The lovely little beach town that saved me
A few thoughts on revisiting our old stories + a blessing for the chapters we sometimes want to burn
I bet most of us don’t like going back in time to particularly challenging seasons of life. It’s like we’re holding the book of our life and we get past that chapter and we always skip over it so those pages never see the light of day again.
Yeah, I’ve got a couple of those chapters too.
Problem is — the pain of those chapters don’t stay in those pages. They creep into other chapters. Our body that navigated that hard season often still holds the pain and carries it into future chapters. Our body doesn’t wait for our permission. It’s got it’s own thing going on, regardless of how tightly we hold that previous chapter shut.
I learned this awhile back and ever since I’ve been more intentional to process the hard parts of my story when some space presents itself. I don’t want to carry that pain forward. Because honestly, it only gets more annoying. It hurts more people around me. It gets heavier and wraps itself around my inner world. It’s like my soul gets more prickly and tired.
A few days ago I dropped into a few past chapters of my own story. I’ve done some significant processing but wasn’t sure what might pop up. But I knew I had the capacity to ride any waves of complexity that might emerge.
I walked the beloved beach of a town we adored for a year and a half. My body filled with such overwhelming gratitude to be in that place knowing more of myself than I did then. I felt compassion for my younger self doing the absolute best she could. I felt the bittersweet “what if” and “if only” questions. I felt the grief of knowing my brother unexpectedly passed away just three weeks after leaving that job early.
I wrestled with the truth that I had to leave this place I loved to save me. And she was worth saving.
There are stories I used to tell myself about this chapter that aren’t really true anymore. I’m slowly exchanging them for something that sounds like love and compassion. Sometimes it takes a few years or decades before we’re ready to journey back into a hard chapter and mark up the margins with more of what we’ve learned. Those early days of pain and confusion don’t have to be the end of that chapter. We get to edit. And process. And learn more of what else was going on inside ourselves.
As hard as it is, I’m so grateful for the time to step back into those chapters, if only for a day. To walk those same paths as a different human. To gaze out at the same water that sustained me then and now. Love was there then. And it’s still there today.
Sometimes we heal by watching others finish the story we couldn’t.
When I exited this beloved beach town a few years back, I thought of a dear friend and colleague of mine who would be a great fit for the role. The timing wasn’t great. But two years later, the role was offered and he said yes. And part of my heart healed that day.
So imagine my absolute delight when this friend said I could use his microwave for my daughter’s lunch since we had to check out of our hotel after beach walking all morning. My family got to do a rare thing in our United Methodist tradition. We got to spend a little time in our old home after our friends moved into it.
We walked in the front door as if we hadn’t opened that door a million times. I asked my friend’s daughters for a tour and they excitedly agreed. I exclaimed over every detail as if I hadn’t said goodnight to my kids in those same rooms. We pointed out how well they decorated that one space we couldn’t figure out how to use. I remembered the hard conversations that felt like they’d never end. My son pointed to the spot where he put his desk for zoom kindergarten during the early months of the pandemic.
Toward the end, I checked in with my body. To my delight I noticed pure joy dancing to the surface.
Watching my friends create this space for them healed something in me.
This is their story and their home. It will unfold and fill their own chapters. But these walls also hold the chapters of every family that went before them. Which means some of my story lives in those walls too. And it was a complex and challenging chapter. Pages I sometimes want to skip over.
But that chapter shaped me in ways other ones never could.
In a sense, something had to be hard enough to shake the core of my life so that I could find me.
I wish that lovely little beach town hadn’t been a part of that shaking. But it was.
The invitation to us all remains:
We get to make peace with the ways our stories unfold.
We get to feel the complexity of it all.
We get to live as intentionally as we can in our current chapter.
We get to practice radical acceptance for all the pages.
A blessing for those previous chapters
Love —
If we’re honest, we want to rip out some of our old chapters. Maybe we can burn them? No one needs to know they’re back there. But you know those pages well, don’t you? The ones I want to deny because it hurts too much.
Could you do us a big favor? Remind us it’s okay to feel big emotions. The ones that scare us the most. You’re already inside the pages we don’t want to see. Remind us our bodies carry those old chapters until we’re ready to look a little closer.
Love, may you do what you LOVE to do. Turn our worst chapters into something that feels like healing, compassion, and possibility. We’d rather you do all this work without us having to feel it all, but apparently that’s how this healing thing works.
Love, we open our hands and hearts to you. Move. Open. Metabolize. Transform. Renew. Love.
I remember those days and nights well. We talk about the importance of living in the present, not getting stuck in the past and not focusing too much on the future. But there is so much truth in your words. We may shake the dust off our feet as we leave a place, but it leaves a mark on our spirits. You did well to engage those memories so you could be a stronger person in the present. There is a difference between wallowing in those memories and learning from them. Over time, you walk that line well. There are many blessings in this revisiting, but a very healthy one is that you could release the place to the important work of your friends.