Hurt people hurt people.
I see the very realness of this every single day in my office, in my own life, in the life of my friends.
It’s what we decide to do with that pain that makes the difference. Yes you can decide to do something with your pain. You don’t choose that it’s yours, but you do get to decide what you will do with it.
Yesterday a dear friend reached out to me about a wound that she was experiencing as a result of her mother not being able to fully understand how to love her, or what she needed. She shared that pain with me.
Last night another dear friend wrote me a string of texts about how her mother did not see her progress she has made with her sobriety and with going to school to change her life around.
In my office so many people sit with me, and show me their wounds. It’s intimate and scary. They reveal themselves to me. I am in awe that they trust me so much with their heart.
It doesn’t matter the why’s of it all. It’s just so beautiful all the time. If their wounds can be beautiful and I can learn and be privileged by them, then so can mine. This is what heals me into a whole person. The courage of others to let me hold their pain with them, and they hold my pain too.
I know they can see it and feel it because they chose me to share their open hearts with.
The courageous are not the ones who have all the answers figured out. The courageous are those who go looking for it, knowing all the while they could experience disappointment again and again. They look anyway. These are my tribe.
Yesterday my wife took her progesterone and oil injection, no thanks to me. I chickened out. My anxious mind wonders what vital organ that giant needle could hit, and feels threat at the possibility of her imminent loss. This is what a combination of PTSD and anxiety can do to you. If you believe anything is possible then you aren’t limited by the mere medical knowledge that there is not a vital organ in your hip. Every part of her is vital to my existence. What if I did something wrong? What if she wasn’t ok? Oh anxiety. Sigh.
I wasn’t anxious before. What is this? I wasn’t human before either. I was a feral terrified wisp who fashioned herself as best she could. I was devoid of real human emotion that would have been poured into me by the wanting of my sheer existence. My existence was not wanted, so I didn’t know what to do with myself either. A person with this sort of beginning will always wonder why the wanted people are interested in her. It feels like a different breed.
But what I realized this evening is it is only our own story that keeps us from being loved as well as we could. The universe provides us with multiple sources to help our gifts come forth from us.
Spoiler alert. It isn’t always our parents and family.
Did you hear that? Sometimes it’s a teacher, a friend, a neighbor, a pet even.
It’s 3 am. I woke up like a shot at 3 am with all of this beauty and realization in my heart. 3 am actually seems to be my prime writing time, when without pretenses or agonizing self-criticism I can just pour my heart onto the page. Adult me knows that this 3 am bullshit will bite me in the ass later, in the form of nausea, dizziness, crushing wall of tired at exactly the wrong time.
But right now childlike me can allow herself to get up and participate in magic making. It’s never as good on the page as I experience it inside of me. That’s a real challenge I want everyone to see what I do, as I do, and right now. I want to be seen like we all do. But then I remember again all of you who share your heart with me. All those who seek my warmth and my counsel, and I know I am seen.
Lately I am seen so well it is staggering. I am regularly in disbelief about this. I was having a few moments like this about it over the past few weeks, and was sharing with a new friend these thoughts vulnerably. They asked me if it was perhaps my sense of worthiness preventing the reception of this. I said that it wasn’t. But as I sit here with all of these people’s shared hearts laid on in front of me I think I must change my answer. It all comes down to worthiness.
I am in shock that someone could come along and see me as safe, beautiful, someone they want to get to know more, someone to look to to learn from. I realize I don’t have a template for that inside myself. And that helps me realize that is what good love does for us. It gives us a template to go off of in learning to love ourselves. Which just makes life so much easier.
When I just said that I got really worried about my son. He is at that very delicate period of finding himself. His first year of college. I’m so afraid that perhaps from not yet having this template he doesn’t have it either and will suffer unnecessarily. I hope the love of others while I was chaotic and frantically searching, and as much love as I had was enough so that he knows he is special, and worthy, and he has permission to find out who he really is without torturing himself with the pressures of society, student loans, and all the negative possible outcomes of an existence.
Bumpy roads still can lead to fantastic destinations. Don’t worry my little love. Worry never did a damn thing, but limit my imagination and possibilities. Yes
While I was responding at 3 am to my friend who is hurting I found a message in my inbox that another friend of mine is getting ready to make her next step towards a dream of hers. She shared her beauty with me too.
Life is a giant canvas mixed with brush strokes of beautiful agonies. It is art in motion. It never ceases to challenge and amaze me. The pain of some of my friends right now, their loss, it sits heavily in my arms. So many people that I love are feeling so many big things right now.
And I am too. I am right in between the possibility of a dream and crushing disappointment right now. I’m standing here and all I can do is love as hard as I possibly can. And I can accept the gifts the universe offers me.
Dear new friend, I accept you seeing me and being interested in investing. You are here at exactly the right time. Thank you for seeing me.
And to all of the people who trust me with their valuable feelings, thank you. You are a gift, and your faith in me renews my faith in myself. It has opened up my heart.
My heart is an open door…
This is a big time for all of us. There is a crib in our room. There are baby things waiting. They have been waiting a long time. Fuzzy sloth blankets, cute little onesies, books on cooking for baby. They are in boxes in bags, packed away. There’s a photo of our embryo we transferred on November 8, 2018. Little pieces of our hearts also are packed away with those things. We begin foster classes tonight at 6 pm. The first step in a lifelong dream.
This love is bursting and flowing over. We must do something, many things, worthwhile with that.
