Here We Grow

The lesson I learned from the women in my life was, “When you get a bunch of shit thrown at you, put your nose down and plow through it. Don’t complain and don’t ask for help.”  As a result, we women are pretty freakin’ strong and resilient. But we’re also kind of Self-sacrificing and that is something to recover from.

For many years, I took a huge part of the responsibility for making a shared life work—in a hobbling along kind of way. While there were some great parts, there were many times when I was holding it together by wrapping it in scraps of string that I had tied together end to end. I got used to a pretty high level of stress, or so it seemed. I learned at a very young age to function in a way that looked to the rest of the world like I had things together. To be honest, most of it really didn’t have to be this way. My creative problem solving skills and my ability to see the good in people and things meant I just kept throwing effort and energy into parts of my life that I could imagine to be potentially wonderful but that just weren’t making the mark. I did all of this while achieving pretty high standards in the rest of my life. I worked even harder on my career, gained a lot of respect and accolades and was an innovative producer.

Then the year of two deaths and a divorce happened. I rationalized that none of this was a complete surprise. People were old or sick and relationships had been long strained. It could be so much worse. So, with a huge hole in my chest, I took on all of the responsibility for the business of the divorce and started to clean up and redefine life. I grieved, but I also put my nose down and plowed through. I started to feel more comfortable in my new circumstances, and I was completely confident that I could take care of myself. I even started to explore the world of dating. I exhaled. I started to feel excited.

No sooner did I begin to trust that I had conquered the worst of all the loss than anxiety entered with a raging force. My whole life was hijacked by it, and it was havin’ nothing’ to do with my bulldozing through approach to dealing with hard things. As my mindfulness teacher would later explain, it was like my mind-body-spirit, sensing that I was finally a bit at ease, believed that I could handle the surfacing of the knots—those tangled up balls of residual trauma and emotion that needed to be seen, felt and released. Handle is a relative term.

While my nose to the grindstone approach was not going to bring me relief, I did have a few more tricks up my sleeve. Divergent thinking just so happens to be another one of my superpowers. And, so, a multi-pronged approach began: mindfulness and books and hypnosis and counseling and writing and yoga and exercise and classes and research and nature and poetry and travel and chickens and gardening and creativity. My motto became ”Growth is not an option.” And, so, though it involved doubt and fear and tears and risk and asking for and receiving help and village building and falling down and getting back up and trust extended and trust violated and trust extended again, I chose the pain of growth. I choose it still.

In coming posts, I will share with you what has worked for me to move toward wholeness. It will be in no way prescriptive. Rather, it will be an example of how I have begun to live, perhaps for the first time since I was very small, in a way that is authentically me.  Ready to grow?