The Exhale.

And then I realized, most of my life I've had a great fear of loss.  I have spent too much time rebelling against the forces of nature, and have dug my claws too deeply into what was never meant to be mine.

This year has been a lesson on recycling pain into a new lens.

It has been nearly a year that I arrived in Australia feeling vulnerable and heartbroken, not to mention that life took no mercy and threw some cliffs and trenches along the way.  I say 'heart broken' in the exaggerated sense that I was deeply in love with a man, and I fought to the point of losing myself to make our relationship work, even though deep down my soul was telling me that it wasn't right.  (The fallacies of a stubborn taurus woman with too much passion.) With him, I did not feel whole. Every voice within told me to let go, but I couldn't bear the thought of losing someone I loved, or the pain that came with the idea of him no longer loving me back. I could not forfeit the transparency and trust I relinquished to him. So I hung on to false green pastures. And with unashamed admittance, I was a grown woman still afraid of abandonment.  It has taken time, confrontational aloneness, and a very broken heart for me to break it open and find my way back to myself.

I've spent some time working for a beautiful family, looking after their 2 and 5 yr. old boys.  Living within a 'normal' family dynamic made me aware of things I had yet to face. This realization came to me whenever the boys wrapped their arms around their daddy when he walked through the door, and my heart felt immense pain and beauty all at once.  I would never have a father that is capable of this role, and hadn't realized the significance of the denial I thought I had concurred long ago. 

 It was an intense awakening that there were still parts of my being that felt incomplete. An incompleteness that has lead to immaturity, unfulfillment, and fulfillment seeking patterns in all my relationships. In the past I became an expert at supressing sadness, only to have it manifest itself into deep depression and resurface (usually under the influence of alcohol) in which I was quick to bury it again.  I've competed with this void by wearing a facade of armour, and diminishing any feeling that involved defeat, even if that meant being dishonest with myself at times. As a child, I had my mechanisms of combating the things I could not control.  I felt an unhealthy need to be the best at everything, a perfectionist, in an attempt to seek love from where it was lacking and to feel somewhat in control.

I'm sharing a small piece of my reality not for pity, but as a message to whoever is reading. The pain we experience in life, in whatever form it comes, from death of a loved one to heart break, this pain is not working against you, and is not the evil nemesis we make it out to be. See pain as a companion, sitting next to you and asking for acknowledgment, reminding you of your aliveness, and all the creativity and beauty it can bring forth to assist you in becoming your rawest, most humane form of you. One of the most tragic things about humanity is that many people never know how to manage their grief.  They carry it around them, too afraid to puncture its bubble, allowing their suffering to stifle their truth. They feel they are a victim of life, and this perpetuates into a vicious cycle where hostility and greater problems breed and hone, often taking innocent people.  Do not allow yourself to deteriorate from existence this way.  There must come a time when we release ourselves from our own prison. No one else is going to write your story for you, and I promise you...you have all you need within to give life to yourself.  

Nicolle