I got really bad grades in art. I was rushed through my process and my body didn’t want to express what I was being told it was ‘supposed to’.
I got in a lot of trouble when I was pissed, when I screamed. I was isolated, punished in my hardest moments.
I was hushed, disciplined, removed, and made to feel like I was the only one aware that my culture and the world around me is harmful to my fellow humans. I was told I’m dramatic and it’s not that bad.
I was ridiculed and met with frustration when I didn’t understand something immediately, when it didn’t come easy to me. I quit almost everything I started because of this.
I couldn’t connect with music the way other people did because I was trying to connect to it the way other people did.
I was told my singing voice was flat and awful, too loud.
The culture around me didn’t teach my parents, my teachers, my leaders how to hold someone in their feelings without needing to fix, alleviate, or change what the process was. So I learned how to take on, fear, and take personally the experiences of the people I loved as my own burden, or to shut down entirely.
I was really praised for good grades. For regurgitating someone else’s truth on a test. I can count on less than 1 hand the times I challenged the teachings and was engaged in a meaningful exchange to grow my understanding, encouraging me to think for myself in my entire formal education.
I was “rewarded” (accepted, praised) when I didn’t “fuck up” to learn my way through life in meaningful ways. When I accepted someone else’s terms of success and performed and accomplished them. When I rejected my own self, my heart, my freedom, my sexuality, my creativity, my feelings so everyone around me could feel comfortable, safe in the smallness of what we’ve all been told to be.
I was called a good nurse when I could anticipate nature and life trying to take its course, and I could intervene, stop the process, play “God” and control what is not in our control.
In just the last month, I have looked the stories I have carried from life deeply in their faces. My masculine has ‘thrived’ being the ‘knower’. I arrive in relationships and conversations posing as if I have the answer to almost anything. If I don’t, I quickly read the context and fill in my own blanks or quietly observe, refusing to ask questions as the curious learner.
I rationalized all my feelings and experiences before I let anybody see them flowing from me realtime, unpolished, not yet understood.
I read people and attempted to discern what they liked, appreciated and rejected and only showed parts of myself that felt like they’d be accepted-mostly as an intellectual, masculine being holding the space, taking care of all the things, unable to receive and to be received in my mess as it was unfolding.
I sit with my current reality, so fucking grateful for the giant leaps I have made healing thorough so many smaller parts of this, loving myself.
As I deepen the mirror in safety in my families, I am confronted with the deepest, most intense and loud fear I have ever experienced. I do not want to busy myself through. I don’t want to look away. I look into my own eyes, and I let the emotion take over my body, tears spilling, loud outbursts, and I listen deeper.
I have healed so much of the roots of where these stories came from, real or not. And there is still a deep fear of something in my most intimate space. A space that I am holding for myself in this moment. In deep, romantic partnership. As I listen, I feel a soft edge in fear of rejection in my expression of my love with my Beloved. I witness the places I have sabotaged myself to ensure rejection by first rejecting myself. But that is not it… that is not the thing keeping me paralyzed in the expression of me as Love. The fear is in being CHOSEN. The fear is in the unknown of what it will be like in a foreign experience in my body. To ALLOW myself to be accepted, chosen, loved and desired when I don’t know the answer with my mind. When I’m in the quiet place, maybe in a place of doubt, fear, confusion, mess. In the silent space of nothing, waiting for the Divine timing of the message of my heart, surrendered. In the space of just being. I am terrified of what it is like to be loved with pure devotion here by my Beloved.
And so I sit every day. I watch the stories arise of what I have rejected in myself. And I begin to choose them with my own healing masculine energy. I watch as my unhealed masculine ego judges the fact that my mind has discovered, processed this and yet my body still wants to cry so much. Still wants someone to hear me say it so much, needing to be seen and heard. And I let my own Divine Feminine, Divine Masculine hug me. Hold me, tell me to take all the time I need. Cry all the tears I need, scream out the Rage for what my body has been holding back, blocking myself from for my entire life, and maybe long before. I find sensual desire for these expressions. Finding them delicious. Finding the medicine of my dance, swaying the stories up out of my hips, my womb. I find wholeness in my own Sacred Union within. Fully chosen, seen, held. I ease the edge of fear for the day I am looking into the eyes of my Beloved, and he chooses me. He says, “You’re the One.” So that I can say from the deepest place of truth, “Yes, I am.”
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