on being empty.

My life is cluttered in every sense of the word. It's remarkable the ways in which I can whittle away my time. New York makes it easy to be busy at literally every second of the day, and I am no stranger to the lure of "more". When I first moved here I hated the thought of being still, and did everything I could to make the most of this city. It had been my only dream for so long, and I wasted no time in living it to the full.

Fast forward four years and the pace is the same, with one difference: I am finding that my world is still very full, but everything inside of me seems to be moving in slow motion. Part of this is because I recently lost love, but I think the greater reason is that I am growing.

When we plant seeds, we do not see them sprout for months on end. Waiting for the seasons to change can be painstakingly passive. Even so, we know that spring is coming. So we watch and pray that beauty will take root and hope will rise again. Sometimes, we have to remind ourselves what is happening beneath the surface even when the ground looks barren. 

But when we can't remember, it is tempting to abandon our tilled fields and look for a quicker form of sustenance. Understanding there's no guarantee that the flowers will bloom again can feel debilitating. Letting go in order to make room for something unknown is a disorienting experience. The reasons to hold onto our misery are boundless in the face of uncertainty, because at least we are holding on to something.

I think this is why I have worked so hard to not experience emptiness...I am afraid there will be nothing to fill it, and I'm afraid of who I am without everything I hide behind. Within our culture, we often look at the word empty as a bad thing. We say the glass is half full, but what if that half no longer serves us? What if we are carrying around a glass filled with stagnant water, or bacteria? We wouldn't be so keen to drink it then. 

This is what I am learning: emptiness must precede fullness if we wish to grow from where we are now. We cannot move forward without emptying ourselves of all that has kept us stuck. And while we squirm in the stillness of a hollowed out heart, there is much to be learned in the echo of its unoccupied chambers. 

In the process of becoming empty, we see things a bit more clearly, which is really the reason why most of us avoid it to begin with. We may find parts of us we don't like so much, or aspects of our current situation which are less than desirable. We may see that we are not so comfortable with ourselves, not so at home in our own souls.

This is a sad thing, to not be able to come home to yourself.

For the truth is, we are only as connected to those around us as we are to ourselves. Being able to sit with who we are in the stillness of our chest teaches us compassion. Allowing ourselves to shake hands with the messy parts, the shadows we are so afraid of, actually heals our dry bones.

And as we get to know our inmost being in this manner, as we lovingly face what lies within, we begin to let go. We release ourselves from the burden of being broken, we whisper comfort to the chaos below. We find that God has been there all along, beckoning us to see ourselves underneath the dirt we thought determined who we are.

Because the truth is, being emptied just gives us space to be our truest, most alive self.  It makes room for where we are going, for all that we can be if we'd just let ourselves get there.

Being emptied always leads to being full.

There is a story in the old testament about a woman whose husband died and left her with crippling debt. When asked what she had to pay it off, she said her only remaining possession was a small jar of olive oil. In her state of distress, a prophet instructed her to ask all her neighbors for their empty jars. In fact, he said:

"Don't ask for just a few."

Upon returning home, she was told to pour her small jar of oil into these empty jars, until every single one of them was full. And by way of a miracle, she did. She was able to then sell them and eradicate her debt completely.

Her life was no longer determined by her past, her destitution, or her perception of herself as a widow.

She was free. She had a future, and it was good.

But she had to empty her jar.

And trust that it would be filled again.

She had to trust that in the process of emptying what she believed to be her only possession,

she would be abundantly filled beyond her wildest expectations.

Sometimes I wonder how many blessings I have missed out on because of what I was holding on to instead. We become so afraid of losing that we develop tunnel vision, doubting that we could ever receive more than what we carry in the moment. Refusing to imagine what is waiting for us just on the other side of the door, if we could only have faith to walk through it.

So.

These days, I'm practicing being empty. I'm leaning into the promise that I will need more than a few empty jars in this coming year. I am finding that as I gently release the identities I clung so tightly to, there is more light that shines through. 

More love.

More hope.

More peace.

I am full.

Emptiness always leads to fullness.

Don't be afraid to pour everything out.

To dig up the ground and part with your last seeds.

Winter will end soon enough,

and spring is waiting just below the surface.
   

on waking up.

One of the most difficult parts of living is found in the waiting. The in-between times ask us to let go of the answers to questions we barely know. Oftentimes, we discover that we may even be asking the wrong questions. Nonetheless, standing still is hard.

