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.