I Can Do It With A Broken Heart

Hi everyone! It's been a really long time since I've written, and the day before my 27th birthday felt like the perfect time to share with you again. 

My 26th year is coming to a close, and It is without a doubt the best year of my life that I can remember.

It's funny… 

Broken hearts can go a long way.

I reflect on times I would wake up from what I thought was a nightmare but it was just life. I would sob through putting on my EMT uniform in the morning, work 13 hours, come home, study, fight with my mind. Struggle to know what's real and what's not. Back to nightmares, back to waking up to a nightmare. Marathon training, working a full time and part time job, being enrolled in one school full time and another school part time, all at the same time. 

Trying to figure out what concoction of meds would get the voices in my head to shut up all the while showing up when I needed to prove to myself I was still a human, and that it was all for something, that I was for something. That I am not the one person in the world that God designed incorrectly. 

I think about the days where the need to occupy my life, my body, my hands, my mind, and my brain at all times, was a survival tactic.The ticket to excelling even seemed to be a broken heart. 

I ran, marathon after marathon. It was what I could do. I never stopped training. I couldn't stop training. When I did stop, I felt sicker in my head. It felt impossible that anything would ever be different.

Running has felt like an impossible task since I've lived in California… I'm also not running from anything anymore. So what was it all for? I think it was trying to save me. 

It was the resource I had during that time in my life, that my body told me to use in order to keep going. The metaphor it created for me, for my mind and body, that I have the stamina and I have the endurance to push through the impossible, in whatever conditions New England threw at me. And I could. And I knew I could. It's one of the ways I learned to trust myself. 

I don't know that I need it the way I used to anymore. I'm actually sure that I don't. 

It's taken self reflection to consider what has changed. 

Some autonomy fell on my lap when it was time to apply for jobs after I became a registered dietitian… so began a new exploration of responsibility. 

I ended up taking a job across the country. It was a choice I could make for myself. Responsibility I could take to change my environment. 

Sometimes space from the environment that caused you so much pain is a healing factor. 

And it was. It IS for me. 

The voices are quieter these days. If they're there at all, I ignore them very well. 
Life is more peaceful.

I have space in my head. 

My body is less tense. 

I never believed I could wake up every day with eagerness, when it used to be fear. It used to be voices. It used to be darkness, tears, and hopelessness, not so long ago. 

My heart's still broken. I have reminders of that here. 

But everything I’ve lost is in Boston. 

From the first time I experienced trauma, to the last. 

I’m not gonna find the things I kept desperately looking for there. 

What I've lost, I've come to accept, is truly lost. It's not the end of my life or my world anymore. And I'm done chasing life as I knew it to be. 
Everything that happened before your life changed as you knew it is still there. But you are never the same.

When innocence, trust, freedom to speak, lifelong relationships, communities, intimacy, trusted adults/authorities/medical providers, choice/autonomy over bodies when "no" was supposed to mean "no," the faith in others that you will be heard/trusted/protected when you share your haunting side of a story and are looking for sanctuary, are LOST? 

Life as you knew it, believed in it, trusted in it, hoped in it… is never the same. 

It's a grief to be grieved. 

Connecting with my clients where I work connects me to who I am. It reminds me that I'm real. 

It reminds me that life as everyone knows it gets taken from them. I was not uniquely damaged past the grace of God, past being worthy of existence in the presence of others.

I continue to be wary that I will lose what I've built here…however, I'm different.  

My greatest gratitude has been the space to learn this life changing truth: Taking responsibility is one of the most freeing acts. 

It seems counterintuitive to what our bodies want us to do (at least, it is for me). 

We want to run away from having anything to do with big mistakes -- specifically things that hurt people, situations that have hurt our own lives that were either mostly not or not at all our faults. 

For situations we have fault in: By denying responsibility, we validate our shame. 