I have experienced most of my time here on earth through chaos. Some of which I have created, some that I have not. This frenzied pattern of existing appeals to me in many ways. I am a person who is always on the go, always moving, always looking towards the next thing. In some ways, this has given me adventure beyond my expectations. I have no shortage of interesting and exhilarating stories to pull from, stories that I never dreamed would be my own to tell. But I also have many sorrows, many tales of suffering. Chaos is an intoxicating companion, but takes a great deal from us in the destruction she leaves behind.

Recently, I fell in love. There's no other way to state it. One day I was asleep, and the next I was awake, wide awake. I knew it deep down, I recognized it as if it were an old friend who had returned after many, many years away. Both strange and familiar, it brought me home. Home to myself, home to the world around me. Falling in love gives us a way of seeing that can only be found through the process, it touches the most intimate parts of who we are and names our very soul.

Loving someone and being loved, it changed me.

But, like many passionate love stories, chaos descended and troubled our happy hearts. What do you do when love is not enough? When you can't make it work, when it seems like who each of you are cannot overcome the obstacles in front of you? When you hurt each other because you have each been hurt?

How can someone hold your heart so tenderly and simultaneously break it to pieces?

Each day, I wonder at the mystery in front of me. I have loved and been loved, and still love eluded me. I found a partner, someone who walked with ease into my life, and yet just as easily walked out. It feels like there is a bit of me missing, a ghost always at my side. Losing love is the answer to a question I never wanted to ask, one that has left me confused, untethered, and lost to the ocean of my own loneliness. What do you do when love leaves you, especially when it never wanted to go in the first place, when it wanted to stay but knew it wasn't the right time or place?

I am haunted by these questions, with nothing to do but offer my empty hands back to the universe.

And so, I wait. I listen to my heart beating, my breath breathing, I watch the season change. I see the tree outside my window exploding in a brilliant, vibrant yellow, and marvel at the beauty that continues on without me. I make peace with myself. I hold my broken soul and whisper words of healing little by little, asking it to please stay awake despite its painful protests to be left alone. I look for signs of comfort in the distance.

In this time, I notice a lighthouse on the horizon, perched majestically atop the George Washington Bridge. I do a bit of research and find that it is the last aviator beacon, over 75 years old. Since planes no longer operate by this method of guidance, the light is completely ornamental. It was left as a memorial to a pilot who crashed in search of his own grand expedition, and continues to call him home. I find this grounding, this timeless commitment to those of us who are still trying to find our way back.

We all get a little lost along the way. We lose ourselves, lose the ones we love. Elizabeth Lesser, a gifted author and practicing doula, writes about this often. She believes that who we are at our core gets clouded over the years by our personal tragedies, the chaos that mixes us up and leaves us uncentered. We forget who are, and thus, life is not about healing so much as it is about remembering.

The storms we have come to weather are only distracting us from the light of our own sun, the light that has been within us from the very beginning.

I'm still working to clear my vision, to see and seek with truth rather than fear. I so wish that my love was enough to bring others back to themselves, but I am no miracle worker. Love sparks an awareness within ourselves, but it is up to us to see it through. To hold on to it, to internalize it and let it fill our empty places until we ourselves are full.

I am grateful I have learned what is to to be loved, what it is to make my way back from the wilderness.

Back to myself.

Back to who I was always meant to be.

How terrifying it is to return to vulnerability.

How tempting it is to go back to sleep.

To stand in the unknown still knowing that being loved is better than being alone.

To recognize that love within myself.

To understand the sunshine deep in my soul.

And to continue to look for the beacon in the distance, to wait with all my hope.

Because love, in any form, is eternal.

But we must stay awake to find it, we must keep our watch in the night.

For even in the dark it is waiting, and it will always find its way back home.

on being held.

When we are in pain, our tendency is to constrict ourselves, to preserve all of our energy so that we can just survive. This is a natural instinct. When we are in danger, especially if we know we will not survive the fight, we hide. Hiding takes the least amount of effort and is the safest bet for staying alive, hiding gives us time.

However, even in the most dire of situations, we cannot hide forever. We need resources, we need a way out to freedom. We want to thrive. Hiding may protect us, but it doesn't provide us with what makes life worth living in the first place, it doesn't fill us up with good things like love and joy and hope. It doesn't allow us to expand into wholeness.

Hiding makes us smaller.

