In front of me, the sun is slowly rising over the building. To my left, the last vestiges of a red dawn hover above the hilltops. There is something magical about early mornings, rising with the dawn to greet the day with the sun. When was the last time you opened the curtains in the morning and took a moment to watch the sun stretch itself like a cat over the horizon? Notice that the darkness vanishes as if it were never there at all.
I know the dawn can be hard. The coming of a new day can remind us of all the things we don’t have. All the things we wish were different. All the things that that we lost. I don’t know about you, but much of my life was spent as a record keeper of all the things that should have been different — all the ways in which the world had wronged me.
I have struggled to come to terms with the circumstances of my life. I was living in such a deep sense of lack that I couldn’t appreciate or acknowledge the abundance that surrounded me. I had lost my way home, the way back to myself.
I could tell you about my road to suffering. I could tell you about who and what ruined my life. But, let’s be honest, it doesn’t really matter.
When we chose to walk through life carrying our hurt and burdens, we become hollow shells of who we could become if we learn how to heal. I am not just saying this. I spent so many years thinking that I was too broken to be healed. I spent many years unconsciously destroying my life because of the trauma that was inflicted on me when I was younger.
I spent so many years at war with myself. I spent so many years thinking that the world owed me something. The truth is the world owed me nothing, even if I felt it owed me everything. The truth is, I spent most of my life dancing along the fine line of life and death. Would today be the day that I finally killed myself? Would today be the day that I found the peace I was seeking?
I was at work one-day last year when a coworker told me that all I do is complain. This small innocuous comment woke me up in a way. I started to look at my life and the way I was talking about it. I realized that he was right. All the things I ever said were to complain about something else: the weather, traffic, my job, my family, how I was too poor, how I wish I could have something. I was so deeply entrenched in my misery all I could do was let it fall from my lips like water.
I want to say that this one comment changed my life, and in many ways, it did. But I also think that it’s always a combination of things that help us wake up to who we are. In my case, I decided to stop complaining and start to take responsibility for my life. Until that point, I had been the damsel in distress, waiting and hoping that something or someone would come and save me from my misery, but there was no one else on stage but me. I could either become the hero of my own story or die waiting for someone to save me.
What happened next was the slow, dramatic, unfolding of who I thought I was. As I am writing this, I realize that it’s been about a year since that moment at my job. The catalyst that drove me forward to this moment.
I have spent the last year digging deeply into myself. Watching as the darkness unfolded before me like a patchwork blanket to reveal the true ways in which I thought about myself. The beliefs that determined how I showed up in this world and the choices I made. What I found I didn’t want to believe, but I knew it was all true. The self-hate, the belief that I wasn’t worthy of love, that I was alone, that I could trust no one, that I was to blame for the assaults against my body. I thought I was completely unrepairable, irrevocably broken. I had turned off my emotions years ago because feeling became unbearable, but with that, I lost my compass. I could only experience the extremes; everything else was lost. And I’ll be honest, mostly what I felt was depression and anxiety, anger and pain. Joy and happiness were as foreign to me as peace for the most part.
I looked at my trauma and cried and held it and loved it for what it was – the parts of myself that I had neglected. The parts of myself that I wished away because I thought I would be consumed by it otherwise. I took them and held them and loved them. I saw how they reached through my life and touched every decision I made. How they led me down paths that I knew were wrong but thought I deserved. I was the barrier to my happiness because, at the deepest level, I thought I was unworthy of it.
As I brought these things into the light of my awareness, I could feel something shatter inside me, a clean break from how I had been showing up in the world. It wasn’t the breaking of who I was; it was me breaking through the shell of who I thought I was and into who I am.
All of this is a long way of saying… when we deny any part of ourselves, we become lost, and the ways in which we show up in the world become skewed. We make choices based in beliefs that we must have something or do something to be worthy of love and happiness. I am here to tell you, dear ones, that we are always and forever whole and were never broken. The only way to fully understand this is to embrace all the parts of ourselves that we are afraid to look at.
It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.
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