The Arrival

I’ve always wanted to arrive at me. I’m forever finding my way, my path, my why. I’ve realized in tandem with my purpose, and I’ve been on a decade-long pursuit of figuring out what’s wrong with me so that I can fix, heal, and live happily ever after. 

How and how long it took me to unpack the nuanced word “surrender” may still land in the TBD bucket. I’m guilty of perpetually searching for something outside of myself, and I usually say it’s my curiosity.

I was determined to find “it,” and I was thorough in my quest. I read all the books and listened to all the podcasts. I did all the therapy, trying to pinpoint the answer. I enrolled in a year-long intuitive healer training course and then signed up for the advanced year. Not to brag, but I’ve had five therapists over the last eight years, totaling well over 100 hours. I took solo camping retreats to dance and cry it out off the grid and in the wilderness. Taught myself to make fire, endure the elements, and learn what utter stillness and loneliness felt like.

I took a women’s New Year's retreat to Mexico solo and made friends with strangers in the desert, dancing around a fire ceremony on the beach.

But none of this was a curious adventure of excavating myself. It was a search steeped in the desperation of “fixing” me. The reality was that I was perpetuating my own rejection by not understanding why I couldn’t change. 

Sounds fun, right?

Well. My healing journey actually became an extension of my perfectionism. I was healing as long as I was doing it right. It became consuming because how do you do it right?

How do I consume all there is to learn while also living in the, well, “present,” while also living in reality and raising my child and paying the mortgage and, there’s something I’m forgetting… joy? Is that you?

I’m writing this because I know I’m not the only one who has relentlessly tried to adapt myself to fit in with a society that seems to more accurately reflect back what I lack that ever nudging me toward all that I already am. I have subscribed to this idea that I am broken and, therefore, require fixing rather than ever believing I am whole simply because I am the sum of all my parts. Because some of those parts have experienced the kind of traumas that make me more worthy of love, not less, and that maybe life has broken me, but in the broken-open kind of way that I would choose over and over if given the chance.

Because that would require some radical self-acceptance, which would require radically changing the relationships I have participated in that highlighted the areas that left me feeling less-than-worthy of a happy “normal” life. The ones that left me second-guessing myself and my lovability, how I was received or what I did wrong.

My overwhelm was rooted in unconscious behavior, patterns, beliefs, and programming that were running the show. I could search day after day for something to alleviate my pain, but I was only outrunning myself.

I’m not ashamed to be a work in progress. It requires diligence, devotion, and dedication to practice, not just a mindset of perfection and the hope of arriving at some destination. It was humbling to stop numbing the hurting parts of me and to integrate the grace of forgiveness, of grieving, of remembering, feeling, and releasing. 

But how do you know how to reclaim your peace when you’ve never experienced it to begin with?

My nervous system wasn’t wired for peace and I’m not unique in that way. Many of us have had to relearn what calm means and accept that perhaps we don’t have to hold our breath, and maybe the other shoe isn’t going to drop. Maybe we can learn to be okay with the quiet. 

I started waking up, trusting that I had everything I needed for the day, because that was true. I tried the other morning mantras and they seemed to bypass a lot of the hard feelings that sometimes gripped me with fear of facing the day. Feelings weren’t facts. Thoughts were often fears. So I made knowing I had everything I needed for today my morning prayer, my gratitude moment, and an incognito snooze button on my anxiety so that I could at least get out of bed in peace.