Wounds and Freedom

As I start this new day, getting ready to embrace a slow morning of journaling, reading, and hot lemon water sipping, I find myself following a heart tug to reflect on wounds and how we heal and grow from them.

We all have a past, and most of us living on this earth that is shifting into a new consciousness of collective energy are striving to stay present and live in the now.

But that doesn't come easy for those of us who have not yet healed from some very deep scars from our past.

Writing this blog is a very vulnerable step in my healing. And as much as I am here with hopes that my words will reach someone out there who might relate or need to hear them at this exact time on this exact day,

Deep down, I know that I am mostly here for my own healing.

Because when we put ourselves out there, expressing ourselves wholly and leaving our thoughts naked for all to see, we are telling the universe that we want to be heard.

Writing is like a soul prayer, a safe place that we must boldly visit when we are ready to step forward and truly live our life story.

I'm about to allow myself to be the most vulnerable I've ever been in writing. I am going to share with you some of my most painful wounds. And I am not sharing these with you looking for sympathy or to amplify the fire of any kind of pity party, but to reach you in a way that might encourage you to also find comfort in your own unhealed or unforgiven wounds. Because we all have them, and most of us decided when we were too young to know any better, to bury them alive and never let them see the light of day again.

Our wounds are part of the journey. Their purpose is to help bring us to a place that is wrapped in self-forgiveness, healing, and wisdom. If we are brave enough to face them and see them for what they are, they allow us to grow and wake up to a new way of living where we can find comfort and freedom.

It's not easy, but when we open that door, something magical happens: we see ourselves with new eyes of grace, and we learn to love ourselves in a new light and with more compassion. And let's face it, all of us are lacking self-kindness and nurturing.

Most mornings, like today, I start my day with journaling. Brain dumping one page at a time allows me to anchor down on my feelings and sort through my thoughts and emotions before I start my day. It's a way for me to get intentional and figure out where my mind and heart are at so that I can meet each new experience with purpose and stay authentic to my inner desires.

This morning, before I was just about to get to my writing, I decided to flip over to the very first page of my almost full journal and found myself reading words that I had written one month prior to my body, mind, and spirit coming to a complete emergency state. For those of you that may be new here, by emergency state, I am referring to being so sick, both physically and mentally, that I was hospitalized for 6 nights.

This was the first time in my life that I faced a life-threatening lesson, which I am learning now was necessary for me to finally listen and wake up. But this is not the vulnerable share; the vulnerable share comes from within the pages I read this morning that I had written 3 months ago before my collapse.

When I was a teenager, I went through a lot of experiences that have molded the way I perceive myself and the life around me. You see, who we are in the world today is a reflection of how we have grown to see ourselves or how we think others see us. Our beliefs, values, and the boundaries we set or don't set come from the conditioning that was formed within us due to what we have been exposed to in our past.

Some of us have scars from our childhood, others have deeper wounds from our teen years, and most of us have a fair mix of both. Mine mostly come from the age of 13 and up.

Kids can be mean, and in my past experience, teenagers can be evil. I know because I was one of them.

You know the movie Mean Girls? I can relate to that one because I was also one of them for a short period of time.

I want to say that I pretty much tried on all the different hats that could be worn as a teenager.

To this day, I am learning to forgive myself for some of the dumb and uncaring things I did in my teenage dirtbag years. Part of this process of forgiveness is reminding myself of some events that happened in junior high.

Because these unexpected experiences molded the angry and rebellious teenager that came in the following years.

Here comes the vulnerable part that I have been procrastinating about this entire time to let myself write...

In junior high, I was "almost raped." To anyone out there who was raped, I cannot even begin to imagine how much trauma and pain that has caused you in life, and I know that I am one of the lucky ones in the sense that it was an "almost" situation. But "almost" was enough to inflict some lasting damage on my self-esteem and confidence growing up. Tears are rolling down my cheeks as I share this because it's the first time I am truly allowing myself to express that this was a big deal for my 13-year-old self.

My very first intimate experience was not so intimate. It was a hard early lesson in needing to protect myself from others and also of shame. I don't feel the need to go into detail about this experience because I have allowed myself to do that many times already. Wounds are not meant to be relived over and over. After much torture, I know this now. The point is not to live in them again and again but to acknowledge them as our lessons and set them free.

I am now finding forgiveness for myself, understanding, and compassion towards why I perceive the experiences around me as safe or threatening. When I was 13, I blamed myself; I felt so much shame. I gave myself some very damaging labels at a time in my life when those early years were crucial for me to have the exact opposite foundation. But here I am today, 41 years old, and understanding my healing journey with much more clarity.

I am creating a safe space for myself to speak to the 13-year-old me and give her the nurturing she would have needed back then. When I catch myself seeking approval from others, not voicing my opinion in fear that I will be shamed or judged, I give that little teenager a hug, hold her in my arms, and remind her that she is enough.

That experience was followed by many hard-to-grasp lessons throughout high school.

From my first long-term relationship being one of the most toxic and abusive kinds, to drug addiction, to having to grieve the loss of many friends who had taken their lives before graduation, and to having to make one of the hardest decisions still to this day of my life to have an abortion and abandon the life that was growing inside of me when I myself was still just a baby... I had to teach myself how to numb the pain and forget because this felt crucial to my survival at that age. I had decided to never allow myself to take those painful memories seriously.

It was as if I was brainwashing myself to pretend that they were just nightmares that never actually happened.

Shame helped me do this. I dared not speak of my abortion because I was afraid that I had cursed myself to never have the chance to get pregnant again, and I played the tough girl card instead of nurturing my wounds.

But it always hurt, and I have always lived on carrying this guilt and pain with me.

We cannot carry our wounds in silence until we have faced them and given ourselves grace.

Even though I am proud to say that all of the experiences have strengthened me to become the fighter that I am today, in some ways they have also weakened me from all the years that I lived in denial, shame, and fear, not expressing myself authentically or voicing my needs and desires.

We can choose to no longer be chained or weighed down by the heaviness of our past.

We can free ourselves through forgiveness.

Our past shouldn't be the reason for allowing our lights to dim in the present, but instead a reason for our lights to shine even brighter.

We will continue to attract people and circumstances into our lives that will default us back to that lost child until we make the choice to open our arms to healing.

Staying in anger or resentment will only harm us more and make the wound continue to live within us longer.

It's healthy to allow ourselves to feel the pain fully, and all of the emotions and stages that come with it.

But we are not meant to stay there. We are meant to learn the lesson and move out of that dark place.

We can let go; we've held on long enough.

We can love ourselves first and acknowledge that those experiences were not fair but were necessary.

Without them, how would we truly know our strength and courage?

We can stop worrying and caring so much about what others think.

Be proud of the soul that we are today.

Stop and breathe in the life that we are creating.

Listen to our breath and listen to our hearts.

Embrace the journey, the good days, and the harder ones too.

They brought us here.

We are enough.

We've always been enough.