical cycles. If this is the case, then we are making choices all the time, and if we are making choices, then there can be no victims. And if there are no victims, there can be no perpetrators either.

I would like to mention a book here, written as a children’s story, but just as relevant for grown ups, called “The Little Soul and the Sun” by Neale Donald Walsch. While I am not remotely “religious”, this book helped put things into perspective for me at around this point. Realizing that I had made a choice before coming into my body empowered me. Of course, I was curious as to why I would make such a choice, and it has taken me years after that realization to really embody the meaning. Why would I choose it? Why would anyone choose it? Maybe because it teaches enormous compassion and empathy when we breakthrough. It makes us stronger as individuals. When trapped in a victim stance, that helpless role you play out, you are the only one who can get out of these pits. No one else can pull you out of the victim mindset. Sure you can seek help along the way, but ultimately you cannot become reliant on anyone other than yourselves.

You cannot rely on outside validation to justify your existence. You need to come to terms with the powerful being you are, the amazing, remarkable creature you are.

This may all sound crazy even unbelievable given that none of you know me. If anyone else were to write this, and none of this had happened to me, I would be inclined to agree, but it did happen. If I had not gone through this experience, I am not sure I would still be here. At the age of 47, I have never felt more content in my life! I still have debt, we still pretty much live hand to mouth, I have the same sorts of problems in day to day life as anyone else, but I prefer to see them now as challenges. And whereas once this would all have driven me back into the hole of depression, now I take it in my stride. It doesn’t depress me. I am happier than I’ve ever been!

So to answer Javier’s original questions: “Are accidental breakthroughs really accidental?” and “would you say everything is PERFECT?”, my answer would be (in order) – No! everything happens beautifully for a reason, and yes, everything really is perfect!

Maya Hayward