We are but like mirrors for each other. Endlessly breathing in, endlessly expelling breath out. Where our attention consistently goes, we are inevitably influenced by. There is truth in routine that what we most focus our energy on externally, we may become. How so many become the very thing they hate or dislike in others or some specific other they choose to target and isolate in their own mind to frame the problem of their immediacy as “out there”. And though that may not be untrue in varying degrees, it is deeply misleading simultaneously. I can say that as someone who did so for a short duration in my life. I guess in my own way, I needed to experience and feel into fully what that felt like.

Though too, does that not then entail its opposite, that if our focus is on what we perceive to love or most value in another or others outside of us, that we may too become that? Perhaps even at the cost of vibrationally losing them, indefinitely or temporarily, to holistically see it within.

One of the hardest things in late-stage recovery for me from the last many years of being open enough outwardly for being terrorized into unfathomable tears shed, so much so that I hide most things more joyful about my life, minimizing them all around, so as to attract nothing more into my life, a road that never had to’ve been mine to’ve gone down, is not getting closure. None lied to me in that closure ultimately is something only to be found within. The truer meaning of saving our self from my lens. Needing saved at all being a direct reference for cueing us into what is transpiring across humanity’s collective wielding of deliberately gathered will powers wreaking havoc across the lives of countless individuals, those deemed needfully disposable such as myself.

This winter has been that confirmation and as the darkest days and pause of the year are upon us all, I find myself in rest and letting go in much more systemic ways to virtually everything as never before prior have I. For a good long while, I have listened down pathways that lured me in towards connection with that very same bait to no avail.

Knowing closure was wanted, knowing how hard it all is on individuals who experience it in some semblance of the less desirable ways as I did, but simultaneously, coming from those actively still a part of it. Undeniably so. How trauma educators themselves can become inflictors for deepening wounds in highly sensitive individuals through the systemic lack of humility that they too are a part of it. The hardest hurt within it yet, but imperative nonetheless to witness. The unlasting internal denial of which tore my gut apart into high alert mode more than anything else confronted yet.

Healing can’t really come from the very thing hurting you, however. Most of us know this in our own ways. I am very different from many in that everything is interconnected in how I view outwardly and I can’t not see the world that way. I never do well breaking things down to small little isolated parts, and so I had to stop pretending to myself that some part was okay and others were not or vice versa.

The sum of years culminating down into condensed months and weeks and days and words questing vulnerably for transparency and honesty in what I have to confess to myself is the only honest and authentic space I was tolerated to see, out in the open world in direct communication where any eyes can see, muted and deleted in deep irony being as though open communication is a sell for such community niches and things. A reality that did not hold up to even basic tests as I have now proven to myself.

And every path leads me back to me and me alone. I am the author of my tragedies, and I am the creator of my sweet release. The crazy making of a world I have never stepped any foot in, not once, hurt me only because I gifted my attention to countless individuals acting outwardly from within it bringing my attention to the awareness that it existed. But a part of it I am not, nor was I ever or I would have been brought in like the unfathomable amount of others that were openly and lovingly invited in in full transparency at their initiatory onset.

Truthfully, I am no one to listen to or follow if you want to better your life, and especially better your life and connections through the means that would lead any of this to make sense. As a result of my choices and experiences my life is more of a mess than a success by all measures for social standards. I own all of my disconnect because I recognize my sensitivities and how they are distinctly wired in me. One of my greatest comforts in self soothing and personal regulation is knowing I never truly abandoned nor betrayed inner listening. Charades and games were only those necessary for others to’ve portrayed what they needed to be portrayed. They are not mine to own outside of privately railing against my own demons for honesty to be made more visible. Thus, I have full empathy and grace internalized and growing in internalization from the perspective of what I alone perceive I endured.

What an ever growing few would ever want to confess is that one’s truth never has to match that of another’s and to expect such an alignment of reality is sometimes an absolute untruth only needing to be enforced by subconscious pulls to control what is outside of the agency of one’s integrity to control, including any collective whole. The irony of that reflection in the aftermath.