I recently experienced a loss that knocked the wind out of me, more than I would care to admit. Losing love is like that I think. One day you are breathing clear and sure, and the next you are not. The next day you find that breathing is harder and slower, that it takes a more concentrated effort and determination than it did before. You come to see that you took for granted what came so naturally, so easily, and it leaves you weary down to your very soul.

In this space of loss, my impulse is to isolate. To turn away from others.

To hide.

I want to be able to safeguard myself from further suffering, I want to numb the heartbreak I have already felt. Loss has a way of bringing up a history of grief, of reminding us of every instance throughout our years in which we felt the stinging pang of abandonment. It feels as though loss takes something from us, every time, until we are afraid we won't have anything left. And so we hunker down. We put up our defenses.

We try with all our might to decrease our pain, and this takes quite a bit of energy. And so in our attempts to hide, to preserve our life, we actually do the opposite:

We become dead inside.

And while this may feel safer at first, we discover that it is no way to live, like breathing stale air or being stuck in the same mud day after day.

Let me be clear: desensitizing yourself is not the same as healing.

If we want to move forward, if we want to feel better, we must allow space to be broken, but also...

to be held.

We cannot make ourselves smaller in our brokenness because this does not allow room for healing to begin. When we go to the doctor, we don't say "I'm sick, but you can't help me." We move toward our physician, we allow them to touch us and examine our bodies, and it puts us in a very vulnerable space. And this is how it should be.

The doctor cannot help us if we don't show where we are hurting. But even more so, the doctor cannot heal us unless we give permission for that healing to enter our hurting places.

We have to let healing in, without running, without fighting, without hiding.

This can be exceedingly difficult, because it means we must remain open, we must feel everything that has destroyed us in the first place. It means we are trusting that our pain can be transformed if we let it. It means we are raw and sensitive and vulnerable and most likely in a state we would like to keep to ourselves.

It means we are allowing our most fragile pieces to be held, so that they can be healed.

So that we can be put back together.

So that we can be whole.

And isn't that much better than being broken?

Our safety is not determined by how many walls we can build to keep ourselves from being attacked.

It is determined by who is holding us.

And how we choose to hold ourselves in the process.

Are we growing, nurturing, speaking compassionately to our wounds? Or are we looking for quick fixes, easy remedies that don't require us to see the full extent of our injuries?

We cannot be healed until we are held.

And we cannot be held unless we are vulnerable: with our pain, with our shame, with our fragmented hearts.

I know it feels you may die from the pain of it all.

But don't shut down, don't hide yourself away.

Stay open so that you can receive, so that you can let in light and love, so that you can do more than survive.

So that you can thrive.

Your heart is still beating.

Don't lock it away.

Let it be held, with great tenderness, and with all your hope.

Healing takes time.

But so does hiding.

And only one of these options leads to you being truly alive.

heartbreak and hope.

It's an age old question: what do you do with a broken heart? As a person who loves intensely and deeply, heartbreak is no stranger to me. And yet, it never stops being difficult. I think one of the hardest things in this lifetime to do is to accept that all things come to an end. We struggle against the changing of the tide because it is scary, because it takes all the joy and goodness and security we have experienced and washes it out to sea.

This fear   

that we can love and lose,

is often what keeps us from loving at all.

I have spent so much time avoiding intimacy because of fear. Call it what you want  attachment issues, commitment phobia, it all boils down to the same thing: I am afraid to love and lose. I have spent the majority of my relationships, friendships or otherwise, anticipating loss. It is so hard for me to sit in the present moment and enjoy what is right in front of me without my brain wandering into the past or future with extreme trepidation. Predicting and preparing for farewells is my specialty.

Unfortunately, life has much to offer in the way of loss. We lose jobs, outgrow friendships, go through breakups. People die. It's messy, this business of living. And yet, we have no choice but to keep moving forward in the face of grief, to put one foot in front of the other in the midst of suffering.

Heartbreak can steal away our hope.

It can hide it, cover it up so that's it's almost impossible to find. It can convince us that there's no point, that while life was generous to us for a time, that time is over.

At points, the pain of heartbreak can feel unbearable.

It can feel like something has been taken from you, something that was a part of you, something that moved within you and was as natural as breathing.

You can feel the tear, in your soul.

You can feel your heart physically break.

And the ache, it can make you wish all the good times away. It can convince you that it would have been better if it never happened, if you had never allowed your heart and home to make room for another person.

But that tenderness, that feeling of vulnerability and fear   

You're listening to it all wrong.

You're brain is trying to rationalize something that cannot be understood with words:

You have loved and lost.

We will never be able to make sense of it this side of heaven.

