I remember the first time I tried to make contact with my father. It had gone well for my older sister and had been a pivotal part of her healing journey. Right from the get-go, something was off with me. For both of us. He wanted to rush me ceding all my power to him after all he had done. He was, by no fault of his own, still so closed off from his own healing, convinced he was invincible having overcome everything. He needed to pretend nothing soul shatteringly terrible had happened when I was young. That there wasn’t reasons my mother had moved us girls into hiding. Why it was we had not been safe to stay in his life and in close relation, and in his rageful haste, to dislocate all his pain he did not want to see, that I saw so clearly in the wake of our intermixing frequencies, and he too in me mirroring it to him without knowing it, all by mere email, by simply existing in gentle strength that I had ultimately self-forged in wilderness wanderings all on my own.
By way of his not seeing me and appreciating in me the very young woman I was just stepping towards becoming, the daughter I was, am, with or without his presence, he projected all his anger and shame about what he’d done onto me. He projected even his anger at my mother for what he had done and how she had tried to protect us from his wrath and ways onto me, accusing me of basically being her for having strength internally, albeit imperfectly. Calling me a bitch ultimately, for not simply ceding my love, which is to say my power, to him unquestioningly and denying me to move outward from a place of honoring that my own slow needs being met in process mattered as well. Instead of grounding myself in my own self and being allowed for any deeper meaning relationship to blossom in a mutually beneficial way. And so I walked away, humbled and aware of my internal fragility and needs not mattering.
I never openly shared this story before because I didn’t truly understand it yet. It’s importance in my life. And when it all started sinking in, there was a long pause wherein witnessing his delicate fragility, and in my compassion and inherent love, I never wanted to share my story more openly for fear of hurting someone who was not only hurting himself, but who had so hurt the greater family. All sides of it. Nobody wants to stir so much stirring about and so I kept it to myself.
From my place of resilience, at last known, tested and proven to my own soul essence now, me having voice was easier to stifle internally than to show up authentically, outwardly, and risk further hurting the deeply wounded father by mere chance that he may one day stumble across my testament, despite it being such a minuscule part of my life’s work.
I am the daughter now grown who now knows voicing my story, even most quietly, especially in that way, still matters. Fore standing in our grounding is what releases our self from cycles of self-harming. I am grateful for years of hardship for having led me to so clearly see it. For bringing me front and center in reunion with the inner child in me. That while there is much to be very private about and for very good reason in times such as we live, there are aspects that diminish our authenticity being seen if we deny them.
How did I get here, as though there is some here anyways? Everyone has a breaking point. The point at which they don’t want to participate in the world anymore. And I’d found mine all over again. It’d been a few decades after all. No longer having the spirit to be a participant. It’s not not having soul either. It’s a disheartening of epic proportions delivered by the good people out there at which one no longer wants to share anything from their soul outward with seemingly somehow. And there’s nothing wrong with it. The purity of finding and courting that silence. It’s necessary to lean into silence in moments, again and again.
Though nothing easy to confess, I have little relations left in my life after the challenges of the last few years and decade. Because of abuse, undeniably, because of illusions, and systemic upholding of delusions, because of others experiencing all of the same in unseen ways to me. Because of me and because of the whole of it.
Regardless, I found myself straddling false dichotomies in ways previously not navigated. Being relational beings, we’re not meant to lose near all our relations, and certainly not in what amounts to one overarching swoop, yet it wasn’t simply because of me. In all the ways I tried to tell myself it was, my gut biome and inner child kept me returning to remember all the ways it wasn’t. It was an overwhelm I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy.
In process of my own healing and combing through all I’d endured, all the added i.e. soul attracted renewed trauma, I found myself navigating suicidal ideations in depths not experienced before at the most terrible timing in my life for what were also some of my best blessed receiving years. And I wasn’t able to show up for what mattered to me most in ways I could have been more proud of.
Fortunately for me, it was not my first go around in this life with dancing towards suicide. The childhood I’d overarchingly overcome already, had well prepared me. I knew and know my demons well. I’d of surely taken my life if that hadn’t been so, something I have bared witness occurring for others in the past few years. But here I am. My ability to be resilient and bounce back has less to do with me being somehow more gifted and far more to do with already knowing my dark depths and knowing beyond all knowing in a soul sense that I cannot give into that.
The dichotomy of illusion that stirred within me, why suicidal ideations flowed more freely than letting go, was the internalization that one no longer wants to suffer, no longer wants to endure pain on the path of awakening, and I understand that to harrowing depths, or conversely, that one is not worthy, that things would be better off without us altogether, and so if we but remove ourselves for the betterment of others somehow, that that would become true. That things would get better for others if we didn’t exist.
