Punch Tea / Last summons before rendition
Weekly Special
My dear beloved customers,
Where was I last time you were here? Let me see… Ah yes!
After undergoing a series of very unpleasant events, beginning to rediscover my inner self during Covid first lockdown, I got lost again when life went back to normal. I thus went back to see the psychic lady who talks to deceased person and everything went berserk all over again in the most exact same way!
But before that, early 2021, just after the Covid repeated lockdowns that induced full stop activities in music business, my husband and I decided to take that slow business moment to reorganise our company, creating a Managing Board to help us with the developments we wanted to achieve once everything would be back to normal again. Four people, mainly acquaintances and friends of my husband, or so he thought, began to help us take decisions and plan our next steps for our business. The main project we were working on was organizing a french emerging artists tour, and find money to do so with state aids, patronage and partnerships with other companies. As I was in charge of this project, I needed to hire again someone to help me with our company daily business. After what had happened with our previous employee as I related in my Weekly Special last week, I wanted to hire someone we had no friendly connection with, someone with no bondings, especially because I was the one managing them. My husband was working on a big side project with one of his long-term friends who had entered our new Managing Board. This project unfortunately led him to be less involved in our other activities putting all the pressure of making money on my sole shoulders. He thought it would be a great idea to hire his friend’s wife who was currently unemployed and, as she had chronic illness, she was looking for a job that allowed her to work from home. As I wasn’t very found of my hubbie’s friend partner and didn’t want to hire someone we already had a friendly relationship with, I first said no and then let my husband convince me that I would be doing a good deed… So, in September 2021, we hired our second employee and everything went smoothly for almost a year except I was exhausted by working on my own on our tour project with little outside support and that I was under the impression that some of the work was not being completed as effectively as it should be by our new employee.
In June, sensing that something was utterly wrong in my life, starting to be attracted again by self-development techniques and, I must say, after watching a Netflix documentary series about life after death and ghosts called “Surviving Death” that fascinated me and brought back old sensations and a vision of the Universe that I had long left on the side of the road, I went back to see the psychic lady in a one-on-one session to talk again with my beloved grandpa and every one of my other grand-parents including my husband’s. I clearly needed guidance and support for I felt so miserable and tired. One of the things I clearly remember asking my grandpa about where I was heading next was if I would go back to develop a Life Coaching activity again - I had started one eight years before and abandoned it when my daughter was born for her birth was a very traumatic life change for me. Clearly, I was searching for an exit door from what I was doing but just didn’t know how to for it involved so many things: earning money for a living and my relationship with my husband who loved our company though he was currently much less involved in it than I was which was partly my fault as I related it in one of my Weekly Special posts. So, my beloved grandpa told me I would go back to Life Coaching but not the way I thought I would and that it wouldn’t be my last professional activity, another would come afterwards making sense of it all.
Summer 2022 arrived with its share of festivals and I hit the last one we worked for in August before our three weeks summer vacations in an advanced exhaustion state. Totally out of my mind, I had agreed to share a rented house with my employee, her husband and their daughter including, of course, my own family - my husband and daughter - the two girls approximately of the same age. During the day, my husband and my employee’s husband would be working on their side project while my employee and I would be working on the last things to wrap up before vacations and we would all work on the festival at night, except for my employee’s husband who would look after the girls. The thing is I am not really good at collective life - I have bonding issues and love my privacy - and I was so exhausted that I was searching for as much resting alone time as I could, isolating myself whenever I could, trying as hard as I could not to seem rude about it.
