“…I started my transformation as an explosion, and eruption of me.”
I spent a few months working with a life coach before settling on the fact that I was much too prone to suggestion to be working with another person to create the life of my dreams. Sure, it’s helpful to be given the tools but I work best in solitude without suggestions, or even compliments, on my process. In my time working with him, though, he pointed out that your greatest struggle in life will also become the gift you have to offer the world. I believe that, at the time, I voiced that my greatest struggle had been in being accepted as myself. The true answer is a bit broader than that though – love.
I felt silly saying it at the time but the thing that kept sneaking up on me and throwing my life into chaos time and time again, the way drugs may for some, was love. I spent some time wondering if I had a love addiction and found myself attending a CODA (codependents anonymous) meeting, trying to see if that’s where I’d find the people that finally understood me. It wasn’t.
After that hadn’t worked, the moment I was sitting on the couch across from my therapist and insisting that I just didn’t think I knew what love was or ever felt it, popped into my head. Certainly if I had spent a stretch of time so sold on the idea that I was trying to sell it myself, then how could I be addicted to something I wasn’t even sure I had experienced? I leafed through over two decades of all of the worst moments that I could remember and the common thread that wove them all together was love, or a lack of. Judgment, conditions on love, casual disrespect – eventually these things add up and shape us into something we’re not.
It happened at every stage throughout my life as it would be pointed out that I was different or too much, as if it were a bad thing. In relationships it was how outspoken I was, and then that I was too quiet. I could never get the perfect balance. At times it was that I was too fat, or simply too ugly. Other times I joked too much, was too playful, was too friendly and it seemed like flirting. I was taking things to seriously, overthinking, reading too much into things. No matter what I was doing, I could only seem to find myself at an extreme because I kept pushing parts out of the way in an attempt to be less me.
Have you ever overfilled a balloon until it pops? Or added Mentos to coke? Or pushed down on your suitcase will all of your might as you tried to zip it closed? We’re talking pressure. I’m talking about the way if you keep pushing down parts of yourself eventually you’re going to run out of room. You’ll become so pressurized that you’ll explode, just like that balloon, just like the coke shooting into the air, just like the zipper busting apart the moment you get up.
My transformation didn’t start the way a caterpillar goes into hiding and comes out a beautiful butterfly. And yes I know, they turn into a big pile of goo in that cocoon but it’s tasteful and out of sight. No, after feeling suppressed and not myself for so long, I started my transformation as an explosion, and eruption of me. I don’t do subtlety, and perhaps that’s because I can never seem to pick up on it myself. So as hard as everything was pushed down for the twenty something years leading up to that moment, I pushed back just as hard.
I learned that for as incredibly numb as I had gotten, as dark and deeply depressed, I get to feel just as much intensity on the positive side of the spectrum. Sometimes I wonder how other people feel. No, not in the moment but how do their feelings feel? What kind of experience of feeling do they get? I sit back and watch people constantly and I can’t imagine that everyone feels so intensely. How do you feel?
Are you still with me? Do you remember what I said about struggles becoming gifts? Have you ever see the way someone’s eyes light up when they realize they’re really safe with you? I think, and likely because I’m bias, that the best gift we can give people is the safety to be their authentic selves and know that they will be loved for exactly who they are. Seek out your judgments and sit down to have a conversation with them and then remove them so that you can find the acceptance and unconditional love that lives inside of you and offer it up to someone in need because honestly, that’s something we all need.
The truth is, we can’t find our people if we’re all walking around in masks. Nowadays, I mean that both figuratively and literally. We have to take them off, reveal what’s underneath. We have to proudly own the people we really are – our silly, our fun, our light, the parts we think are hard to love, our strengths and weaknesses alike. We need to lean into embracing these parts that way we can both show others the unconditional love and acceptance they need as well as acknowledge and receive graciously the unconditional love and acceptance we are being offered. Our people aren’t always who we thought they would be or where we thought we’d find them – we have to stay open and understanding to draw near the people that are truly for us.
Love looks and feels a little bit differently for everyone though. It will vary in intensity and form. There are endless limits to methods of delivery and acceptance, but love must always come without conditions for it to truly be. We form conditions as we project our fears, insecurities, expectations and attachments onto other people – as if their adaptations will fix those things and make us feel secure. Each time we meet someone, with awareness, we can use it as an opportunity to feel those unidentified, lingering expectations, worries, etc.
It’s in this way that we heal one another as well as ourselves – or at least it’s how I’ve been doing it! Love has been my obstacle and it will be the gift that sets me free, what’s yours? Try to keep this in mind as you proceed – and I hope you will. Until next time.
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Madeline May I... 