I’ve been thinking a lot about foundations lately. Good old Merriam-Webster (what dictionary are we supposed to be using these days anyway?) basically sums it up in another word – support. What happens when there is damage to those foundations? Do we keep filling in the cracks hoping it won’t leak? I feel like the filling will eventually get pushed out. You can’t contain the ocean. Stop trying.
Sometimes we have to start over. Sometimes we have to destroy the foundations of our lives, because they were wrong to begin with. We try so hard to be right, that we forget that living isn’t about being right. It’s about being right now, living in the tiny moments that string together this life.
Burning It All Down
I don’t mean to say that to encourage anyone to light a match and run, although I have done my fair share of that. It works sometimes, for a bit. Other times the only thing you can do is sit, and smolder in the ashes. What that literally has looked like for me is sitting in the fetal position on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably with snot pouring out of my nose. It looked like sitting in my therapist’s office with a pile of used tissues, and the conclusion that everything that I thought was ‘right’ was all wrong. What do I do now?
We hide the hard parts from each other. Funny our parents did the exact opposite. “I walked uphill both ways walking to school, and to home,” they said. But if you really think about it, they were simply leaving out the downhill parts. Those are the easy parts. Those are the parts nobody talked about. Now it feels like all we do is watch people stand on top of the hill, except now we are leaving out the struggle part. We put it in a pretty package for the internet. We are still leaving parts out.
I struggle to balance this within myself. (Hello, Libra sun!) I try to share the good and the bad, mostly because I don’t like the biases that go along with those words. I was good at one point. I was quiet, stayed out of the way, bottled up my emotions and tucked them away never to be felt again. I hid in my goodness. If I was good enough, then maybe they would love me.
The more I looked for love from the outside, the more I hated myself on the inside. All to fit into the predetermined mold of what I was supposed to be. I became a doll, a hollow version of myself.
Rebuilding
Eventually those cracks broke, and I couldn’t plug it up anymore. I tried to hold my hands up, but the tears kept pouring out. There was nothing I could do, but surrender. Let it all flood. Let it all wash away. Start from scratch.
Tarot taught me that we have the ability to rebuild on our healed foundations, but you can’t heal what you keep concealed. A Christian-based therapy practice taught me that you can’t do it all alone. Everyone has a foundational support group. Yoga and mediation have taught me to look within for the answers, instead of outside for them.
There is something inside of me that keeps telling my that I am finally moving in the ‘right’ direction. My right. It’s not the same. This one feels more like truth than right.
The dam broke. All the ugly fell out. No one ever tells you that you are going to like everything about yourself, especially the self-inflicted wounds. The ones you used to try to pretend that everything was fine when it wasn’t fine at all. Or the ones that were inflicted on you, the ones that are filled with other people’s expectations of you. That’s the smoldering. Let it all die out.
The beauty is in the rebuilding. I’m still in that part. I’m trying to figure out what that looks like. I don’t want to rush through this part, like I have done for most of my life. I was always so busy trying to make it to the next thing, the next goal, that I missed so much along the way. Not anymore. Not for me.
Mad love, Jenna
