on memories and ghosts.

No one tells you that memories are tangible. That the sudden thought of something, or someone, rushes around you like water, welling up from some hidden place as if the time between what was and what is no longer exists. We are mediums for the past, for little ghosts in the present that mournfully remind us of who they once were. Their hallowed voices need no words, no language to convey the tune of loss and longing that every bone in our body breaks to.

The refrain of grief is sang alone.

So much of what we remember is out of our control. We find ourselves forgetting the every day details of living in a sea of faraway feelings. It's strange to me that our memories hold more feeling than fact. Feelings that have somehow found their way into this moment, feelings that are so familiar they are like a habit--second nature and difficult to break. They are ingrained in our felt sense more than our thought, an orchestra of emotions. We don't even notice the way we rehearse these experiences, an eternal curtain call that never never quite makes it to opening night.

Sometimes it feels like our memories are all we have left.

We carry them, packing them away in suitcases that are never far from our reach. We take them out of our own accord when we are lonely, or sad, covering us like a blanket and warming us from the outside in. We remember because it feels good, because we want to feel something, because we want to feel anything. We desperately reach down through layers and layers of heaviness to find if light and love and fullness are still there, searching for possibility despite the aching of our empty, weary hearts.

Other times, our memories destroy us. They rip through us like a tornado, violent and chaotic and completely devastating. Try as we may to resist their path, there's no outrunning a storm. So we do our best to take shelter, to block out the deafening screams of all we've lost, helplessly watching our hopes slip away with the wind until all we can hear is.....nothing.

But if we let them, some memories can orient us, ground us and bring us back home to ourselves. They can remind us of what is missing, or what we are looking for. They can continue on the spirit of a time that has passed, or honor what is no longer present. They can teach us, inform us, and help us to move forward with insight and integrity.

Regardless, they are a part of us, little maps that show where we've been and where we are trying to get to, even where we're trying to avoid.

Like breath in our lungs, expanding and contracting, holding and exhaling...

In and out they go.

They can fill you up.

Or swallow you whole.

But one thing is certain:

they are entirely yours alone.

on longing.

The space between accepting what is and hoping for more is where we find longing. I like this word because I think it's one that you can feel as you say it--wrapping itself around your center and reaching forward all at once. It both asks a question and stretches for the answer as if it were a loved one, just out of reach.

Longing is an essential part of living because it keeps us holding on when we are down and out. In trauma counseling, we call this imagination. For those of us who have encountered more suffering than not, experiencing consistent, positive emotions can feel like an unfamiliar concept. When this happens, the brain is trained to pick up on all possible threats to safety, both internal and external, resulting in a negative emotional experience. Without any orientation to feelings of wellness, it can be difficult to find our way back to solid ground. So, we teach our clients to imagine--to visualize what it could feel like to be well again. We tell them to picture what their best life is, to describe to us what they would be doing, or how their bodies and emotions would be operating under these conditions. 

Research has shown us that when the brain imagines something, it creates almost the same pathways as actually completing the process. We need imagination to propel us forward, to increase our faith. And longing, well longing is only bearable if we believe that things will get better. That even if our circumstances do not change, that our spirits will transcend our challenges and we will not feel so heavy any more. 

Longing keeps us alive.

But it can feel like an unending path.

There are so many things I want at this age. A partner, a family. Freedom from the unhealthier parts of myself. I see my friends or family on their own path, and I am happy for them (not without a fair dose of jealousy). But the longing, it is unlike any other pain. It's like holding your breath or trying to touch the sky, it is a feeling that pulls at you from beyond. It's as if you are sending out all your love, all your bright, exploding energy into the universe only for it not to be returned back to you, back to your beating, bursting heart. 

It's looking for a home but finding you must wander farther, further, still.

Longing is tough, but it has a purpose. I think it prepares us, in a way. I think it opens us up so that whatever is coming, whatever may be headed our direction, we are ready to receive it. Longing, if listened to properly, can illuminate the parts of us that feel incomplete. 

