Weathering the storm

Learning to dance in the rain. Or learning to let yourself experience the pain so you can heal. How many wounds do we have that are buried so deeply inside? That we have forced ourselves NOT to remember? That we have simply laid aside because they were to painful to deal with? As I live this life and walk this path, I learn new things every day. I think the biggest lessons are the ones I am still learning about who I am. The lessons about what made me who I am. Today while speaking with my closest friend of 30 years I had a revelation that I never expected.

I truly knew that there were many things that I have experienced and have had to face in order to grow and heal. I also realized that there were many issues that I set aside either because they were too painful to deal with, or they seemed inconsequential at the time. I am learning that EVERYTHING is consequential.

Things that I have shrugged off as, "Well that is just the way it was" or "It is over and I know what NOT to imitate" ... these things that I 'thought' I had let go of an moved on.. these are the things that are so deeply buried that the venom of the infection is still burning and eating away at me. This is still affecting my core being and my habits, my attitudes, and my behaviors. This is something that I have examined from other angles at various other times but for some reason, today it all jumped out at me.

I am not discounting the lessons I have already learned. Nor am I making these lessons the only lessons that have value. EVERY LESSON LEARNED HAS VALUE! However, upon self examination I further realized that I have come this far and done all of this completely on my own.

I have not had extensive hours of expensive therapy. I have had no one diagnose my 'traumas' or tell me what I needed to work on to become a better person. I have had no one person to turn to or to lean on to give me that comfort and encouragement I needed or sought to go through the steps necessary to address the wounds of my life or the pains of my past. I am not saying there were no people that cared or that there were no people that wanted to help. What I am saying is that I felt isolated. I felt judged. I felt unworthy and unloved and for those reasons, I withdrew. I closed myself off.

I have worked very hard to learn how to correct my mistakes. I have worked very hard to learn that loving and accepting myself was one of the first steps to finding love and acceptance from others. I have worked to forgive a lot of the wrongs done to me and to forgive myself for wrongs I have done. I am still working and learning how to let others in. I learned today that I still have open wounds. Although they have been buried so deeply that I can not even see them myself, they are there. They can not heal until they can be exposed to the air and be cleansed.

I am not the person I was 30 yrs ago. I am not the same person I was 5 years ago. I am not done learning. I am not done healing. All of that being said, I am NOT a bad person. Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes my judgement is still skewed in certain situations. No matter how loudly or how often I say I dont care what people think of me, I learned today that is not true. I do care. I care very much.

Caring what people think of me, and changing who I am to impress others are NOT the same thing. I am still who I am. I still do what I think is right. I will not change who I am or what I believe to please others but it still hurts to realize that they do not like me for me. It still hurts to accept that no matter how much I try to heal me, I will never be good enough for some others. This is a deep rooted wound. One that is extensive enough that after all the years of self examination and retrospect, I had hidden it deeply enough that it hadnt even surfaced until this one afternoon while chatting with a friend.

I guess the point to all of this rambling about learning and healing and growing is very simply, we all have a tendency to fool ourselves into over looking the things that are the toughest to address. I have grown in so many ways. I have accepted and truly learned so many lessons. I have realized today that it is time to examine this wound thoroughly so that it may be cleansed and may begin to truly heal. No more slapping band aids on it. It is time to let it be exposed to the air with the occasional bump or painful rubbing against life so that it may truly heal and stop coming back again and again as a festering infection that causes more pain and fever. It is time to really clean it and let it go.