My Blog
Tools and strategies for owning, valuing,
and celebrating your life.
She said, "Oh that's good, because we don't really have many people of your kind at our school and she'd probably have a hard time fitting in."
"What kind are we?" I asked, completely baffled and wholly curious to see what was about to come out of her mouth.
"You know... broken," she said, shrugging her shoulders and smiling apologetically, "We don't have any broken families at our school."
Oh. Broken.
It was almost my turn to speak. In our close and huddled circle, each person had already spoken in hushed voices and long pauses -- each taking time to go within, to listen and to wait -- bringing forward only what they had found to be true about their experience, sometimes with the look of astonishment as though they had just discovered something they didn't even know they knew. To sit with someone as they tell the truth is to witness something holy, one of the greatest gifts of our shared human experience.
A while back, a woman wrote to me asking me to talk her out of being a fool. She'd met a guy and for whatever reason there was a spark. Lightning even. She said that she knew better than to believe that it could go anywhere.
Towers of white water rolled toward me. Rows of frothing Goliaths moving sideways and forwards, bumping into each other as the wind whipped their white crests of spray high into the air and further toward the western horizon, doubling their size, magnifying the fierceness.
I felt small.
It’s like I closed my eyes for two minutes. Maybe it was just a blink. I swear, it couldn’t have been that long. Fall came and went. My daughter now too old to be taken door to door by her mother, made plans to trick-or-treat with friends. Did we even buy a pumpkin this year? I don’t think so.
I needed to speak to you: lost one. You know who you are, the one who wrote to me for help. You're the one who reached out in those last hours of your life. You are the one who told me your story. You're the one who doesn't go a day without crying. You're the one at rock bottom. The one whose been too far lost now for far too long.
Yesterday was my birthday. I spent it in Hollywood with some of my favorite people doing yoga all day. It was a good day, a great day actually. It was filled with laughter, learning, mythology, down-dogs and sweat. After a long and hot day, I came back to my home-for-the-week and looked out at the pool. I forgot to pack a swimsuit. Actually, I didn't really forget - the truth is: I don't like cold water. I almost never go swimming. And when I do, it's when it's a million degrees out and I carefully let myself down into the water and then bounce out immediately.
I think this is what happens when a heart gets broken too many times. When a person gets criticized too many times. Or when a body is lonely for too long. To save our own lives, we cut pieces of ourselves off in an attempt to drag ourselves to whatever we are desperately seeking.
These were little compromises, tiny seemingly-harmless shape-shifty-things. I'd backed myself into a corner of a very small cage. And I wasn't okay in there. Something needed to change.
Valuing yourself is a brutally courageous act. It's raw and vulnerable and sometimes it takes the strength of eighteen hundred elephants to speak it out loud.
