lost and found.

"When you won’t accept forgiveness, you’re left to your own schemes.”

In recent years, I came to the startling conclusion that I am attachment avoidant. I think I mostly never realized this because I would date classically unavailable men. In my mind, I wanted an intimate partner, but my intimate partner didn’t want me. I gilded this thought process and pattern in light that made me look like the all patient, all loving individual who just kept picking men who were bad for her. I would complain and push and spiral out and be crushed when my relationships would inevitably fall apart. I would wonder what was wrong with me that I couldn’t make anyone stay. It took me a long time and lots of inner work to understand that I willingly chose men who would not choose me because I myself did not choose me.

As a person who feels things very deeply, being in an intimate space with someone can feel very messy. Strangely, this doesn’t register for me as much in friendship as it does in romantic relationships, or relationships in which some sort of commitment is involved (read—organizations, bosses, communities in general). Somewhere between my perceived freedom and possible attachment I go a little wonky. I start to feel anxious, afraid even. Now, I have done enough personal and therapeutic work to recognize that what is happening within my nervous system is a result of a history of relational trauma and not necessarily an actual indicator of something dangerous. And yet, I am nearing 32 years old and have deeply struggled to allow myself to connect in a lasting and loving way with someone else—someone I could belong to. I am much more comfortable singing my life song alone. 

And thus comes my word for 2021—belonging. It’s interesting because my word for 2020 was home. I was trying to figure out how to come back home to myself, how to belong to myself, and yes—how to choose myself. I was trying to stop running, to settle into the spaces within that I had avoided for a long time. I was trying to learn how to accept and even love myself. I was trying to find me. The me I had buried or pushed away because of shame, the me I had yet to forgive because I found her unforgiveable. But the thing about belonging to others is that we first have to belong to ourselves.

And the thing about belonging to ourselves is that we then discover there’s a part of us that can only be found in others.

Lost and found.

We are all just lost and found.

Over and over again.

In moments where I lose myself, I feel off kilter. I can feel myself saying and doing things that don't align with my heart—with my core. I can recognize that there’s a part of me that is afraid, or angry, or anxious, a part of me that is trying to protect me from getting hurt but is really mucking things up in the process. And now when this happens, I try to close my eyes and breathe. I find this small, frightened part of myself and I speak to her gently. I let her know that I am here, that I will not betray her and that it’s alright if she take a break from being so worried all the time. I give her a hug. Then, I take a deep breath and look for the underlying string that will lead me back to my center.

I imagine that this string is gold and softly glowing, and while I can’t really see anything else around for miles and miles and know not the path it will take me, I can trust that it will lead me back home to myself.

But the other thing I am learning is that sometimes, the road back home is also a road back to our connected self. There are parts of me that only exist in relationship to others. I can be myself by myself, yes, but we are not meant to be alone. Poet Kahlil Gibran puts it eloquently when he says, “and let your best be for your friend…for it is his to fill your need but not your emptiness.”

At the start of last year, I wrote this part of the poem in the first page of my journal, as sort of a guidepost for my healing process. For so long I sought others to fill my emptiness, and ironically this kept me from my needs actually being met. I first had to fill my own emptiness and heal my hurting places so that I could even begin to enter authentic relationship. I had to recognize my own responsibility in self destruction, my own avoidance and choice in rejecting myself over and over and over again in order to really have the relationships I was looking for.

I do believe that others help us on our healing journey, but I also believe that until we internalize this healing we are just wells that dry up too soon. We must constantly tend to our emptiness and find the places where we feel full—which is usually where spirituality is forged.

And then, we have to trust ourselves enough to let our inner child go. It’s sort of like a parent who is worried that her child won’t be able to protect herself, won’t be able to make her way out in the world—except we are the parent and the child is our softest most tender and beautiful place within.

We have to let her go.

There is so much hope and love and joy and peace and connection to be found out there but we must be brave enough to go and get it. We must belong to ourselves so that we can belong to others, and we must give ourselves away in order to find ourselves again. It’s such a complicated, messy, undefined process that will absolutely involve being hurt.