The festival lasted three days and we arrived the day before it started to settle in. On the second day of the festival, during lunch, though I had struggled to adapt to living with others with their out-of-my-comfort-zone way of life, I thought we had, at last, found a common rhythm and it had become quite pleasant. How more wrong could I be! My employee’s husband went to his room seemingly on a good mood after coffee and, after five minutes, came back and started shouting at me out of the blue, telling me I was a horrible, despicable and spiteful person who loved nobody but herself, who thought she was better than anyone else and that he never ever wanted to speak to me again. He then stormed back into his room, leaving me stunned for I didn’t know what I had unadventedly said to deserve such a violent row and leaving everyone else in shock except for his wife who kept on table cleaning as nothing had happened. I asked her what was wrong with her husband and she said “Don’t worry, it happens to him sometimes, it will pass.” I went to my room, undone and cried for a minute before asking my husband to come and join me for we had to work that night for the festival and there was no way that man who just took such a violent row at me was going to look after my daughter. I didn’t see my employee’s husband again that day for he stayed locked up in his room until next morning.
When I got up next morning, he was having breakfast with his wife on the dining table and I just saluted them discreetly before taking my coffee to the couch next to the table where my husband already was, my back on them. For a moment, he talked very loud to his wife about how they treated well their friends, implicitly but very obviously opposite to us, and a few mean things directed to me about my despicable behaviour which I couldn’t understand for their was no precisions about what which exact behaviour of mine was so despicable.
My husband and I went to our room and I told him I thought the best way to end this very painful situation was to let my employee depart for her vacation on that very day even though there was still a day left of work on the festival. I thought it would be a relief for her too according to this very awkward situation but it turned out it was not, at least, that’s what she let me know a few days after we went back to work.
We waited for her husband to go back to their room and I went to see her and informed her they could leave early and we would take care of the festival until the next day on our own. I was still trying to understand when it had gone wrong and what on Earth I had said to him to spark such a violent reaction but, though I didn’t find any rational answer, I decided to apologize nevertheless to settle things down, especially because, he was part of our Managing Board, my employee’s husband, and we were supposed to keep on working together within the next coming months. So when he got out of his room to depart I went to apologize to him but never had the chance to utter a single word for he started to shout at me again telling me he didn’t want to talk to me or see my face ever again for the rest of his life. Hearing him shouting at me again, my husband intervened and took him to another room, firmly asking him to stop talking to me like that. He managed to cool things down by making him talk about what was wrong. In a very rambling way, I heard him from my room where I had retreated tell my husband why I was supposed to be such a horrible person. He cried all the way through his argumentation. During our whole stay, he had obsessively picked up every little things I had said or do and interpreted it as a series of actions directed against him. Every joke, every unsignificant word, every move I had taken had been distorted as a token of my dislike of him. It was a paranoid fit totally disconnected from reality. My husband told me afterwards that he had previously had psychiatric issues and appeared to have stopped his medication. Lucky me! I wished my husband had told me so before I agreed to live in the same house as him!
You think that, as another warning from the Universe, it would have been enough? But that was just a kicking start my friends, a warming up of the Universe since it knows I can be quite hard to convince! I let one week go after the festival to try and get some rest but knew I had to inform the President of our Managing Board of what had happen and the fact that I wanted my employee’s husband to leave its functions there. After all, it was the company I had created and didn’t want to keep on working with that man. As being part of the Managing Board was merely an honorific non-paid title, I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. But, when things can go wrong… So I phoned the President of the Board to talk to her about what had happened. It was not an easy nor comfortable conversation, I was hurt and angry but nevertheless compassionate for I thought he was a very sick man. What I didn’t expect was that he had gone to my President first and told her his side of the story, how badly I had behaved towards him and his wife and, as my President had been friend with them for a very long time, she just told me that she didn’t want to intervene and be a collateral damage in what was presented to her as a small quarrel among friends. It was a slap in the face and I thought that must be what victims of rape must feel when someone tells them they misread their attacker’s intentions and they overreacted.
