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. 

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.