Some say we get what we deserve. Often times, for those in the West, those invigorated and invoking that they have part in delivering another karma, or baring witness to it being delivered with applause, claim and assert power by them saying so or interjecting to intervene at all, that participate to ensure karma runs its just course. For me and surely others, that I and whomever else who also receive it into their hearts in their own process, our empathy leads us to cede ours and take on that we deserve all the hurt delivered to be absorbed, regardless of degree of truth. My inner child and self knew from my personal story it was somehow untrue in the extremity of ways I perceived it to come at me, but I understand it more clearly now. Beautifully so. Because of new lenses I’ve allowed myself to listen to and witness, further opening me to alchemize what instinctively resisted projection and resonated within to great personal cost, allegedly.
There is so much that can shift in internal tension with just one simple degree of opening. In the whole of my life experiences, there’s always been room for acknowledging a little bit of truth in near everything. A terrible suspension, blessing and curse, for empathic humans navigating projection laden landscapes. Points of tension, conflict, from the micro to the macro, but that doesn’t mean it’s always how any but the wisest smiling at all of us would anticipate the unfolding going, which is to say completely unattached to it, far removed from all need for projecting upon the outcome, trying to dam up and control it. It’s funny how the world can feel as though it is coming at you. That it needs you to see things a certain way, or you it, but those efforts are not really true, are they?
Everything is an illusion. Always was. I tried to go along with it, illusions of all sorts of kinds. I resisted it, I fought it, I loved it, I hated it. I hated being anything visible to illusion making at all. I fought so hard for boundaries, yet all those approaches failed, and I took it personal. I spent two years crying about boundaries, screaming about them, to no avail. Like resisting the world as it is in the here and now. Until the illusion ran its self out, what may be perceived as calamitously to many, but so perfectly and romantically for me. Kind of like flipping the script on karma and what it can also mean.
At the glorious moment I saw all the harm my empathy inverted enabled me to internalize was never mine to be anything in relation with or have responsibility in holding onto. I am but one tiny drop in a cosmic hydrologic cycle as my interiority has always known, even if semantically that is not perfectly framed to meet the terms of some out there authority. That how others participate or construct or reinforce lies and manipulations, legalese even, even when it feels, or is near made to feel personal intentionally by some who very much may not have our best interests in mind at all, dwelling from a deeply detached interior understanding within their own self, has virtually nothing to do with any of us, as much as it has to do with all of us in its wholeness. Those fruits are more so about those who need the projections to be true anyways, and there is no script any must follow. Each is expressing their state of being for their self, a reflection for their self and where they are coming from and moving outwardly from a place of.
Having said that, I’m grateful to’ve lost my mind for a while. Certainly wouldn’t have frolicking in and wandering wild places on my own as that’s mostly been the formative experiences of my life. Enduringly challenging yet joy filled except for when coming back to the world. Reentry depression, while not untrue to be experienced, is as false as when going out to nature, seeing that as not always where we too are.
But now, now I am free to simply be myself and laugh and smile alongside the ever-moving cosmic joke, which is not to say I will not cry again witnessing it. And so are any who choose to be. Thank you to those out there in the ether who have been beacons of light and dark for many through absolute chaos, rigid systems of control, and simultaneously moving energy from staying utterly stagnant, which too includes myself in ways I may never understand or fathom. But that, that does not really matter. I am one drop and being that drop is all I need to tend and be vibrationally.
To know we are always so free, a freedom I am beyond appreciative to experience within, but I can attest, I never would have agreed to all I endured if I had been shown up front what the costs for this version of me would have been. I lost my faith in myself, in humanity, in the goodness of others, in the goodness of the movement of the universe itself not being only evilly controlled by a dichotomized narrative of source itself. But in that loss, my faith in that which is in me, was always trying to come through me, my faith in that which is higher than me, my faith in raw essence has been more deeply restored than it ever could have existed within me again and again and so faith in everything is returned. Breath by breath.
While we can say evil exists, and its rearing and appearance may not be untrue, and cruelty and terrible things do happen every day to many often undeserving, there is a truth I have bled for dearly that all is in all things in all ways. If I could take back all my recent years of suffering, and the ways it wreaked havoc across my life, surely I would from a more selfish space, but I would not be awakened to who I am in the holism sense of earned quiet confidence if I didn’t have to stare evil within and evil outside of me down so ruthlessly and simultaneously. But the same could be said of lightness too. Thus I would not know myself nor the grandeur of experience in the clarified ways that I am moving towards internally. And surely I am not alone in that experience, as in all of life, we never are.