Grief becomes a familiar friend in these times.

But what I am learning, what I am trying to fight for, is to continue to live with my heart wide open. To continue to love fearlessly and courageously, even when I may lose, even if loss is a possibility.

I am finding that each time I allow myself to fall a little more, to love a little deeper, I am making space for more love to come into my life. I am stretching, pushing past my anxieties, and seeing that even when I experience a goodbye it doesn't destroy me.

There may be days where we feel like we can't possibly push through, that there is no way we can tolerate another loss, another heartbreak but  

We get through it.

So. I am leaning into my heartbreak because it is letting me know that what I lost was valuable. That it changed me in such a way that had I not experienced it I would not have been for the better. That it gave me the gift of love, no matter the time period, a gift that can only be received if we lean into it fully.

I know we want to protect ourselves, keep our fragile hearts safe.

I know.

But don't ever stop loving. Don't ever stop showing up to what life has to give you, especially when it's really good, especially when it's sweet and full and whole. Yes, there is always the possibility of loss. Yes, our heart does have the capacity to break.

It also has the capacity to heal.

And sometimes, sometimes we need a glimpse of the good to just make it to the next day. To get through all the bad moments, to remind us that life can still be beautiful and full of hope despite what has happened to us.

Love prevails despite our circumstances.

Don't let it go because it hurts too much.

Being without it is much harder.

Much darker.

Your heart may fall to pieces, but the pieces will be put back together.

Not always in the way we want.

But with time, in the way we need.

You are not alone.

You will get through this.

Stay open.

Love is never lost.

And it will find its way back to your heart again.

vulnerability and love.

In life, there are few things that time does not wear down. Recently I went on a trip to Peru, and packed the only pair of hiking shoes that I had: a five year old pair of timberland boots, well loved and already weary from years of traveling. However, I was determined to get a few more good weeks out of them, to save some money and also because truthfully, I was attached. I have this weird thing with attachment. I tend to latch on to things rather quickly, becoming territorial and sentimental when there is a threat of them being taken away. It happens with people, places, and yes...even inanimate objects.

Anyway, the boots made it through the trip just barely. I found that by the end I was developing cramps in the arches of my feet and was beginning to feel just about every pebble that I stumbled across. They were worn down, and thus, not entirely useful to me anymore. They had a purpose when they were brand new, and they delivered well. But time had changed them. My boots, while once a comforting object, were now starting to cause me pain.

And that's the thing about attachment. So often we secure ourselves to that which no longer serves us, that which is in fact making us sick. We do this for so many reasons, but I think the biggest one is that it is familiar. We do not like what we do not know, even if the thing we do not know may be better for us. We would rather surround ourselves with familiar, dying objects then risk letting go in search of something new, something that isn't guaranteed to come.

I think the biggest way in which I struggle with this is within my identity. I am 29 years old and still discovering new things about who I am. And yet, most days, I find myself frantically scrambling back to the old, back to the Sarah that was unhealthy and detached and safely isolated. For some reason to me, this identity feels safer. I worry that if I meet someone new and they only see the nice, neat parts of who I am that I am in fact a fraud and not being honest about the mess underneath.

But the truth is, the parts of me that are whole and healthy and good ARE in fact the real me. I am learning, so very, very slowly, that if I want to move forward I must be willing to let go of who I used to be. I must stay open to new ways of being, new ways of seeing and perceiving myself and the world around me. I must let go of my attachment to familiar identities that kept me comfortable but in pain, identities that left me longing for more and asking questions that were answered a long, long time ago.

One of the hardest ways we must struggle against our attachment to the old is through the experience of love.

Oh, love.

Love has no rules, does not play by anyone's games. It will not be controlled and it is not here to listen to all the ways in which you believe it is not right for you, how it's not the right time or person or place. Love doesn't care. It will take you hostage and smother you in vulnerability, make you uncomfortable and squeamish and so very much afraid.

Love is about letting go of your attachment to what you think it should be.

Of who you think you should be.

Because the truth is, when we really love someone, we see their flaws and embrace them anyway. Love is not perfect, after all. It's the imperfections that draw us in, that keep us grounded and remind us that love can ONLY be love if it sees the whole picture, and stays. Anything else is merely idolatry, an infatuation with a partial picture of only the best parts of the self.

This is why we put such a high price on love. It's rare to find, but when you have it, it fills you up. It makes you bloom and teaches you about yourself in a way that is new and healing...

If you let it.