But being hurt is a shared part of our humanity.

We were never meant to not feel.

As psychologist Susan David says, to feel nothing is to have “dead people’s goals.”

And as C.S. Lewis says, “to love at all is to be vulnerable.”

So, here we are friends.

Open hands.

Giving and taking.

Losing and keeping.

Hurting and healing.

Over and over and over again.

But this is the music of our life.

Some notes are lost, some are found.

In the end, it's all part of the grand symphony--

our soul's song.

Let us be brave enough to create it.

on knowing.

Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

There are many ways of knowing, of learning to trust ourselves and the process that is living. When I look back at my younger years, I can see the undercurrent of my true self weaving in and out of my choices. There were the decisions I made from who I thought I was supposed to be, who I wanted to be, and sometimes—who I really was. I have found that our souls have a profound way of re-directing us to who we are underneath the more performative acts of our nature. And while we worry that the wandering is a waste of time, really it is just another way of reflecting our light within, gently guiding us home little by little.

As someone who struggles with mental illness, faking it isn't really part of my repertoire. However, I have tried to outrun myself on several occasions. As a young adult, I wanted to be happier, nicer, more patient. I wanted to be normal. So I squeezed myself into places I didn’t quite fit, and the result was always incredibly painful. And while I believe that many of my mental health issues were biological in nature, I also know that sometimes they were indicators of inauthentic ways of being. As Parker Palmer in Let Your Life Speak put it, sometimes depression is really just a friend trying to get your attention, pressing you down to the self that is longing to be heard.

Whenever I meet with clients and they thank me for my help, I always remind them that really, they already know the answers to what they are looking for. Therapists are just facilitators for the inner self trying to make its way to the surface. Our divine nature is very powerful, pulling us back to our center even when we don’t realize it. I think this is a comforting thing to remember, to recognize and trust that we know the way even when it feels like we are lost. I have entertained my own fair share of chaotic experiencing, a practice deeply familiar to me from childhood. Externalizing our feelings and behaviors is a quick attempt to escape suffering, but generally just exacerbates it. All of us can fall into the habit of reactionary living—because it is familiar, because it is easier, and because it protects us from the vulnerability we desperately seek to avoid.  

Many spiritual paths speak about the journey within—what I believe to be our most holy offering to humanity itself. We each are a key that has the potential to unlock goodness and hope and freedom and love in this world. We do ourselves and those around us a disservice if we are not living from our grounded self. Another way I have heard this concept explained is to live from the back, not the front. The front is where we go to present our ego in all its fragility and confusion. The back is a place of stillness, of space. It is from here we are able to access our ability to transform, which in turn allows others to do the same.

I have spent so many moments not trusting myself, not listening to my inner voice. I have spun out, shut down, and begged others for advice and guidance. None of these things were necessarily bad—they all were a part of me growing forward in the only way I knew how. But I can see now how I participated in my own suffering at points, complicating situations in an effort to control them. I think all this time I have just been trying to figure out how to live graciously with myself, to listen to the light inside and believe in its inherent goodness.

In Sanskrit, the word namaste translates to “the divine in me bows to the divine in you.” I think now, more than ever, finding divinity within ourselves and each other is not only necessary, but a matter of life and death. The path to knowing becomes that much more vital because our actions (and inactions) profoundly impact those around us. The place of stillness, where we can sit back into our soul, is also a place from which we can effect rooted change because it is where the strands of all our humanity join together—and true stillness always leads to right action.

So learn to listen. There are many ways of knowing. Follow the strand that leads to where your soul finds freedom to just be. Then be with yourself. Especially in the tough moments, the ones where you wish that you were someone else all together. And be with each other. We are all in need of a little space, a little tenderness in the hurting places, someone to see the divine within...

and someone to walk with us home. 

on staying open.

I have not written since January. It’s safe to say a lot has happened in that time, so many things personal to me as well as bigger than me, changes that have been both a long time coming and way too late. I started this year with a word in mind, a practice that I began more recently than not, and that hasn’t failed me since. The word always comes to me, right when I need it and always in a meaningful way, calling me into a new season of life. Then, as time progresses, I keep track of the way it inevitably shows up—and I am never surprised to find that the word is actually more of a promise, or a premonition of things to come.

