Lens.

I need to talk about something that’s going to make people feel uncomfortable. (What else is new, right?!)

I have being sitting with myself lately - like, REALLY sitting with myself.

Allowing myself to be instead of do. Allowing myself to unwind and unfurl and slow down and ;start breathing again. Allowing time and space for my deeper emotions to surface.

It hasn’t been pretty.

For those of you who don’t know me well, I will share a few tidbits:

I am a Scorpio. I am an empath. I am highly sensitive. I am fairly/moderately psychic. I have a history of trauma and abuse. I struggle with depression and anxiety… the point I am trying to make here is that I am a VERY emotional person. I am very sensitive. I am in touch with the deeper parts of this life, very much in touch with the spirit realm. I am **very in touch with my emotions** in the grand scheme of things — and I STILL have oodles and oodles of stuff I try to dodge, evade and save myself from.

Life has backed me into another corner, so to speak, where I’ve needed to take a closer look at my stories and narratives, self-limiting beliefs, core truths about myself and this life.

We all have stories. We all have these tapes that are playing in the background of our lives, that we oftentimes don’t even realize we are playing on loop.

Some of them are empowering, some of them are benign, mostly though - they are cruel.

I am no stranger to shadow work. I’ve been aware of my demons most of my life and I have been working on facing them for many years.

Still, though, things will take me by surprise. And this is what I want to talk about today.

I unearthed another cruel core belief this past week. One that goes something along the lines of: “I have never been wanted by this life.”

Read that again.

“I have never been wanted by this LIFE.”

Wow. Right?

That’s pretty fucking serious. And it is also feels very true for me.

(Note: it can very much feel true for me while not being an accurate, factual “truth”.)

I have always felt a sense of “not belonging” - but not being wanted? That’s a different flavor.

So I have been trying to unpack this a little bit…

Before we go on, I would like to give a trigger warning (general trauma, abuse).

So… let’s unpack.

I was conceived as an unexpected, unplanned, teenage pregnancy. Both of my parents love me very much and my mother fought with everything in her to bring me into this world and do right by me. This post is in no way a reflection or a finger-pointing at either of them.

This being said, I do feel I experienced this energy of not necessarily being welcomed joyfully from the very beginning. Anyone who finds themselves scoffing or rolling their eyes… I invite you to look into the field of pre and peri-natal psychology. I believe there is validity in it.

Anyway. I experienced this energy of “not being wanted” from the gate. Perhaps not from my own mother but within my families of origin. Teenage pregnancy was a bigger deal back then than it is now and, suffice it to say, the two families were not exactly thrilled. My mother was disowned. Kicked out of her family home. My father’s family was disappointed, concerned, whatever.

As I grew through childhood and adolescence - this theme was reinforced. Whether it was ‘real’ or ‘perceived’ - I could feel the energy of not being wanted by my step-family. My step-father was abusive to me. I was treated differently than his biological child, my half-sister.

I felt the energy of not being wanted in school. I came from a significantly different background or home life than many of my peers. I was fortunate enough to go to a “good Catholic school” on scholarship but the marked difference I felt between ‘us’ and ’them’ was constantly palpable to me. I felt ashamed somehow, even in elementary school, and was constantly taking inventory of the ways I did not measure up, in comparison to others.

I felt the energy of not being wanted socially. I was bullied the entire way through school. Elementary to high school graduation. I was objectified and sexually harassed by the male students and, because of this “attention” I was hated, berated, excluded and tormented by the female students. I internalized all of this - believing there was something intrinsically wrong with me. Everyone hated me, I could see this very easily in many areas of my life, but I had no idea why. And so, it seemed to me, it could be for no reason other than the fact that I was… me.

I felt the energy of not being wanted romantically. Because of my emotional baggage, my issues with my own father, so on and so forth - I sought out emotionally unavailable men at best, emotionally abusive men at worst. I felt unwanted by my own husband and his family, when I was married. And again by the father of my second child and his family, once I divorced.