And make no mistake, we will find a way to fill these aching chambers. But what I am learning is that in the longing there is a seed being planted in our souls, and how we choose to water it matters. We can cover it up or numb it away, but this will only serve to anesthetize our very being. Contrarily, we can desperately poke and prod as we try to mash ill-fitting pieces into our puzzle, leaving us brittle and prone to breaking. 

Longing is the middle ground. It fills us up and unlocks the vulnerable places, makes us sensitive and brave and trusting in what is yet to come.

It keeps us grounded.

It show us what could be, if we are patient enough.

In our best life, in our innermost being.

Our processes hold meaning, and while our outcomes may not always be what we want them to be, our longing is telling a story all the same. 

But we get to decide who we are until we reach that place, we get to choose what to do with our longing. 

I am trying to listen to it.

To feel it. 

To accept where I am, while daring to imagine more. 

Let your longing lead you.

It knows where to go.

Its melody is a reflection of your heart, after all.

And that--that is a song never wasted, no matter how endless the journey may seem. 

lost and found.

There is a part of me that has been lost, for a very long time. She is small and frightened, and has largely been rejected by me throughout the years. Every time I would get close to finding her, another part of me—one that doesn’t want to be vulnerable and exposed—would lock her away in a prison of shame.

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t make progress. I learned to quiet the voice of chaos and extreme anxiety that kept me debilitated for far too long. I discovered that I could be more than my suffering, that I had beauty and goodness wrapped up in all that I believed about myself to be broken. I gained love that allowed me to come back home, back to myself, with enough of myself to discover that there was still a part of myself that was missing.

I use the word discover loosely because what really happened was that a deep depression settled in the more I ignored this abandoned part of me. She had a lot of feelings, and her neediness both alarmed and terrified me. I have spent the better part of my life denying that I was indeed as helpless and insecure as I felt, so her insistent cries were not welcome in my misguided quest for total and complete stability.

So, I put her to sleep, over and over again. It’s not so surprising then that depression showed up to gently pull me back towards myself, however miserable that self was. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out who I was trying to be because the part of me that had been left behind was making it too difficult to face the present. I waded in and out of self-loathing, confusion, and a loneliness that felt palpable. I became so disconnected from myself and others that I dazedly wandered through six months in a hazy, grey fog of sadness and oppression. It felt like I couldn’t breathe or see, it felt like I was muted and stuck and watching the days go by on a film that I was no longer participating in.

And there were many, many moments I wanted to die because I couldn’t manage the pain. I was so very, very afraid of myself—more afraid than I had ever been before. I didn’t want to sit with myself, I didn’t want to feel the intense emotions of abandonment and rejection that had kept me trapped for so long. I didn’t want to face the Sarah that felt left behind, weak, and overly emotional. I didn’t want to be too much, to need too much, to face the emptiness that kept spreading out further and further around me until it felt like there was nobody left except me and her.

It didn’t matter if I had friends, if I had love in my life or people that cared about me. I didn’t care about me, and all the attention in the world could not fix that.

You see, loneliness is not just about connecting to others, it’s about connecting to yourself—and most often, the self that you most desperately want to avoid. I couldn’t figure out why every time there was even the slightest hint of insecurity I would tailspin into a sea of unrelenting hopelessness, why every morning that I woke up by myself I was filled with a sense of dread.

But my little heart, my exiled, hurting part—she knew. She didn’t want to be alone either, but I made sure she wasn’t welcome. I would fill up my time, numb out on anything, everything that would keep her small and silent until—I simply couldn’t anymore.

They say that when the pain of not doing something becomes greater than the fear of doing it, we move forward. Eventually, we just give up, less because we want to and more because we are too exhausted to keep hiding. Parker Palmer says that this is where depression can at times become our friend—the still, small voice that is asking us to pay attention, gently pushing us back towards ourselves until we no longer have a choice but to listen. It is by no means a comfortable process, but a journey towards something greater than what we can imagine in the pain of the moment.

So, these days, I am sitting with my little Sarah. She can be overwhelming, with all her mistrust and dysregulated emotions. But who can fault her? For 30 years she’s been dismissed and blamed and asked to not show up, under any circumstances. It’s going to take some time for her to feel safe again, for her to feel seen and heard and loved.