Because generally what happens is we reject it before it can even grow. We test it and we push it to its limits, and because we are afraid, we purposefully bare our teeth to see who runs. We fall back into old attachments, old ways of being, and when we get the response we are looking for we wearily let out a sigh of relief and go back to our miserable, lonely, comfortable cells.

There's a story in the bible about a man who was an invalid for 38 years. 38 years of a single identity, 38 years of suffering and going at it alone. Jesus saw this man and asked,

"Do you want to get well?"

And the man replies (in so many words),

"I have no one to help me."

Now, two things about this story interest me. One, I find it interesting that Jesus would ask the man if he wanted to get better, and genuinely wait for a response. But I think this tells us a great deal about the human condition, about the way in which we are willing to suffer because so much of our identity is found in it. The second thing I find interesting is that the man does not directly answer the question: he externalizes it. He does not have a belief he can get better, doesn't even seem to understand what Jesus was asking because it's so foreign to his 38 years of experience. There is new life waiting for him, right within his reach, and he rejects it, outright.

Luckily, Jesus saw through his limited understanding and commanded him to get up off his ass anyway, and WALK dammit (see John 5:8). Jesus was not fucking around!! He knew the man's capabilities and did not accept his excuses. He saw the true identity of the man, in his wholeness, not in his depravity.

Man. If only we could. If only we could see how we look when love is shining on our faces, if only we could surrender to it with an open heart and wide reaching arms, if only we could see ourselves for who we really are and not who we have been or are trying to be.

I want to settle into love. I want to hold it close, to have my soul mingle in the vulnerability in order to get the joy, in order to get the sweetness of such an attachment. Because ultimately, we cannot have both. We cannot lean into fear and let go into love. We must choose.

And it is a hard choice. Don't be mistaken. It will require you to put to rest a piece of you that you may have held on to for a long time. It will ask you to be open and patient, to make room for growth that is painful because it is stretching you, making space for all that love to take root deep down in your soul.

Trust the process. You won't know where you are going, and that's OK. Keep every part of you open.

I know it hurts.

But sometimes, we have to break the bone to heal it.

It's much better to take the pain up front, than to never walk again.

Remember, if it's new it will be hard, scary, and feel treacherous at points.

Don't turn back.

It's not worth it.

Keep your face towards the sun.

And let it remind you of the treasure you've always been,

And of the one that's been waiting for you all along.

the call of chaos.

When you are swimming in the ocean, there's a certain point at which you begin to feel the pull of the tide on your entire body. It's a dangerous current, one that sweeps you up and in with little to no warning, one that often proves to be deadly.

If you grew up on or near water as a kid, you were likely told when a current was too strong to go swimming in a particular area. In many cases, you avoided the water all together, or at the very least stayed near to the shore.

However, sometimes the current crept up on you. Maybe it wasn't strong enough to cause alarm, or maybe you were told and overestimated your swimming skills: either way, you found yourself slowly drawn in to a force bigger and stronger than you, suddenly fighting to make your way back in one piece.

When I think about the ocean, about the tide and the push and pull of all that encompasses life, I think of chaos. There is nothing that I know of that attracts and traps people more than this force, this unseen, sweeping power that leaves nothing behind.

If you were ask someone if they like chaos, the likely answer would be no. But as a therapist, I have seen enough to know that more often than not, the real answer is yes.

We. love. chaos.

We do. We love to chase after things that are passionate and unknown and sometimes even volatile, we love the ups and the downs and the feeling of being alive. 

We may even love to suffer, because our suffering adds value, adds meaning to whatever it is that is sitting before us. Our suffering tells us a story about who we believe ourselves to be, what we think can or should be offered to us at any given moment.

We gravitate towards chaos because in some way, it feels good to feel bad. 

There's so many reasons for this, far too many to process and go into detail here. But at the heart of it all I think is this:

We are afraid of love.

When we sense it, when we feel it is being given to us freely, we lose it. We do not like the feeling of not being in control, and love that is a gift is just that: an offering that leaves us vulnerable if we choose to accept it.

So, we run to chaos to protect us from ourselves, because at least there we are in control of our own destruction.

You see, love requires us to let go, to fall deep, to trust another person. It asks us a question, one that we are often not prepared to answer or ready to address:

Are you worthy?

Our heart hears and quietly turns away. With our eyes tightly shut we run as far as we can into whatever feeling will drown out the request that love is begging us to take, anything to stop us from hearing that we are going the wrong way. 