When I went back to work, after non-resting sleepless vacations, I had to set a Board meeting to plan the company next moves during the fall and to put an end to the situation once and for all. I didn’t want to fire my employee for I thought she was not responsible for her husband’s actions and that wouldn’t be fair for her. Two things happened then almost simultaneously: the Board with no reason apart from not upsetting a long time friend dismissed my request for my employee’s husband to resign from it and my employee started to harass me with several emails a week telling me what a despicable boss I had been so far, listing all the things I had done wrong and lecturing me on the way I should have adopted a more appropriate behavior. By the end of September, I collapsed - “at last!”, would say the Universe. “It took you time!” - and took a sick leave for burnout. I could barely stand on my feet and was enable to open my emails from fear of finding another vicious one from my employee. Without any surprise, two days after I stopped working, my employee went on sick leave as well forcing my husband to take over for everyone. As she didn’t want to talk to my husband and me - rings some bells from two years earlier? - it took three months for our President to reach a settlement with her and for her to agree to leave, settlement that resembled a lot to extorsion. Weirdly enough, our President didn’t stay friend with my former employee and her husband after that, neither did the rest of the Board…
But this time, I had heard the wake-up call from the Universe. It took me a lot of strength to resign from my own company but, most of all, to face my husband and explain to him what had gone very wrong in the way we related to each other professionally and personally wise, how miserable I had been without him knowing what was going on and believing everything was fine while creating his project on his own, letting me solely in charge of our incomes, free to live his life with no pressure at all. It was hard for him when I told him I didn’t want to work for our company nor with him anymore as we did for the past twelve years and that I needed to work on a project that belonged to me, that fulfilled me though I didn’t know yet exactly what that project was, going for Life Coaching and redirected by the Universe and my guides towards a full-time writing activity. I think that deep down he thought that if we worked together, apart from the fun it brought to us at the beginning, it would be a reason more for me not to leave him for he always thought I was too good to be true. But we managed and got over it.
Nowadays, I feel so much freer and more present though still working on my inner balance and on the way I want my life to grow from now on.
Was there a point to that story? You mean apart from whining about my poor fate and complaining about how grand a victim of villains I am? Just kidding! I guess there was indeed a point to all that: when we don’t listen to the Universe’s signs warning us that we are not on the right path, they keep repeating themselves until we finally notice and comprehend them. Two years apart, I underwent the exact same situation at work with my employee and both incident served as a wake-up call teaching me that I was miserable for not really habiting my life, just living to help fulfill others’ dreams such as my husband’s, my daughter’s and my musicians’. How did I end up in this situation twice? Because I am a people pleaser and the way I relate to things is that if I am capable of doing something that needs to be done - and I am able to do lots of different things and always curious to learn how to do new ones - I will automatically do it to please the person who sollicites me without even asking myself if I want to or not, if it is going to bring me joy rather than sorrow, or even leave space for some others who could do it better than or simply enjoy doing them whereas I don’t. It’s as bad an habit for me as cigarettes for others and I am still in a process of quitting it right now simply by becoming aware of it.
What those events showed me as well is that I have what Laura Lynne Jackson calls in her book “Signs” I introduced in Café 42 June Selection Book an incredible “Team of Light” that watches over me and guides me in the right direction, a little violently sometimes but they know I can be a very stubborn and persistent person, deaf to suggestions when I get lost, entangled in the vicissitudes of life. For, why would those events have happened each time only a few weeks after I went to search for answers and support from my grandparents?
What is the most amazing thing about all that is that I am actually grateful to both my employees and to my attacker because I wouldn’t be writing to you right now nor have written my first novel if it was not for them and their painful behaviors. I deeply understand they were only merely tools the Universe used to help me find my way in the dark. So thank you all for that and I wish you to find the inner love and peace that you helped me find inside me.
So tell me, my dear beloved customers, have you ever experienced one of those wake up calls for the Universe?
Lots of love,
Geay
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The universe is persistent and will keep putting us in situations until we finally get the message :)
Thank you Géraldine, I would say yes, I did receive wake up calls from the Universe after being à people pleaser, like you! I am happy that you have overcome this kind of behaviour...I won't go into détails but I think it's good that you and your husband finally decided to have separate professional activities... it looks like he knows better than you how to have boundaries with othere, including friends... and yes, we all know that it can be difficult to work with friends... mixing feelings and attachments with professional matters can be really hurtful.
Good luck for your career as a Life coach and write!!!