For her to feel like she can come back home, too.

And until then, I’ve learned to hold the high watch for her. To keep reaching out, keep being patient, keep compassionately showing up even when it feels like it hurts too much.

To keep my arms opened wide until she is no longer lost, but welcomed as she is found—

just as she is.

on coming home.

I’ve been finding lately, that the further away I feel from what I think is myself, the more myself I become. It's painstaking, to wait in this transition, to search for something I know is there but is taking time to rise to the surface. I feel a loss that I can't quite describe, where the chaos used to be, and it terrifies me.

It turns out sitting with yourself is very hard.

I have spent most of my life running from or attempting to work my way out of various states of mental illness. When you are drowning, you will do anything you can to keep your head above the surface. Getting healthy is hard work, particularly when life serves up quite a few difficult circumstances. And this is an important part of the process, learning how to swim. Finding that you can make your way out of the depths towards the sun, breathing fresh air for the first time. The relief that comes from knowing you are no longer sinking into yourself, the liberating knowledge that you are no longer trapped within your own mind.

But freedom alone is not enough, and you can't keep treading water forever. You are yearning for the shore, but you are tired. Tired of trying, of fighting. Tired of struggling with yourself, tired of looking for what always seems just out of sight. You recognize that the old way isn't working for you anymore, and that all you have pushed up against for all those years is simply....gone.

You don't want to sink.

But you can't swim any farther.

So you learn to float.

Floating can be peaceful you know, when the waters are calm. It can feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable at first, when you have spent every minute up until now wildly thrashing about. The stillness can be unnerving, and I think that it is here that we can really start to take a look at our soul.

We can really start to listen to it.

This is a lonely process, being with your soul. Everything is stripped away out in the middle of the ocean, and you are left naked and vulnerable. It can feel a bit like you are unmoored, untethered from what used to be a secure anchor of suffering. Of course, you think, why would I want to be chained to what kept me miserable for so long? But don't underestimate the security we feel in familiar patterns, no matter how unhealthy they may seem. Our defenses were useful in protecting us at one point, after all.

This in-between, the space between what was and what is coming, can feel overwhelming at times. Floating requires you quiet yourself, and this is hard to do when you are used to fixing everything within and around you. It is much easier to keep moving, to keep searching, than it is to be still.

But the stillness is where we find our soul, where we come home to ourselves. It's where we find our balance, where we get to see who we are without all the ways we have tried to shield ourselves from the unrelenting waves of the universe. It's where we begin to recognize "the face before we were born".

And I love this idea. I love that our soul has been there all along, that it can recover from hiding underneath the shroud of self-doubt and insecurity that has seemed to last for an eternity.

That we can look with curiosity, and not shame, at all that kept us from being who we really are.

That our souls are so much richer than we originally thought, like a prism catching the light and sending it in a thousand brilliant directions.

So I am learning to be patient. To wait in the emptiness. To endure the unknown. For as restless as I feel, and as frightening as silence has always been to me, I know that there is more. More than just keeping my head above water, more than just swimming to stay afloat.

I am ready to come home.

Back to myself, to my center.

Back to my soul.

It will take time, yes. And uncertainty is part of the bargain. But I'm done swimming, done defining who I am by who I was when I was just trying to survive.

I'm floating, no longer anchored but finally, and truly...

Free to be me.

on telling the truth.

Quite often, a version of myself appears that I don't particularly like. This person is not my friend. Generally, based on how she's reacting or behaving, I want nothing to do with her. It's like I leave my body for a minute, observing with judgment from some hidden place where I don't have to connect to whatever part of me is acting out. Later, when I'm alone, I replay all the worst things that have been said to or about me just to really make sure the self-deprecation sinks in.

Disliking yourself can be a full time job.

These days, I'm tired of working the shame shift. I have no energy left to to show up to this kind of work anymore, and so I've given up.

The thoughts come. I let them. I acknowledge them with a nod. I don't act so surprised by my humanity. I hope for better days.

And this is where, I believe, my healing begins.

I am learning to tell the truth.

