How does one know what is *their* life?
Choosing to believe ourselves
How does one know what is their life?
I wake up most days and my life is unrecognizable by any previous standard of measurement. Guardrails vanished. Familiar rhythms dissolved. The external cues I depended on to know I was right side up are gone.
It’s somehow quite unsettling and liberating.
It leads me to offer the question we name here today: How does one know what is their life?
I’ve learned this past year that it’s surprisingly easy to live a life that used to be ours but then we change and we’re still living a life that doesn’t fit us anymore. But we have no idea how to talk about this, let alone make a change, and even if we did, how does one know what is theirs? How do we know the life we’re living isn’t just a combination of all our random decisions triggered subconsciously by unprocessed pain and patterns? (Why yes, I’m still enjoying therapy. Thanks for asking. Worth every penny).
This year I’ve had the space, privilege, and terrible invitation to look at my life from every angle. While I’d easily call 2022 the worst year of my life, it’s also offered the most healing. Life is weird like that. I’ll share more in the future but for now, I know what it’s like to ask questions of your life and not know the answers anymore. I’m discovering that if we sit with something long enough and ask honest questions that come from our soul and not our fear, life will gently and gloriously unravel us into our next chapter. And sometimes that chapter looks nothing like the previous ones. And that, my friends, is super awkward.
How do we know what is our life? Maybe a more helpful question is this: How do I accept what is my life while also remaining curious about the healing and love ahead of me? I imagine we live in that tension our entire life.
Our life is somehow both what is right in front of us and what is yet to come.
It can be scary to look directly at our own lives. We do weird human complex things to avoid this work. I shared with a friend recently that my anxiety started presenting around 2004 when I was wrapping up college. It took me another thirteen years of half believing therapists and rolling my eyes at mental health issues (while suffering from them) before I couldn’t take it anymore and finally got serious about unraveling what I was so afraid of in 2017. Thirteen years of knowing there was a problem and being deeply scared to do anything about it. Thirteen years of suffering and not connecting in my closest relationships. Thirteen years of avoiding the actual problem, convinced my day to day reality wasn’t that bad.
People don’t change until they’re ready. Or, as my uncle says, until the heat gets hot enough. I wish it was easier to look at our lives and see a pain point and easily move through the steps to heal. It seems if we want to know what is our life and where we’re being invited to stretch and grow, we must first develop the trust and self-belief to look honestly at our lives, even when we’re afraid or unsure.
We simply cannot wait until we have rooted out all fear and uncertainty. We cannot wait until someone delivers us a well-formulated ten step plan for this next chapter. We cannot twiddle our thumbs and hope we stumble into a life that feels like love.
If we want to know if the life we’re living is the one we most want, then it will take us showing up scared. Acknowledging the fear and looking at ourselves anyways.
Only then can we begin the holy painful work of tenderly holding our stories and all that waits inside us to be seen. Only then can we start to uncover the longings we abandoned years ago. Only then can our true voice find its rhythm. Only then can we get to the end of the unraveling thread and realize the destination was already ours.
Love.
It’s hard to believe that love until we unravel some threads.
Our eight-year-old son is in a reflective mood at bedtime. I sit with him in his bed. He says several beautiful things but my heart breaks when he says, “Mom, you think I’m amazing but I don’t think I’m amazing.” I resist the urge to gaslight him by jumping in and reassuring him, “No, no, you are amazing.” Instead, I nod and reflect back, “You don’t think you’re amazing sometimes. That must be hard.” He nods. I hope he feels heard and seen.
Then I respond, “You’re not alone in that. A lot of us adults feel that too. People tell us we’re great but part of us doesn’t believe it. Just know that my job as your mom is to find all sorts of fun and silly and creative ways to help you believe you are amazing.” He shyly grins.
My dear reader — do you believe and trust yourself? When you look at your life, do you trust your eyes and what you observe? Do you believe the pain points for you? Not because someone is nagging you to deal with something. Like — does it actually hurt for you? If so, that’s your life. That’s the thing that’s asking to be looked at. Explored. Honored. Believed.
There’s a good chance that pain is what keeps you from trusting yourself. That pain is telling you a story that might not be true.
Maybe believing ourselves is where we truly begin.
I wish that I had believed myself in 2004 when I realized anxiety was taking over my body in harmful ways. Instead, I gaslit myself and said it would be fine. Then I proceeded to do everything in my power to hide it from everyone. Harm upon harm.
When we’re invited to believe ourselves, it’s another way of saying we’re invited to trust love.
We can trust that Love is here. In the situations that confuse us the most.
Love’s always got plans for our thriving and belovedness.
We can trust Love’s movement and invitation within us.
We can hold our uncertainty when we trust that Love is holding us.
We can wrap our entire life in grace, knowing there’s no race to healing.
Love helps us accept exactly where we’re at today, while laying the groundwork to trust what’s unraveling.
My friend — as you journey this season, may love and grace be yours. May curiosity and and trust be close. May you show up to and for your life, believing you are worth it.
Everyone wins when you are fully alive.
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