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.

space and grace.

Suffering has a way of silencing us, shrinking us down and making us smaller until we wish to no longer exist. Our ability to torment ourselves and perpetuate this pain is a universal disease that continues despite our circumstances. We do not need to be in hell to experience it within ourselves.

For those of us who struggle with mental illness, the battle is often unseen. Our brains lend themselves to self-deprecation freely and with no questions asked. What you may see on the surface is usually only the smallest indicator of what is going on underneath—our emotions have the capacity to bring us to the darkest place you can think of, and then a little further. It is no surprise to me that those of us who wrestle with our own demons become too tired to carry on. Living can take an extraordinary amount of work.

In my own life, I have been fortunate enough to have a patient therapist and a community of people who have allowed me the space to suffer freely. Medication also helped, and I have no shame associated with that which allowed me to heal when nothing else seemed to work. I have come so far from where I was just six years ago, and the hope I have experienced has been my anchor in seasons of despair. I am grateful that I was taught to lean into joy and peace in the smallest moments (thanks Shauna Niequist), because those memories have served as a reminder that goodness still exists when the ache in my soul tells me differently.

However, despite our emotional growth, we still have battles that seem to arise again and again. Pain that has not fully healed has a way of resurfacing, and I find this to be true not only in my own life but in the lives of those I work with as a therapist. Becoming whole, it turns out, is a lifelong process that we have the privilege of uncovering only a step at a time. This can be frustratingly heavy, and yet, this is what it means to be human—perfection escapes us this side of heaven, no matter how hard we try.

And yet, we keep on trying. The irony of this is that what we want for ourselves is often found in the opposite of doing, and nobody likes to hear that. We like being able to fix things, we like the idea that we can earn our keep and rebuild our tired bodies by running faster and farther than before. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard a client relay to me the extraordinary hurt they have experienced, only to finish the pain-filled telling with a solitary, resolved question:

“So, how do I fix it?”

I generally look back at them with a mirrored empathy, for I too am familiar with the particular yearning that comes from wanting desperately to be something other than what I am in the middle of my mess. But the gentle truth that has been relayed to me over and over is that healing can only come from acceptance, and that our struggle against ourselves only serves to imprison us even further. It is a beautiful paradox that wholeness can only come from picking up all pieces—how we put ourselves back together is up to us, but if we choose to leave out the difficult parts of our narrative we will never quite be able to make the pieces fit.

Recently, my sister introduced me to a healing practice called The Alexander Technique. I don’t fully understand it, but I know it has to do with the way in which we carry and move within our bodies, such as our posture. As she was examining the way I stand, she noticed that I tend to shrink into myself, moving everything inward and down until I am almost hunched over. To remedy this, she asked me to widen my shoulders. In response, I thrust my chest forward presumably to straighten my back and open up my shoulders. She shook her head at this and said,

 “No, not open. Widen.”

Sometimes, I think that this is the response that we have to healing. We are open to the process, but we must remain wide to really feel the effects. We ask for tools and read up on all the steps, and we apply them dutifully almost as if we are following a treatment plan. And it works.

For a little while.

But slowly and surely, we wither back into our suffering because we think that it is the truest reflection of ourselves. We very physically mirror our pain, and all the openness in the world does not change that because our openness must also be wide.

To me, wideness means that we are filling up space, that we are saying we are allowed to be in the room with everyone else. It says that we are OK with who we are and where we are at, and that those things do not denote or negate a seat at the table. It means that we are permitted to be in process, but that we are committed to believing we are capable of change.

Open says “can I come in?”

Wide says “can I stay?”

We often walk through the door but become frightened by our sense of belonging, we fight the feeling that it could be possible we are actually worthy.

One of the most powerful examples I have seen of being wide came from a former client.  She had lived most of her life small, trampled by the abuse of her family and internalizing the shame of her past. She wanted desperately to fix and forget, but was beginning to be open to the possibility that she was valuable even in the middle of her fragmented heart. I remember her telling me about how someone had said an offhanded comment to her, and how the words hurt her even though she knew that they were not intended to. She came in so excited one week because she had pulled that person aside and gently but courageously told him how and why she was bothered by that exchange. The person responded with such humility and respect, and thanked my client for being so open and honest about her feelings.

When my client told me this story, she was bursting with joy because she had finally been able to see and accept that she was worth speaking up for. She was open, yes, but she was also wide. She allowed herself to take up space and create a safe place for herself. She internalized self-compassion and love, without beating herself up or digging a hole of hate. She could have easily internalized the incident, blaming herself for being too sensitive or reasoning away the situation so as to avoid conflict.

But she didn’t.

She was wide, and in doing so, she found healing that took root in a soil that would not rot or erode away. She planted herself in worthiness because she was able to recognize that her wounds did not make her unworthy. They would heal, but she would have to let them, and to do that she would have to believe that she was worth the healing even when she was in pieces still.

You see, when we place all of our wholeness in being good or controlled or behaved or perfect, we really aren't planting ourselves anywhere healthy. The second that something or someone comes along and triggers us, and all those emotions come back up, the shame cycle starts again.

But when we can open ourselves up to grace and then let it widen our souls, it won't matter when we feel and fail and fall down and shatter again because we know that those pieces still belong to a whole being, they belong to a person who is growing and changing and learning to love all the parts that have brought her to where she is today.

When we are wide, we are honoring our pain and making space for our prosperity.

We are wishing ourselves well, even on our worst day, even when we feel like we don't deserve it.

And isn't that the point of grace after all?

To call the unworthy worthy?

To bring peace to those sitting in darkness?

To open up the doors and invite us in, and to ask us to please, please stay.

Because there's a seat at that table.

And no one else can fill it.

No one but you.

Don't make us wait until you have it all together...if you're anything like me, it'll be awhile.

Besides, you'll fit right in with the rest of us who don't know where we are going.

But we do know there will be grace.

So let it lift your head and ground your feet.

Your space will be waiting for you.

Don't waste any more time trying to earn it,

it's already yours.