The Path To Myself

I have a deep want for the people who love me to understand me. To understand my trauma. To understand the dark places of this world I’ve had to visit and live in. To understand the broken places in my mind that are in need of gentle and loving reassurance. To understand that I am full of scars you can’t see, scars that make me relate differently to you, scars that cause me to see the world through a different lens. But the problem with this want, is that it is unattainable.

The people in my life cannot understand me in the way I wish because they have not been to the places I’ve been. This does not mean they have not had their own, unique bouts with the darkness. But they can only understand me on the level that they’ve understood themselves. And if they have not looked at their own dark places, if they have not walked into their own houses of their minds and found the rooms with broken doors and shattered windows in need of repair, then how can I expect them to recognize mine? How can I expect them to hold praise for the way I built a new door and screwed it to the frame, still leaving the marks on the wood from where the old door was brutally broken, but creating a new working door that allows me to move in and out of that room with ease? How can I expect them to lovingly grace my wounds with caring fingertips when they so willfully ignore their own? 

We take so much in this life personally, myself included. When I feel not understood, or even worse misunderstood, I feel deeply, painfully, achingly alone. The kind of alone you can only feel when you have felt completely alone, without love, without anyone, including yourself. And that is where my work lies. That is where the door is still being built. I am not, and will never be again, alone. Because I have found the path to myself, the me who does understand. The me who sat next to me in the passenger seat of my Toyota Solara and packed up all of my belongings at 18 and moved across the country more than once. The me who snuck food off of plates I was clearing from restaurant tables as a busser because I had little to no money to my name after leaving my mothers home to escape her abuse. The me who had her hands on my head as I sat in my walk in closet in my family’s million dollar home crying and screaming about how lost I felt as I self mutilated and wrote lyrics on my bedroom walls in sharpie in protest of my mothers perfect home. Lyrics that put meaning to feelings I couldn’t yet articulate at a young preteen age. 

I understand. I know the dark places I’ve been. I know what I have triumphed through. I know how strong and courageous my soul is. I know the battle I face every day with my CPTSD, and I know time and time again I show up, never backing down, never giving into the fear that I’m broken. And this deep understanding is the most beautiful gift God could offer me, and it’s the gift that the people I love are still trying to find. So how am I best serving them and myself? By projecting wants and fears onto them that they cannot fulfill? Or by taking absolutely nothing they say or do personally because I understand that they are walking their own path to the truths I’ve already found? 

This was my Oracle card spread after experiencing
the trigger that inspired me to write this piece;
My angels encouraging me to confront these dark parts of me
And to remind myself that I am safe, I am loved, I am enough