Here's what I know: there's a wounded part of me that reacts when triggered. Sometimes, depending on the season, that can be quite a lot. In the moment, I regress. This can look differently, depending on the day. Sometimes I have an anxiety attack. Sometimes I become really depressed. I lash out in anger, desperately cling on out of insecurity. Compulsively try and fix. Explain myself away. Push and push and push to be perfect.

I fail every time.

So I beat myself up. No one else needs to do this for me any more. Turns out I am quite skilled. But curiously enough, this does nothing for me. I wake up the next day with a dose of self-loathing and a morbid determination to do better, and the cycle starts again.

I am learning that we tend to define ourselves poorly in a misunderstanding of our pain. We often believe things about who we are that were told to us in a time when our suffering spoke the loudest, where our truest self was not able to show up at all. We often believe things that were told to us by someone else who was acting out of a wounded part, and somehow we believed them.

It helps to look at the reliability and validity of your source.

When someone is hurting, they have the potential to hurt us. In that space, our emotions let us know that something isn't quite right. Where the trouble begins, is when we start to personalize someone else's pain. We make it about our core self. Somehow, we must have caused that mood or reaction. Somehow, it's completely our fault.

Somehow, we must be as bad as we think.

And so, as life goes on, we react too. We shut down or overcompensate or become defensive. We spiral and over think and become chaotic inside. We respond to the fear that is deep within us, the fear that tells us we are unlovable and dirty and too much and not enough and that we can't ever fix it. 

That we are broken beyond repair.

But with if that part was just that....a part? What if we didn't have to define ourselves by our difficult moments? What if we could give ourselves compassion when this happens, if we could hold our hearts just a little more tenderly? What do you think would happen?

Not surprisingly, this idea is more uncomfortable than not. We worry that if we love ourselves in the middle of our mess, it is the same as giving permission for that bad girl to run wild and really tear the place down. We worry that if we love ourselves, we are somehow lying to ourselves about our identity.

We believe we must be perfect to be loved.

This is where telling the truth is so important.

There is a part of you, a part not yet healed, that responds imperfectly to what happens around you. It's not about that one moment. It's about every moment that led you to this place. We do not live in a vacuum, and neither do our emotions. We pull up things from the past, sometimes even unconsciously, and we make it about the present. Listen to me:

The absolute worst thing you can do when this happens is to shame your emotions. We cannot help what we feel and how we feel it. Blame only serves to intensify the feelings, and results in those  behavioral responses that we aren't the biggest fan of.

Who we are does not have to be defined by what we experience or act on when we are hurting. 

Telling the truth about ourselves means accepting that there are times we won't get it quite right. That we make space for the parts of us that are still healing, that we give those parts permission to speak because they want us to know they are hurting and are tired of being ignored.

Here's the thing: when we treat our emotions with kindness and respect, they respond. We find out what is really going on underneath the tide of reactivity, and we can tend to the wound without fear because we know that it is just a part. 

We can be honest with ourselves and take responsibility for our emotions, even our behaviors, because we aren't confusing them with who we are. We can believe we are capable and brave and strong and good even if our responses don't always reflect this truth.

We can believe we are still worthy even if we are acting like we are not.

We aren't prisoners to our parts anymore.

We don't have to sit in the dungeon of despair.

We can be free.

Take a breath.

Let go into the curiosity of all that we've kept ourselves from, because we were so preoccupied with fixing instead of healing, hating instead of holding.

I want to love every part of myself better.

To show up for myself, as vulnerable as it feels.

To have a positive relationship with myself.

Because the truth is, sometimes we have to go into the dark in order to bring things to the light.

We can't see them clearly otherwise.

It will take courage.

It will be hard.

But the old way isn't working anymore.

If you're like me, you have nothing to lose.

Let the sun shine on the the most secret, shame filled parts of who you are.

For in its warmth the whole world has a chance to become new again.

So do you.

Love will lead the way.

healing and hope.

Last year, I dated someone very special for about three months.

I fell in love. In all the classic, movie manufactured ways. Being with him felt a little bit like heaven, and a lot like floating dreamily through time--which really did pass in the blink of an eye. I thought I had found it, the thing, the magic everyone talks about and the music that makes your whole being sing.