Love beckons to us, time and time again, and we give it a different excuse every time.

Not yet, we say.

Let me get it together.

Hide the mess.

Make myself more deserving.

But love, love see our mess and comes to us arms wide, beckoning us to seek shelter underneath a canopy of grace. It offers us stability and protection and consistency and we, well.

We are just not ready for it.

I'm not sure I completely understand my own draw towards chaos. Maybe it's the pain, maybe its the certainty. I do know, however, that I have entered its current one too many times. That I have listened to its siren call as truth rather than as an alarm warning me of storms up ahead.

Chaos calls to us because it is as familiar as our own name, it is a mirror for what we feel at the deepest core of who we are.

Are we love?

Or are we chaos?

Are we worthy?

Or will we let the tide pull us under to everything we fear,

but ultimately believe to be true?

We must choose. 

Sink.

Or swim.

As for me, I'm fighting like hell to reach the shore.

Chaos continues to call my name.

But love is calling louder.

for everyone who's ever felt too much.

I used to think emotions, at least the unpleasant ones, were bad. This was unfortunate because I seemed to experience a disproportionate amount of them on a daily basis. Anxiety, depression, anger...these were my companions. No matter how hard I tried I could not stop myself from feeling everything, all the time. I couldn't hide it and I couldn't fake it and I couldn't make it go away. Emotions, it seemed, were my kryptonite.

I spent many, many years trying to stuff those feelings down as far as I could. I was unsuccessful. The thing about emotions is that they demand to be heard, to be seen, one way or another. They will come out in a myriad of ways, and the honest truth is that the more we try to push them away, the harder they fight their way back to the surface. This looks different for every person, but for me it resulted in some major depression and a large dose of self-hatred.

In therapy, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, we talk a lot about core beliefs. Essentially the premise is that every person has a set of ideas about themselves that are largely inflexible and usually unhelpful. These beliefs often are rooted in some form of evidence, but we take them as all encompassing truths about ourselves. They tend to be quite critical and literal in nature, causing us to suffer under their demanding weight. Some common ones are:

I'm bad.
I'm too much.
I'm broken.

Sound familiar? If so, thank you for being honest. It not, congratulations to you, I'm not sure how you've come to this place in life but by all means keep it to yourself!!! We don't need to feel any worse about ourselves than we already do!!!

For me, the core belief that came up again and again and again was overly emotional. In my eyes, this meant that I was damaged, that there was something wrong with me, and that I was therefore unworthy of love. Nothing could change or challenge this idea I had of myself and everywhere I looked I seemed to find evidence to validate my assessment.

You see, the thing about core beliefs is that they are limited to a very specific, very particular set of glasses. When I put those glasses on, everything looks a certain way. However, if I were to put on the glasses of say, my best friend Tessa, everything would look different, including myself.

So. Which pair of glasses is revealing the truth, and which am I willing to believe? If it's true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is what I'm choosing to behold helpful to me? Is it building me up, encouraging me, validating that I am doing the best that I can with what I have?

Usually, the answer to these questions is a begrudging no.

If you take anything away from my writing, anything at all, let it be this:

You are allowed to accept where you are while acknowledging you would like to move forward.

Life, loving yourself, creating balance...it is only found when we stop striving and let whatever come, come. Especially your emotions. The hard ones, the happy ones, the ones that scare you and the ones that fill you up and the ones that you want to keep and the ones you want to get rid of.

It. Is. ALL. OK.

Your emotions are god given, natural responses to the world around and the world within you. We are conditioned by our lives, by our experiences, by our DNA and by our brains and I have news for you!

WE DON'T HAVE CONTROL OVER WHAT WE FEEL.

But we do get a say in how we choose to respond to ourselves in the middle of our mess.

Will we shame? Or will we show ourselves self-compassion?

Only one of those scenarios contributes to healing, and isn't that the goal?

Not that we aren't complex, chaotic, neurotic people...but that we can be those things and LOVE OURSELVES ANYWAY.

If you feel, deeply, you must understand that this is a gift. Some days it will leave you flat on the ground, gasping for breath at the pain of it all, but other days it will allow you to connect and to empathize and to care for those around you in a way that only you can.

Your sensitivity to all of life's emotions help to make you who you are. And while I will be the first to say that sometimes I act out of those emotions in a way I am not proud of, this does not give me permission to hate myself.

We all have parts of ourselves that we'd like to change. The irony is that we cannot, will not heal until we can looks those parts in the eye and say "I see you, I love you. We are going to be OK".