This year, my word was home. I think for me it was almost a longing, a pulling towards what I had hoped for most in my twenties. And not necessarily in a literal way, or even in a familial sense. What I wanted was to feel home, within myself, regardless of my circumstances. I wanted to come back to a place I felt like I had never really been, a place that I had maybe in fact been running from for a long time. One thing that became very clear to me in the pandemic was that we are all just trying to get as far away from ourselves as possible. We are so afraid to look inside, terrified of ourselves and unaccepting in the most damaging of ways.

So we put up a good fight, and this is real fucking exhausting. We wrestle with ourselves I think more than anybody else. We want to blame it on others, shifting uncomfortably in our seats as if the whole situation could be remedied if we just found a new position, or chair, or room to be in. But the truth is we carry ourselves with us wherever we go, whether we like it or not—and I believe that the parts of us that are hurting will continue to get our attention by whatever means possible no matter what seat we are sitting in.

I’ve learned its best for everyone if we just settle in.

Here’s what I’m figuring out about coming home: it is much harder to do if we create an inhospitable environment. In general, we do not want to experience shame, and so we shuffle about looking at pretty much everything but ourselves. We can’t separate what we feel from who we are, so the process of sitting with our pain becomes an almost untenable process. We reject any experience that causes us discomfort, and most certainly the parts of us that we deem bad.

The fact is it is so much easier to shut down than it is to stay open. Our defenses are there for a simple reason—we want to protect ourselves. But in doing so, we inevitably block the way home. Everything I have read, discovered, or heard this season has told me one thing and one thing only:

Stay. Open.

When you hurt, stay open. When you are angry, stay open. When you are sad, anxious, indifferent—stay open. My friend has another way of putting this I like even better. She calls it “sitting in your dirty diaper.” Sometimes you just gotta stink up the room and call it a day. Eventually you will get it changed, but in the meantime, you just have to accept that you are sitting in a heaping pile of your own shit.

And believe it or not, there’s value to this. If you sit in your shit long enough you really learn what it smells like. You aren’t so repulsed by it and come to realize it is a natural part of the human experience. Everyone shits! Maybe I’m not so bad after all?

And if your home has piles of shit locked away in rooms and an insane amount of Febreze plugged into the walls, trust me—eventually you will have too much shit and no place left to put it. Might as well turn it into manure because really, we are all just trying to make some room for things to grow.

Another way to think about it is we cannot hold on and let go at the same time. This is why I write so often about open hands. If I want to come home, I must be willing to hold hands with myself in a compassionate and genuine way. I must open my arms up to all my experiences, I must be patient and kind and gentle with the smelliest of shit. And most central of all, I must believe that I am not a piece of shit.

This is important.

Staying open is maybe the hardest thing I have ever done, because it requires all of me in truly agonizing moments when all I want to do is lash out, retreat, or go into some other mode of destructive self-preservation. But after wrestling with myself for so long, I now know with no amount of uncertainty that staying open is the only way to be fully alive. It’s like realizing you have never actually taken a deep breath, or finally getting to rest after a long trek back to the place you have always longed to be:

Home.

self-forgiveness and the space in-between.

The underground is a dangerous but potentially life-giving place to which depression takes us; a place where we come to understand that the self is not set apart or special or superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness and light; a place where we can finally embrace the humanity we share with others. || Parker Palmer

I think, for most of my life, I have not understood the concept of forgiveness. Or rather, I understood it in my mind but not in my heart—the felt experience was lost on me.

I have spent many, many years afraid to look at myself for fear of what I would find. As someone who constantly struggled with internal chaos, it was simply too hard to sit in my badness and experience anything other than shame. I felt that I deserved punishment for my reckless behavior and unfiltered emotions. I couldn’t separate who I was from what I had done, and so I lived in a perpetual state of fear that there was something very, very wrong with me. My feelings were strong and at times volatile, shifting at a rate that felt terrifyingly out of my control. Growing up I didn’t have the resources I needed to learn how to regulate, so in the absence of this education I instead learned how to hate myself.

