This month, I celebrated my 10th year anniversary in mental health recovery. I wrote a reflection post and thought I’d share a slightly tweaked version of it here as well…
10 years ago this month, I had had enough. I wanted to be fixed, I thought that I needed to be shut down and taken in for repairs. In an attempt to finally surrender, a bit of desperation (okay a lot), and with a big piece of humble pie I sat in my first therapy session crying my eyes out. Everything I thought I knew about myself felt like lie. The elaborate mask I wore and unintentionally decorated through my responses to the, “you should be’s” and other social conditioning I projected onto myself, had cracked, and with the newfound awareness that I even wore such a thing came a realization that everything that gave me the identity I had up until that point had fallen away and died.
I only felt the pain, the anger, the disappointment, and shame that remained and I wasn’t sure what or who would emerge from the darkness that bled out. Could an ice cold heart ever beat again? Could a lost soul ever be found? Could a broken girl ever find peace enough to become a whole woman? Would I ever think my own life was worthy of the fullness of my humanity? Would I ever stop wishing I never existed? Would I ever be enough in my imperfection, my intergenerational trauma, my “other-ness”?
Every week despite not getting a magic pill to make everything “wrong”, “right”, I went back to my therapist. Shoulders slumped, world caving in, struggling, dragging my feet, working on pieces but not being willing to work on others, digging up skeletons I forgot I had, looking myself in the mirror of truth and trying not to smash it so I didn’t have to deal with what I saw in my reflection.
Healing is hard work ya’ll.
Slowly but surely trusting that the process worked. Working the process even though it meant never reviving those things in myself that needed to be let go of, yet wanting to cling to because unhappiness, or rather pervasive sadness and discontent was comfortable and familiar.
Healing asks for you to go beyond the temporary fixtures (such as addiction) or bandaids (like empty relationships because you’re afraid to be alone or that nobody else will want you).
Healing is growing to the point that you can’t stay in the cocoon anymore. Staying there doesn’t feel right anymore, and you know it. Growth requires that you break out of the trappings of what holds you back from your being more fully who you really are, it asks for you know yourself, to care about yourself, to love yourself and to trust yourself enough to spread your wings and fly.
And I have found that I see the beauty of life so much clearer now from this different point of view. I fly, I rest, I learn, I fly some more.
I eventually flew into the arms of Infinite Love.
A redemptive love, a healing love, a transformative love, a love that waited for me until I was ready to accept it and therefore all of myself, a love that lifted me, a love that leads me, a love that calls me by my name. No, I have not “arrived”. I don’t think I ever will. That is the beauty of our human experience. I like to believe that my striving, my 2 steps forward and 1 step back, my determination is what makes me even more lovable in the eyes of my Beloved – the Higher Power of my understanding.
Today, I have found purpose in my life.
Today I have found freedom in my ongoing quest of accepting all of what makes Lynette, Lynette. Today, I learn to like myself more and more. Today, I have joy in my heart. And even when I struggle with anxiety and depressive moods, I want to live. I think deep down most of us do. I want to have life most abundantly and this time, I believe I am worthy of it. I constantly work on my belief I don’t have to earn a worth that is already inherent to me just for being me. I have found that the G-d of my understanding is a G-d of Love, Healing and Justice. I work to embody that.
I have the battle scars, accountability sisters, and G-d’s side eye to keep me in check. And it is my honor as someone who has looked my own proverbial Grendel in the eye, and lived to tell you about it that I use my own life, (even as my own hero’s journey still unfolds) as a witness and testimony of Divine Grace, Compassion, Mercy, Forgiveness, Redemption, and Transformation.
I will be human, I will be messy, I will goof up and have to find my center again, I will get tired, I will punk out, I will be slow to the uptake (laughably so), I will struggle with the growth, and yet still, I will press on. That’s what we do.
Until Next Time…Peace!
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