As a small child, I was the queen of imagination and limitlessness. I remember vividly before the age of 5, playing and enjoying the hell out of life. Everything was fascinating, everything was a miracle, including my imagination. Oh the things that I could do, the places that I could go. It reminds me of the show on PBS, Reading rainbow. My mother told me when I got older that she would hear a commotion in the wee hours of the morning and she would rush up to find me, my sweet 2 year old self sitting peacefully in my little rocking chair, with every single book on the shelf piled around me.
And then life began to change. Now that my father was back in the house and my little brother was born, there was violence and unrest. I couldn’t be free and joy filled. I learned to dim my light because for some reason, my joy made everyone around me angry.
I went out into the woods, into nature to share my light. Nature never yelled at me or told me to get the hell out of here or to be quiet. Nature shared in my joy, I heard birds singing and the trees whispering and tickling my face. It was and always will be my safe place.
As I got older, a relative came to stay for a short time, but left in his wake long lasting devastation and a pattern of fear, shame and unworthiness that has haunted me for the longest time. My light grew dimmer.
I attracted more situations that reinforced the fear, shame and unworthiness in every area of my life except when I was out in nature. My parents, well meaning, only served to grind these beliefs deeper. I was lost, alone, and wondered why I was even here. I couldn’t find anyone in life whom I could relate to or could relate to me or who would even listen.
Every single day for the better part of my life, I have contemplated leaving this Earth. I have devised every way possible and every time I got into the car, I imagined driving off cliffs, running into barriers and all kinds of ways that I could die. I didn’t talk about it to absolutely anyone ever. I learned not to discuss my pain as it seemed to make everyone uncomfortable. I stuffed it instead.
Until one day, I couldn’t do that anymore. I had no place left to put the pain, so it all came pouring out. And it kept coming. And coming. And coming. And I thought that it would never end. My whole body ached, it felt like I aged a million years, but nothing stopped it from coming out. And then it did. And everything changed.
I began to see a deeper thread, a thread of hope. I realized that while I had closed myself off, I had not closed off my heart. While I suffered greatly my thoughts and beliefs, I had also recognized on some level the love that was under it all. I had come into this lifetime full of love and joy and somehow the thread of that was still alive, buried deep.
It’s like having a storage unit that you keep filling until one day you can’t close the door anymore and then you clean it out and you find those little nuggets of gold, the priceless treasures that you forgot that even you had.