"If I did this, that means I'm a terrible person, a life ruiner, I have no integrity, and no one would be able to look at me. I am heinous, because of what I've done, which defines and validates what I believe about who I am. I am what I've always feared becoming, and everyone can see it. I am fake and will not be loved or accepted."

Accepting responsibility for understanding where you've come from that could've led to whatever decision you have made in a moment, is integral to both growth and freedom. 

Responsibility is not condemnation, it is FREEDOM. 

For situations we had no part in: By denying responsibility, we make it impossible to move on.

"If I move on, people won't believe this ruined my life. They will think what they did was okay and they don't have to think about it anymore, while it is a trauma I will never un-live." 

This is a fine line: the point is NEVER to take responsibility by believing it is your fault for crimes committed against you and your soul. 

In the situations where all you did was exist and you were wronged. Traumatized even. It's taking responsibility for still having a LIFE and continuing to be an active role in making it what you want it to be. The responsibility is having the autonomy to do whatever it takes to create the life you want. Trauma can live with us, AND, life is not on pause until we've "healed" from it. Life keeps moving forward, with or without us moving forward with it. 

"If our pain and our sorrow is not witnessed, we don't feel real." -Laura McKowen

I love this quote -- because how horrifying a fear that is! I still have that fear. 

And yet, I'm the only one continuing to suffer with it day after day, waiting for the reckoning that may never come. 

My pain and sorrow can be witnessed without my life being held back until the trauma is reconciled.

There are some mixed-bag scenarios, in which I used to have it all wrong. I lived in the responsibility of things that were never mine to hold. I decided that I was worse than Hitler, and when I brought that to a church authority, all he did was say sorry and continue to rebuke me, but he didn't deny it. I continued to believe it, it seems as though he equated my actions with Hitler's as well. 

So I LIVED in that. So I couldn't live. 

That same church authority years later told me that the thing I felt that way about was something he didn't believe I had any fault in.
I took responsibility in the wrong way. It tortured me. I lost life to what I allowed myself to believe about who I am as a person. 

Did I have any responsibility in what happened? Sure, but not in that way. In a way that I have been able to have compassion for myself, understand where I was coming from, and know that I have the resources and safety now to consider how I could handle myself differently.

My heart is still broken these days. I don't cry very often, but I sobbed the other night. I was afraid my life would be a self fulfilling prophecy and the same things were going to happen all over again. I'm definitely afraid of losing the life I have here in California, so much so that I'm always trying to feel unattached from it. 

The problem is, I value my integrity, and I know I only do things wholeheartedly. So as unattached as I want to be, I am attached, but when I try to detach myself, it's not secure, because I'm always TRYING to be detached, over thinking possible ways I could lose everything so that I can stop caring about what I have here. Which turns into me just being insecurely attached, which is exactly what I'm trying to get away from.

So, I have to dig the security and secure attachment out of myself. I have to be securely attached to myself, even if I can't quite have that in my relationships. I know who I am, and I have ALWAYS shown up for myself. I have gotten out of EVERY bad situation I've been in. I'm still here, doing exactly what I want to be doing, despite everything.

I still do life. I still choose to trust myself. I trust myself to stand by my integrity, and to take responsibility with how I tell myself stories, what I tell myself about what those stories mean about who I am, and how I carry my life forward. It's safe and it's freeing.

I'm not fully there -- yet. I still have visceral and out of proportion reactions. Here's the thing, I can see that in myself, and I don't have shame for it. 

It turns out that it's okay to be dramatic, it's okay to seek attention, it's okay to be selfish, it's okay to be needy -- we all are ALL of these things. ALL OF US. We make those terms so evil and immoral, looking down on those characteristics. But be SERIOUS now. 

We all have emotions, we all need to know we're seen and loved, we all need to think about ourselves, and we all have needs. 

So I recognize that when it happens, and I don't always choose to change in the moment. 

I'm also always choosing to grow, as slow as that may be. There's no shame in that. No evolution ever happened over night. 

I can do it with a broken heart. I still am. Yet, there's more freedom now.