And I let myself tumble head over heels, arms open, heart first into this person who so deeply cherished me.

The thing is, we are not in love for the short term. We hope for forever, and this is what causes us to run with such abandon into the soul of someone we barely know. I'm not sure I understand what exactly happens for us to trust another with this sort of intensity--to be honest, I'm not sure anyone does. What I do know is that it does happen, and that no matter how it ends, it is always a gift.

It's been three months since we broke up. It was an unusual occurrence in the history of failed relationships. The feelings were still as strong as ever, but the foundation wasn't there. We desperately wanted to make it work and yet, we couldn't. As we held hands on my bed and whispered our deepest affections to each other, we knew it was time to let go. We didn't know for how long or if we could still be friends or if we'd ever get back together. We didn't even really understand why. 

But what we did know was that something was not right, and that no matter how hard we tried we were simply two pieces of a puzzle that didn't quite fit. 

Now, you may think that since an equal amount of months has passed as the time we dated, I would be wised up and over it by now.

I am not. 

But this doesn't mean that I am empty handed, either.

I am sad, a lot of the time. Confused. I don't have the answers I would have liked and to be honest, am still not even sure what the questions should be. 

I am healing.

A note on healing:

We think of it as a nice word. A word that indicates we feel better, even good.

But while healing does lead to those things, the process is still painful. I have had several surgeries throughout my life, and each time the weeks and sometimes months after were filled with hard work, tear soaked pillow cases, and a great deal of physical suffering. 

Healing is not nice. 

It is difficult. The agony we feel on the surface is just a small fraction of what is happening underneath, and it is no different when we are heartsick. 

I have stopped asking "why" because I have found that the response does little in the face of loss. I have stopped trying to calculate what I think will happen in the future because I have found that the person I am in now can rarely imagine beauty beyond her present limitations. 

So I have settled for unwavering, unrelenting hope. 

Hope is so dangerous. It asks us to move forward when we don't know the way, to trust that all will be well when we plainly see that everything is falling apart. To believe that maybe, just maybe things will turn out better than we ever could have expected. 

But most of all, hope asks us to stay here in the moment, to fully live the life that has been brought to us on any given day. It requires us to keep loving without our beloved, to keep being enchanted by the world around us even if it doesn't include our deepest wishes. 

Even if it doesn't look like we had planned. 

Is this what I thought or even wanted my life to look like at the age of 30?

Of course not.

But each morning I wake up to the sun streaming eons of light through my window, my cat sweetly nudging me out of sleepiness to feed her, and the sound of my roommate shuffling about in the room next to mine as she readies for day. I am greeted with coffee and cold winds and crowded trains, the gesture of a stranger giving up her seat for someone who really needs it, today of all days.  The friendly smile of the security guard as I arrive at work, the quiet of my office and the familiarity of this space that has held so many secrets, so many sorrows, so much time filled with connection and joy and... 

hope.

It follows, even as it wells up within me, and it never lets me go. 

This is what it means to stay alive, to remain awake in a world that tells us to distance and downsize and defend against everything that makes us vulnerable. 

We are so afraid to be vulnerable. 

Yet, if falling in love taught me anything, it is this:

We must remain open even when it hurts because THIS is where the healing begins. 

And the truth is, the more we love, the more love we let in. Just because I lost someone it does not mean that the love we had is dead. I know this because my own heart is very much beating in the midst of missing someone I cared for deeply, and that love will always be mine to hold. To give, maybe even more than before. 

So. I am thankful for the in-between, for the what has been and the what is to come, for the fullness of this minute, this instant happening all around and through me. I am grateful I don't know the answers or the questions or the reasons why because it is in the absence of that control that I am free.

I am healing, yes.

But I am also hoping. 

I am letting my imagination run wild in the face of uncertainty. 

And this, this is what it means to love.

To show up, bloodied and bruised, but not broken.

To offer our heart because without it, we aren't really living.

To believe that no matter what is taken away, love will always remain.

And that is enough to keep showing up, to keep hoping, to keep loving...

today.