Wow my friends. I just had an experience that gutted me. Rammed a wrecking ball into my stomach and wretched my insides out afterwards with a machete. It hurt to say the least.
I’ve sat here for the past hour trying to move on with my work and forget what’s happened. It’s my habit to push things out of my mind, to stuff my feelings, to just pretend that it didn’t happen.
That usually results in an eventual dam break and downward spiral, as it gets more and more difficult to keep the thoughts of inadequacy, desperation, and frustration at bay. It’s like pushing back on a door holding an avalanche of water on the other side. It’s eventually going to start to seep out.
I realized today though how much I’ve grown because in this whirl of emotion, I also realized that I had a wonderful opportunity. Instead of doing what I’ve always done - try to handle it in my head with rationality, indignation, and forgetting - I could try something different and really look this pain square in the eyes.
I have my coping mechanisms for anxiety and for the random onslaught of negative feelings. When I’m gutted by something off guard though, I’ll admit, it’s harder to remember how to work those. So today, I’m going to walk myself and you through what to do the next time you are gutted. Unfortunately in life, it’s something we all are going to experience.
Fortunately though, that camaraderie is the first thing we can begin to take solace in.
Happily, luckily, awesomely you are not the only one that jarring things happen to. For someone depressed, suicidal, and overly anxious, this fact is life saving. For anyone, this fact is at the least comforting. Nothing is happening to you that hasn’t happened to others. That means there’s hope that you can get through it too. AND that means that no-one or no-thing has it out for you, that there’s no curse that lays upon you and that there’s no inevitability about what’s not possible for you but possible for others. We all have the same chances.
The other thing that is helping me today is remembering that although this feels painful and it feels sad and it makes me want to defend myself and get these others to understand where I’m coming from and see my perspective and validate me and and and...There it is - validate me. What’s helping me today is realizing that I’m allowing this thing to mean something that ultimately boils down to invalidating me. I’m allowing this occurrence to make me question my value and place the decision maker outside of myself. And although that’s so easy to do, it’s never the right thing to do.
You really have to get to a point in your life where your sense of value is maybe shakable but never breakable.
I was dangerously close to letting this thing today mean that I’m not worthy. It was quickly trying to become another notch on the board of ‘not worthy’ evidence. And I know by now that that is just bs. It’s just plain fallacy.
And now from *this place* I can do my forgiveness work. I can do Hooponopono with the people involved. I can write a letter that I never have to send, expressing my feelings and my forgiveness. I can light a candle and do mirror magick to help everyone see more clearly. I can do whatever it takes to acknowledge the pain and to let it move through me, hurting no one else unnecessarily.
And I can do all of these things from the standpoint of my own worth, instead of all the myriad of reactions that can spring from feeling unworthy.
That is the key for me today - remembering that there is nothing in this world that can deem me unworthy. Things may go wonky and I may be unliked and even unloved. But I am not ever unworthy. Neither are you.