Hating myself, I decided, would be my own self-inflicted punishment.

The idea that someone could love me despite my seemingly fatal flaws was beyond me. I knew that I had positive qualities—that people liked me, that there was some part of me people enjoyed. I was funny, and bright, and used these aspects of myself to connect to others as best I could. But when people got close, close in a way in which I couldn’t hide, I almost always felt defeated.

Relationships, of any sort, were exceedingly messy and it seemed to me that I was the one who always brought the mess. I just couldn’t get it right, and I think, for a long time, I wore my moodiness like a shield, not to protect myself from other people—but to protect other people from me. I wanted intimacy but believed with every single part of me that I would eventually drive people away with my badness.

And because I didn’t understand forgiveness, once I thought I had fucked things up that was it—there was no coming back for me. I couldn’t tolerate the in-between space, the part where I could have done something bad instead of believing I was bad, in totality. I couldn’t accept that someone could possibly love me, or even like me, after I had behaved poorly.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around forgiveness because it would mean accepting that somehow, I was still worth loving even in the face of doing something bad.

I think as a culture there is a lot of curated vulnerability around perfection—we admit we make mistakes, mess up, and collectively have a huge sigh of relief. This is definitely progress in the right direction. There is a certain level of acceptance around failure.

But what about when our perfectionism centers around our emotions? Around the times in which we overreacted, spoke in anger, impulsively did something that hurt someone else? What about the times in which we REALLY fuck up, the times that leave us running farrrrrrr away from humanity because we are sure that we aren’t worth loving now, after all?

What does it mean to accept ourselves in the face of some of the worst things we have ever done?

This past year for me brought me to this question, over and over again. I think, in large part, because I finally had enough of myself to hold myself with compassion. For so long I was all tied up in hate, avoiding anything that would trigger my inner shame, avoiding intimacy. At the age of 30, I have only ever had one true romantic relationship, largely because I did not know how to sit with myself. It turns out it’s very, very hard to sit with someone else in a place of vulnerability when you don’t know how to sit with yourself.

But, you can’t outrun yourself forever and last year my feet all but collapsed underneath me. I found myself face to face with some of my deepest insecurities, some of the ugliest and most shameful aspects of my being. I found myself grieving the pain I had been in, along with the pain I had caused. And with the help of some good friends, a therapist, medication, and neurofeedback (healing, apparently, is a lot of work), I started to carefully tread into my suffering.

I created space, lots of space, to sit in the dark. I softened into my hurting places, instead of anxiously jumping into fight or flight mode. I let myself feel all the scary feelings I thought had made me a terrible person, I examined them carefully, without judgment and a gentle compassion that I was just learning to find.

What I discovered is that I had done bad things, yes. I had hurt people, both intentionally and unintentionally, with my behaviors, selfishness, and ever fluctuating emotions.

But what I also discovered, much to my dismay, was that this was a part of being human whether I liked it or not.

And something inside of me started to understand love in a new way. I found that as I created compassionate space for myself, I could also create space for other people.

Pain makes us live in a dichotomy of good versus bad.

When we are in pain, its hard for us to feel safe and so instead we look for answers.

Was I right? Wrong? Normal? Abnormal? Accepted? Rejected?

Good?

Or bad?

When we learn to forgive ourselves, there is space for other possibilities.

We take responsibility for ourselves while also remaining in a loving position towards our difficult parts.

So, I am practicing living in the compassionate in-between.

The reality of my emotions is one that will take a lifetime to accept—mental illness, trauma, the stickiness of human relationship—we really all are just doing the best we can with what we have.

So today, if you find yourself in an endless loop of self-loathing, take a seat.

It’s likely I’ll be sitting right there with you.

And while the road to self-forgiveness is long, take heart.

Because in all of our humanity, we are never walking alone.

on pushes and pulls.