I guess I share under the premise that it may help another someday whose life is or has been wrecked in mirrorable ways as mine has been. One whose life has been stripped down to nothing and needs what feels to be a more honest mirror to find their own empowerment to make it through and out of screaming in authenticity to stop the crazy making that was not a part of their life prior. To have the confidence to know if you were wanted ever in anything, you’d have been brought in right from the beginning and embraced behind closed doors until your grace was organically and rapidly nurtured.

I know that’s a truth for some because I was shown individuals who were likely as toxic as me or more so differently for whom those doors were wide open for them immediately. And I was shown that to be so by those individuals smugly smiling at my suffering and gladly participating in laboring through those pathways in hope to further break me down. Though I say that knowing its effects were not on only me, thus laboring to break down countless more like me. Recognizing the scope of that effect too hurt me deeply. Likely why it hurt me so much at all as it would for any highly empathic individuals bearing witness to what I did.

While it is not my responsibility to concern myself with the wellbeing of anyone outside of me, I know this more than ever now, it hurts still knowing intimately how bad these things are hurting so many on vastly largely scales than I can fathom. Like a silent war occurring in our time that selected individuals are only further hurt if we try to talk or express or process openly much of anything about it.

Truth be told, it’s hard to not want to turn violent in the face of it, but it’s a violence that only destroys our own interiority as most violence is, much regardless of reasoning. Thus I have learned when I am not laboring to escape that controlled intentional crazy making, a futile energy expenditure I now know it to be, years of my life have passed by in the face of it, I return to speaking from a me grounded place because if there is much of any meaning in anything that flows through me, I have also been shown internally that it is in the ways that my vulnerability, or that of others who do so in their own ways, opens space for others to process and open up to theirs internally as well.

I now know that to be one of the reasons I am without much of any meaningful human connection despite the illusions of connections that never were that have swirled around me because what I openly grapple with is something individuals are not even safe in the larger influencing world in a rather literal sense to more authentically connect with me nor anyone expressing as freely as I do about such things. Thus, there were blessings for others that it happened to me even if they cannot understand much about the human behind what they perceived they were witnessing. And when they were done with the limiting scope of what I have offered by simply trying to exist in my tiniest little corner possible in the world, what they were illusorily shown from out of it, they move on to what is next for them most beautifully as I now am learning is the only pathway forward for any.

As this winter’s decay and germination flourishes under the surface within me personally, I find I am on the precipice of a terrain of my own making. Away from everything. A blank canvas per se, with a pallet and awareness of how to paint or grow my own garden unlike any other I’ve worked with before. I have let go of absolutely everything even if I will still glance around occasionally to make better sense of the vibrational whole I unavoidably feel across the tapestry of this realm with or without looking. The effects of it all are felt down into everyday mundane interactions and I find myself better equipped for grounding myself through it all by not just turning a total blind eye to what simply exists in time. And I can do all that without understanding anything more. And without being hurt anymore.

Having said that, our lives may be anything but similar, and yet still we can each find mirrors in experiences entirely unlike ours that offer us breakthroughs in teachings and lessons applicable in our own distinct lives. I find the ability to relate in just about anything I look at outwardly, and even that is a problem in the eyes of many that are more interested in someone like me to fit into any given box of their needs and for me to just stay in it. Their projection. But it also can be a problem for me as an empathic human to be more attuned to such a blatant opening. That boundaries as big walls matter immensely in times like these.

When we are brought back into ourselves through forcefully externally inflicted trauma delivered into our lives, it is also like there is a pull from our own soul bringing about the conditions for deep pause in pools for reflection. Not those outside of us, but the inner wells for stillness that only we have access to for our own self.

