My Mother's maiden name was Black. She died in 2011. I was 41. Within two short years, it broke me.

In April 2013, after choosing to stay, Bitcoin appeared to me. I bought one for $100. Thus began a five year trek into cryptoland that was filled with the kind of chaos I desperately needed to participate in, as part of the kind of recovery I had decided to undertake, an all or nothing, all-in kind of approach to survival. I'm not afraid to tempt fate. It's been the one constant in my life that I could always trust. Without it, there's staleness. And stale is dead. And I ain't dead yet.

The long road to recovery, on multiple fronts, was finally getting under way. It took 5 years of dedicated, persistent and difficult effort on my part to find my soul again, to test my own bounds and revisit former limitations. To heal wounds I forgot were there and many more I never even knew were there until they started bleeding. I walked fully into every healing modality I could find. I tried so many different things and each attempt assisted in the revealing of my scars. I finally started gravitating towards the methods that brought me joy. To become expectant rather than expecting. To trust more than scowl. My programming was strong. It took my Mother dying to snap that elastic, and in her infinite wisdom, it did indeed need to snap. And by the fuck it hurt. Unexpectedly too.

Now I've developed an entirely different set of coping tools, all the others are still within reach should I need them but I haven't had to call on most of the old stand by's since early 2018. I have to say, that is when the recovery stage ended and the consolidation stage began, the new foundation was feeling nice and sturdy and I decided to just sit back and enjoy it for a while. I felt safe.

That's when Mr. Anderson showed up. A Raven.