It’s been awhile since I’ve written to you. I have been frolicking in Los Angeles for nearly a month and before that was locked in on creating my 12 week course that is being edited as I type this! (Don’t worry I’ll keep you posted on my launch date.) So many exciting new things are on the horizon, and yet I found myself returning to the past quite a bit on my trip.
As I drove the streets of my hometown of Santa Monica, I didn’t need GPS. I know the roads that others find confusing and overcrowded the same way I always know which way is west, the ocean tugging me into my sense of direction. This time though, after living in Austin, Texas for the past two years, something had changed, and it wasn’t the streets. It was me.
I found tears rolling down my cheeks as I passed intersections that held memories of walking to get lunch in middle school, or the restaurant where I had my first date with my husband, the home in which I brought my babies home (and birthed one in), even more tears sprung up as I passed the exit where I used to get off to go to college, the drive over Kanan to the PCH reminded me of summer babysitting jobs and the time I had to manage two stores at once and that drive was my only freedom… big and small memories flooded in no matter where I turned.
Heading to my uncle’s celebration of life, I took a wrong turn—or I should say the right one I needed—and I found myself on the street in which twenty years ago this month I began an extremely abusive relationship. My hands trembled and the tears poured out as I realized how much the location was bringing up for me. Things I thought that I had forgotten rumbled inside as I drove past.
I realized that all of these potent memories were rushing forward as they were ready to be released back into the nothingness that existed before they came. They are not me anymore, with no bearing or weight on my life. They are a part of my story, yes, and supported me in being where I am today, but I don’t need to hold on to them to be who I am.
I am safe and beautiful and whole exactly where I am as my current self.
Although that may seem like a simple statement, it hit me head on. I realized I have been trying to piece myself together from the different versions of myself. But just as I am not that nineteen year old girl who naively entered an abusive relationship, I am also not the same girl who went on that first date with my husband, or the same girl who started college, or the same woman who was a new mother or worked two jobs at once.
I am simply me.. And I am in this beautiful phase of my life where I am no longer guided by the past but instead guided by my soul’s calling.
A client-turned-friend sent me an Instagram post this week which shared that we have to go through our darkest spaces so that we can become the person who we would have needed to help us get through that darkness. And wow, did that allow me to unfurl everything that I had been holding.
As I boarded the plane back to Texas, I realized that I am the woman that my terrified nineteen year old self, whose bright light and spontaneity was replaced by constant fear and conformity could have relied on. That I would have told her how brilliant and beautiful and wonderful she was and that no one could tell her what was best for her because her own intuition always knows the way.
I breathed in a sigh of gratitude for all the versions of myself but especially for my current self. And while I was at it, I thanked my future self, who is already reminding me that she’s shining the light on my road ahead.
コメント