The goal is not perfection. And if it is, this blog is not for you. I don't have any secrets or tips that will allow you to lead a blameless life.

We feel.

We fall,

We get back up again.

But don't spend a minute more convincing yourself that you are too much.

Because I've fought long and hard with that belief, only to come up with not enough.

And neither of those are true.

I have emotions, yes, but I am not only my emotions. I am not my depression or anxiety. I am not a walking panic attack. My tendency towards feeling in an intense and powerful way also allows me to experience joy, intimacy, and creativity in a way I would otherwise not. It makes me good at my job and able to connect to people no matter their background, and has produced some of my most meaningful work yet.

So today, I am thankful for being emotional. I am able to recognize both the vulnerability and strength it reveals. I am grateful for this unique, sometimes difficult gift that keeps me learning and growing and moving forward every second of the day. I know that I am a complex, sometimes crazy, always curious individual but.

I am trying my best while learning to accept the rest. 

And to every single person who feels it all:

You are not alone.

I see you.

We need you.

You are not too much,

And will always be enough.

holding hands with grief.

I've been feeling a little bit lately like someone, or something, is in the room with me wherever I go. This presence is not menacing, it is not there to scare me or cause me harm. Rather, it sits and it watches, patiently waiting for me to take notice. There is no hand waiving or noise making. No effort to alert me or demand my attention.

But it is there.

And it remains with me, constantly. Like a small child who is used to being ignored but is waiting for the right moment, any moment, to be noticed, to be seen. It is constantly at my heels and hovers in the corner of every room I enter, and like an absentminded parent, I let it be seen without really seeing it at all.

I've come to recognize this companion as grief.

You see, we all experience grief whether we recognize it for what it is or not. Some therapists would argue that all therapy is really grief therapy, mourning the loss that has accompanied our suffering in even the smallest of ways. I have found this to be true, both in my own life as well as in the lives of my clients. We have all lost something, and will continue in this manner for the rest of our lives.

For some, they feel that the purpose of counseling is to be happy. I'm afraid this isn't so. For many, pain is as present as breathing, more common than not. Bodies are breaking. Violence is spreading. Humanity is familiar with the ache of despair and the echoing of injustice, the hollowness of loss and the seeming absence of a God who cares.

These clients come to therapy to be fixed, but in reality what they are really seeking is to be healed.

And in the same way, I want to see my grief as a problem to be solved. But I am learning that its presence in my life is not to bring me harm, but to bring me healing. If my heart feels like it's being smashed into a thousand pieces, that's because it is, and because it should be. If we are not allowing our eyes to see and our souls to feel the deep wounds that are being carved into humanity every day then we are not honoring ourselves or the people around us.

Grief lingers because it needs to be heard in order to bring about healing. 

Grief is waiting for my attention, and when I fully face it, when I sit down and say "I'm ready now" grief pauses, looks at me with knowing eyes, full of tenderness and firmly says:

I've been watching you for some time, the way you go about your day, the pauses you take when the feelings are trying to fight their way out, the busyness you wrap around yourself so that this doesn't happen. I see you in pain. I see the way you listen to those around you, the way your eyes meet those who are suffering for a moment and the familiarity of this emotion even as it passes you by. I see you welcome others but just as quickly push them out. I see your heart breaking a million times over for every person around you and I see you sink back into yourself when you feel your powerlessness is too much, I see you covering your eyes and your ears when you feel the burden is too great to carry. I see you holding in the bad and trying to scrape together good, little by little as if you could make something of it, anything of it, if you just try hard enough. I see you working to make yourself presentable to those around you, I see you striving so hard to be worthy, to be valuable, to be whole. I see the hate you feel and the pride you hold and the selfishness you use to keep yourself from having to be responsible, the chaos you make because you feel so much, so much, all the time and wished desperately that you didn't.

I see you.

And I have news.

I am here to hold your hand and help you through. I am here because you have not numbed yourself out, I am here for a reason. And you can run and you can hide and you can ignore me but I will be here waiting for you until you lend me your ear and listen. Because you are right, this world is a mess and you are too. But you must not, you cannot, stop there.

You see, my friend hope is also here. Also waiting, also sitting with you in the dark. And hope knows that there will be times of mourning, times where you think you will not be able to pick yourself up off the floor, times where you will believe that the next step is simply not possible, not even probable, given the circumstances. It will seem like there will never be light again.

But you see, grief cannot exist without light because grief expands into the darkness that light has left behind, it lets us know that something has died and that we need to honor this loss and respond.

