I Don’t want to

I’ve always wanted to arrive at me. I’m forever finding my way, my path, my why. As of late, I’ve realized in tandem with my purpose, I’ve been on a decade-long pursuit of figuring out what’s wrong with me so that I can fix, heal, and live happily ever after. 

How and how long it took me to unpack the nuanced word “surrender” may still land in the TBD bucket. I’m guilty of perpetually searching for something outside of myself and usually say it’s my curiosity. I was determined to find “it,” and I was thorough in my quest. I read all the books and listened to all the podcasts. I did all the therapy trying to pinpoint the answer. I enrolled in a year-long intuitive healer training course and then signed up for the advanced year. Not to brag, but I’ve had five therapists over the last eight years, totaling well over 100 hours. I took solo camping retreats to dance and cry it out off-the grid and in the wilderness. Taught myself to make fire, endure the elements, and learn what utter stillness and loneliness felt like. I took a women’s new years retreat to mexico solo and made friends with strangers in the desert and danced around a fire ceremony on the beach,

But it wasn’t a curious adventure of excavating myself. It was a search steeped in the desperation of “fixing” me. The reality was that I was perpetuating my own rejection by not understanding why I couldn’t change. 

Sounds fun, right?

Well. My healing journey actually became an extension of my perfectionism. I was healing as long as I was doing it right. It became consuming because how do you do it right? How do I cause no harm? How do I consume all there is to learn while also living in the, well, “present,” while also living in reality and raising my child and paying the mortgage and, there’s something I’m forgetting… fun? Is that you?

I’m writing this because I know I’m not the only one that has relentlessly tried to adapt myself to fit in with a society that seems to more accurately reflect back what I am more than ever consider nudging me toward all that I already am. I have subscribed to this idea that I am broken and, therefore, require fixing rather than ever believing I am whole simply because I am the sum of all my parts. Because some of those parts have experienced the kind of traumas that make me more worthy of love, not less, and that maybe life has broken me, but in the broken open kind of way that I would choose over and over if given the chance.

Because that would require some radical self-acceptance, which would require radically changing the relationships I have participated in that highlighted the areas that left me feeling less-than-worthy of a happy “normal” life. The ones that left me second-guessing myself and my lovability, how I was received or what I did wrong. Relating, relationships, have been monumentally difficult for me my whole life but I never understood why. 

My overwhelm was sitting on top of unconscious behavior, patterns, beliefs, and programming that was running the show. I could search day-after-day for something to alleviate my pain, but I was only outrunning myself. I’m 37-years-old and I just started living my life. I’m not ashamed to be a work in progress. I love learning and growing, but it wasn’t until I fell in love with the process of unlearning that my life came to color. 

The reality of unlearning for me was that it required me to unpack all that I learned through ingesting what I believed made me lovable. It required me to live there, and explore everything that was driving my operating system. It required diligence, devotion, and dedication to practice, not just the mindset of perfection and hoping to arrive at some destination. It was humbling to stop numbing the hurting parts of me and to integrate the grace of forgiveness, of grieving, of remembering, feeling, and releasing. 

But how do you know how to reclaim your peace when you’ve never experienced it to begin with? 

My nervous system wasn’t wired for peace and I’m not unique in that way. A lot of us have had to relearn what calm means and accept that maybe we don’t have to hold our breath and maybe the other shoe isn’t going to drop. Maybe, we can learn to be okay with the quiet. 

I started waking up trusting I had everything I needed for the day because that was true. I tried the other morning mantras and they seemed to bypass a lot of the hard feelings that sometimes gripped me with fear of facing the day. Feelings weren’t facts. Thoughts were often fears. So I made knowing I had everything I needed for today my morning prayer, my gratitude moment, and an incognito snooze button on my anxiety so that I could at least get out of bed in peace. 

I spent all that time intellectualizing my way to healing and dropped myself at the crossroads that asked if I was ready to feel my way through all the tools I collected. It was time to integrate the wisdom I was carrying separate from the way that I moved and spoke and thought. 

It’s been humbling. It invited me to accept that I have been on the periphery of my life for over three decades because standing in the center of it scared me. 

The last few months have felt like a silent initiation into a new way of being. There was a lot of rejection and reflection in and of the life that I built around me. It was all built on the foundation of fear. When fear is your foundation, peace is an illusion. I kept reaching for something outside of myself, and my foundation would crumble. 

I chose a new path because I’ve only ever chosen the one well-worn that keeps me perpetuating through the same circles and cycles I have always lived. 

Turns out the path back to myself was as unknown as any journey I’d ever taken. There’s a lot of truths that have suffocated here, told to wait or go away. The pieces of me that weren’t compatible with my needs getting met, so I stuffed them away. 

Slowly, year after year, I started writing my story. My words were resonating with people in the silence spaces that craved a voice, even a whisper, to those that felt like they were in it alone. 

It had to. I lived it on purpose and I was determined to find who it was meant for and share it with others. 

I’m generous with my words because I know how powerful they are despite the trend to abbreviate everything. I know the magic they unlock when the combination is right. You can keep your character count and your sound bites, I don’t subscribe to the bullshit confines of brevity. I am not worried about grabbing your attention. 

Nothing holds our attention because our attention 

is seeking something to hold us. 

We’ve forgotten how to hold each other because we’ve subscribed to this belief that we're all too busy and we started writing sentences where we need paragraphs because our commitment to busyness keeps us from feeling. So we stay busy and say we’re healing wounds that only our presence can. Stillness is where the soul speaks. If only you could hear how brilliant yours is.