I don’t know about you, but I hate feeling *stuck*.
Stuck feels boring, and constricting, and suffocating.
I may not always be zooming forward in life at lightning speeds, but I know for darn sure that I resist feeling stuck as much as I can control. Because feeling stuck is uncomfortable.
But this is a lesson i had to learn a really hard way.
I can emphatically NOT recommend divorce as a way to achieve personal growth on a quantum level, but if you do have to go through it, I suggest you take the quantum route. What I mean by that is this: as hard as it might feel sometimes to be thankful for my divorce, I have become thankful for my divorce. Were it not for this complete upending of my life, beliefs, faith, trust and view of myself, I think I’d very likely have stayed in a place of “stuckness”. I wouldn’t have had to sit in the white hot pain of loneliness for 1.6 seconds, day in and day out (i’ll get back to that awesome quote by Pema Chodon in a little bit), I wouldn’t have had to face some hard, painful, ugly truths about who i was, and who i had become, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to do any deep digging around excavating those things out of my heart and becoming the woman I know I was destined to be.
Because, see, i was very very STUCK.
I had an almost 40 year long soundtrack of “this is who i am, this is how i was raised, this is what happened to me, and this is why i cannot possibly be a different/better version of myself because I am a martyr, a victim, and innocent bystander in the drive-by shooting of my life woe is me can someone just please bring me some m&m’s”. I know it was played out. And I also know that even though it was all TRUE, it didn’t have to be MY truth, my defining character, the framework around which I was building my identity.
This work didn’t just happen over night. It was months and years of intense, hard, emotional work. Of hearing or facing a truth, of being told that my response to that truth was an excuse, of wanting to cry my way out of the hard work. But as i sat in that pain, as I faced the “excuses” i had used for so long and unpacked each of them, analyzed them, and decided to let the old stories go, I felt lighter. I felt freer. And I realized that I was ready for new stories.
So that’s where I am.
Writing the new stories.
some of these stories will be in the book(s?) that I am writing. Some of them are going to be shared here. Some of them are still being written in my head and heart and i have no idea where they’ll end up.
But this is how i started.
By being willing to face my “excuses”.
By being willing to admit that I didn’t have all the answers, and that doing it the way i’d always done it wasn’t really getting me very far.
I set out to find my fire again, and that’s what I’m going to do.
That’s what i am doing.
I’m not staying stuck in the “divorced middle aged mom of 4, and forever unlovable” story.
I’m not staying stuck in my old “martyr addiction syndrome” of being the poor overworked self-sacrificing medical mama who never has time for herself.
I want to get these stories out, and they are coming, but it’s late and i have to be better about starting these blog posts early.
I hope you’ll join me, both in a spirit of support, and maybe even learning to let go of your old stories. Staying stuck in the pain of the old ones, it’s no way to LIVE. Sure the ripping out of old scarred parts of ourselves hurts. i cannot tell you the many nights i lay awake crying so hard my eyes were puffy the next morning and i felt positively dehydrated. Emotional pain so deep i felt it physically. The toll that years of stress has taken on my body feels nearly irreversible as I continue to battle stressed out adrenals and a hardly functional thyroid – but see? those are more old stories. i am writing a new story and it starts with a healthy me, a pretty well-rested me, a me who doesn’t cry herself to sleep anymore.
What’s your old story you’re ready to let go of?
And even better…
What’s the new story you are writing for yourself?
T.