For me, yet again, when I am not laboring to escape deliverance crazy making, I have to be honest with myself about where it is my energy goes. In my heart of heart I know through every water molecule within my being I am here to outcreate systems as my adversary, not individuals. It’s where I was when I was first tempted otherwise, to the chagrin and vengeance directed and delivered from outside of me to annihilate me as though I mattered at all beyond to my own self, and its where I return to in full integrity as I release those temptations and concern wholly for much of any outside of me in specificity. Therefore I am a lot leaner and lived now.

What does it mean to outcreate any system that is vastly larger than us individually anyways? Something entirely beyond our agency for those of us reduced to nothing by deep invasions into our personal worlds on behalf of those with already all the power behind them. From my perspective, because I haven’t any influence or agency for it to be anything more, not even within me, it means to find meaning in some way to alchemize the experience of our relationship with it differently. In a way that works for us and it even if distance and severing relationality is what that results in. In seeing the whole of life as a part of the web of existence itself, there are ways that is untrue as all plights for removal of all earthly entanglements always are, but there remains merit in it still when abuse is so pivotally a part of its whole. Ceasing to fuel the supply from our self to it. Even if any carry on as though that is not what we are doing. They can only carry on the illusion with others, and energetically, that is all that must matter internally.

In being honest with anyone reading, not that but less than one handful that do, and I appreciate every one of you, I am quick to confess that I am drawn to looking towards conflicts, not turning my back away from them. It has been both blessing and curse as those few remaining surely have witnessed in knowing the why behind it or not. That is lastingly so for me after having listened so intimately and trustingly to higher integrity individuals working outwardly from within indigenous communities that in conflict is where our greatest opportunities for teachings reside.

While many would think it to be crazy I listen to any intimately entangled with those who were such a central part of what I painfully perceive to’ve experienced, and if you truly knew my story of it uncensored you’d cry too if you have heart at all, though sympathy even is the last thing I am looking for, I know that any can have been a central part of how abuse was delivered into my life and yet I am wiser knowing that I do not have to throw out lessons experienced or valued in process simply because the foundation I was externally made blind to was so toxic for me personally, knowing it less personal than it likely was ultimately. And to frame it so specifically is intentional honoring it to not be so for what should be rather obvious other individuals.

From an outside lens looking but merely superficially across the surface, it appears not toxic for most, so I too must own the need for me to remove myself from giving close attention let alone any delusion I am participating so that those for whom it does work for, can continue about their ways more healthfully. If you are in a similar position so as those words relate to you and make sense, perhaps removing yourself too is the best for the some greater good effect. There is nothing wrong with that. Not all of us are in positions to do literally anything more than that. If you know what that means, you know.

Now I know there is certainly a dark side within this: looking towards conflict. But, conversely, I am also consistently drawn to looking at spaces between things. To seeing the all in all like an unspoken language more sensed and felt, intuitively held and known. Dark and light, good and bad, right and wrong, that it is never so simple. That there is goodness in me even where some may see evil and vice versa, where some see only good in others, it is wholesome and sacred and not incorrect for me to experience those aspects as I do as anything but. There’s not a human alive that is perfect and run, run very fast away from those whom only perceive themselves as embodiments of light.

I don’t know what my future holds. I do know what is in front of me, and I feel blessed for all I have survived and am in process of overcoming. The strength and resiliency growing behind my smile that most will never get to intimately know me well enough now to be able to see the why behind it. It’s a beautiful beautiful thing, to know yourself in ways that you owe no one to share those parts of yourself more deeply. There is little else like it. Before all this happened, already was that a part of me, and now, hindsight, its growing and nourishing me in ways I cherish more even if I’d never of chosen freely to have expanded those parts about me.

There truly is a silver lining in everything. Even war and terror have their reflective pools for awe and wonder in humility if one is willing to remember that all is in all at all times. For some of us, we don’t get to have more voice or reconciliation than that that occurs within. If that is you, and you’ve stumbled across this, just know you are anything but alone. The world is never so simple.