The thing about depression is that is pushes you down, way down, until all you can really get a good look at is yourself. It creates a dense fog around you, amplifying your fears and reflecting back to you all the things you have desperately tried to hide from your entire life. Sometimes, it's accompanied by anxiety, forcing ruminations of deprecation to the forefront of your brain, like a movie reel on an endless loop of self-perpetuating hell. You are frozen, watching in horror as the worst parts of who you are tortuously crawl through the night.

So often, this trauma lives within in our bodies, trapped by years of neglect and self-abuse. And if you have struggled for a long time, these emotional responses can almost become routine, like riding a bicycle or brushing your teeth--patterns of behavior so familiar we can scarcely imagine a different way of being. Our feelings become a part of us, like breath to air, and we hardly know who are anymore. The trauma, ingrained in our DNA, pushes us into these behavioral habits and turns us upside down.

The world inside us can be far more troubling than what lies beyond the trappings of our body. 

Emotion regulation is a tricky thing. Our responses can be so strong at times that it's impossible to distinguish reality from fiction. Our feelings can tell us truths that we are so certain are accurate, that we behave out of them without a second thought. I have, very frequently, been beholden to my emotional states. Later, back in my "wise mind" I could recognize my intensity as trauma responses, my body and brain working together to keep me safe from whatever perceived threat had triggered me prior. But the coming of this realization was always followed by the weight of unbearable shame--a crushing belief in my own unrelenting badness, which seemed to me to be both automatic and inescapable. 

When I am in the dark place, it feels like there are two tiny versions of myself inside my heart. One is angry, volatile. Her rage is unmeasurable, uncontainable, and she is a danger to herself and others. Because she is so caged in she wants to hurt herself, she wants punish the people who have hurt her but mostly, she wants to punish herself. Her hate runs white hot, deep in her veins like lava, ready to self-destruct with little thought to the consequences. Her pain is so unbearable that it is explosive, shaking the bars of her cell and screaming relentlessly to be let out.

The other version is very, very afraid. She sits in a corner of her own free will, one that is both dark, and damp. She is huddled under the weight of her own body, tiny and scared, tears of grief silently sliding down her little face. She makes no noise, has no requests, and desperately wants to hide from that other person. She is sad, and alone, a ghost of a child who once existed. She will not come out under any circumstances because she does not trust that she will be safe in my care.

Two versions, two ends of the spectrum. I learned to manage--pushed into corners and cells by a system within that seemed to be monitored by something else all together.

When I finally went to therapy and got on medication, it was like walking normally for the first time. I didn't know it was possible to wake up and not want to die, to get through a day without a panic attack or to believe that maybe, just maybe, I was alright.

And then this year, I went to neurofeedback. After a series of personal losses, I realized that while I had done great deal of cognitive work, my body was still wrecked by all those years of practiced chaos. I retrained my brain to not go into autopilot at the slightest trigger, I got some distance from my emotional selves, some distance that allowed me to sit with my pain in a newly compassionate way.

Instead of being pushed into emotional states I found I was being pulled towards my hurting selves. What did they need? What were they saying to me? Could I accept the parts of myself that I had tried so hard to ignore? The parts of myself I had deemed bad, and unworthy of love and belonging? 

Many of my clients think that they are coming to therapy to "fix themselves". Maybe they have behaviors that fill them with shame, histories marked by their own self-destruction. But what I have found over and over and over again is that it is not what we are running from that matters, but what we are running to. We won't get anywhere trying to escape the versions of ourselves we are too ashamed to hold. It's like not watering a plant and expecting it to grow. 

We all have parts of ourselves that are hurting, parts that are not reflective of who we are at our center. Parts that we acted out of to protect, parts that didn't know any better.

But if we can acknowledge that and love ourselves anyway, we have a chance at healing.

It's not about rejecting our bad in favor of good. 

It's about taking our good and sitting with our bad.

Instead of pushing these parts into corner and cells, we gently pull them towards the light.

So this year, I'm not making resolutions.

I'm not pushing or punishing myself, I'm not hoping to be someone different.

Instead, I am listening. I am being still and quiet, I am letting my hurting parts speak and tell me what it is they most need.

I am being pulled towards the light.

Which--as it turns out, has been inside all along.

I just had to know where to find it.