Grief shows us where healing needs to begin.

So.

These days, I'm leaning into my grief, with hope, to better understand how to move forward. I'm listening to what grieves me in order to make space for healing, both in my own life and in the lives of those around me. I am recognizing that life will bring me many, many forms of sorrow, and that my purpose is not to tidily fix what is broken, but to grieve what has been lost.

In the words of Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning and Holocaust survivor, we "must not lose hope but should keep [our] courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle [does] not detract from its dignity and its meaning".

We will face losses, big and small, this much is certain.

Let grief come.

Invite her in. Respect her pain because it is meaningful. She may not always make sense and you may not always know how to respond but just start where you are because you can't go backwards and you can't skip ahead.

You can only hold her hand and say,

"I'm here. Go ahead. I'm listening."

curiosity and condemnation.

Life teaches us that relationships are about power. We learn this from a young age. Popularity has more to do with confidence than looks, though one can certainly influence the other.

Unfortunately, sometimes this confidence is bought by subtracting rather than adding. The world is full of those who gain esteem by lowering others, those who come into power because they are good at playing the game. Their comfort is directly correlated to the discomfort of the person they are with, their power gained from the powerlessness of those around them.

Personally, I don't believe that people set out to be cruel. Bullying, subtle or obvious, is a trait inherited in insecurity and confirmed by experience: we want the power because the power keeps us safe. Vulnerability is an intensely uncomfortable emotion and we will do anything to avoid it. Brené Brown's research on this topic was, not surprisingly, groundbreaking simply because she touched on something that so many of us feel and fear. Her work shows us over and over that vulnerability is a part of courage, not a sign of weakness.

But it doesn't come easily.

A fellow therapist and I were recently talking about relationships, and how often the discomfort we feel lends to premature self-destruction. Unanswered questions or feelings of powerlessness prompt us to force answers that cause us to decompose rather than advance. She said that when she feels this uneasiness she tries to look at the problem before her with curiosity rather than certainty, and asks herself a question:

Is the path to knowing dysfunctional?

Will stirring up a whirlwind of anxiety ridden questions rooted in control really get me the true answer I'm looking for? Is this something that can be solved overnight? Is gaining power in this situation actually harming myself and those around me?

Sometimes our impatience in vulnerability leads us to do things we are not proud of and almost always regret. Whether this is actively making someone feel bad or giving up in despair, the path to knowing in this way can only serve to isolate us even more. We gain a power that seems secure but is shallow, easily uprooted or stubbornly impassive. Both threaten our sense of belonging and wholeness.

I am learning that I must lean into the discomfort in both myself and others in order to unveil that which needs nurturing, that which needs pruning and a tender hand. When we choose condemnation over curiosity, we automatically shut a door that may have brought us light. When we aren't open to the process and just want the product, we miss out on the challenges that we need to grow into the people we are becoming.

I want to choose the path that is uncertain, insecure and vulnerable because it is only by being aware of and listening to these pieces of my being that I can properly heal. When I rush to cover up or scramble for power and control, I am laying the ground for dysfunction to take root and slowly poison my soul.

When we pass judgement on others, we pass judgement on ourselves.

And when we gain a sense of security from the insecurity of others, we dishonor our humanness and take away from that which allows us to connect.

And connection always breeds compassion.

We must be able to tolerate unpleasant emotions if we want to be whole. We must be willing to lower ourselves to the uneasiness of others, to meet them in their self-consciousness because we too, understand it. Because we too, are insecure, questioning our place and longing to be seen.

Is the path to knowing dysfunctional?

Can you tolerate the not knowing?

Can you be open to the process that will undoubtedly ask you to be vulnerable, and to connect to the vulnerability of others?

Can you choose curiosity over condemnation?

Because just one of those options leaves the possibility for more.

More life. More hope. More healing.

More love.

Be open to the process, no matter how difficult it may be.

Let your heart be rooted in kindness, not control.

It's the only way you'll grow.

arrhythmic love.

arrhythmic love.

He
was always always looking at her.
always guessing her expectations
never realizing
that to meet them
would require him to
be someone he
could never be.

She
afraid this was true never met his
weighted gaze. understanding that to
expect anything
meant an empty
aching that would prevent
her from being
someone she could.

Love
their love, limited one another.
it protected them from the truth
that they were mismatched
pieces of a
puzzle desperately
wanting to fit
even if it

Meant
never quite being whole.