I have felt unwanted by family members, peers, friends, romantic partners, employers, neighbors, people within the community, the list goes on and on… literally in every single aspect of my life - I have seen this theme reflected back to me. There have also been times in this life I have deeply hated myself as well.

Now, whether or not all of this was real or perceived is irrelevant to a degree - because nothing will change the fact that **this was the reality and the truth of my experience**

This was the reality of my experience and I internalized it so damn much - that I integrated it into everything. It became the lens through which I viewed the world and so I transposed it on to EVERYTHING. All of this time.

I will be 40 in November and I realized this week - I am STILL wearing these glasses.

Everything I have done in the last year a half - my flower farming, my Sanctuary boxes, my coaching, my writing, my gift shop, alllll of my creative ideas… I have been telling myself (albeit, very quietly) — I am not wanted by this world. I am not wanted by this life. Anything that is borne of my creative mind is absolute trash because I, myself, am unworthy and unwanted and so, by default, all of my offerings will be unworthy and unwanted as well.

Pretty fucked up, right?

And here is the thing. It is always so much easier to notice these kinds of things in others. It is easier to call bullshit on other peoples’ stories and self-limitation than it is our own. It is easier to be kind, caring, gentle and loving to others than it is to be kind, caring, gentle and loving to ourselves.

But we cannot, I repeat - we cannot truly give and receive love until we love ourselves. I am convinced of it. And not because of some magical fucking formula that you have to nail in this 3D world. But because - until we love ourselves, really and truly - we will never be seeing things rightly. Our perception will always be skewed and dirtied, mucked up by all of this residual shit smeared all over the place.

We have to get right INSIDE before we can expect out outer worlds to shift accordingly.

I have hidden most of my entire life.

I may have been participating in the outer world in a way that seemed cohesive and accomplished to those on the outside but it was a persona, an avatar if you will. It was a protective shell I wore to protect my soft and wounded inner child. I was going through the motions and doing all the things I thought would get me to where I wanted to go. I was trying to “fake it until you make it” as they say. And it did not work. At all.

I ended up all the more battered and bruised, lost and confused. I ended up alone with two kids - divorcing the first father, and calling off the wedding with the second. I ended up in a career I hated. A depression I could barely dig out of. And I was working on closet-drinking myself into an early death to be able to tolerate it all.

So why am I writing about this? Why am I sharing all of this shit? I ask myself constantly: how in the actual fuck are you able to share more vulnerably in your writing, in front of hundreds of people, than you have ever been able to in your own real life?

I’m not entirely sure I know the answer to this yet but I know this much… it’s because we have to start talking about it. And so I am going first. I want to allow others to see me at my worst. I want to allow others to see my peaks and valleys and everything in between. I want to allow others to see me struggling and failing so they know, firsthand, that it’s okay. That you can let others witness you and STILL SURVIVE. I am, quite literally, living proof.

We are all so fucking ashamed of ourselves. Maybe not ALL of us, but many of us. I can feel it in others’ energetic fields. I can see it in their body language. The way they avert their eyes when they are speaking. The way we all talk ourselves down, keep ourselves small. It’s as if I can actually SEE the weight we are all carrying around, on the inside.

I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t want to pretend anymore.

I don’t want to carry my shame anymore. I want to set it down.

I want to feel free. I want to learn how to truly love myself.

And the way I see it is - all of this shit is hard. It’s hard and it’s hurtful. It can be confusing and disorienting. Sometimes I don’t know which way to go, what to do next…

I might fail. I might fail miserably. I might fail miserably - publicly!

If this happens… it will hopefully show others than feeling shame privately and feeling shame publicly are both shit. There really is no advantage to going it alone.

And I might succeed. I might learn how to unravel all of this. To let go of my shame, to catch hold of self-acceptance and self-love. And I might do so publicly!

If this happens… it will show others who are struggling in the ways I am struggling that there is still hope.

Sounds to me like there is goodness, no matter how the cards fall.

So, here I am. Airing out my shame. Letting it be seen.

My hope is that witnessing my shame will make yours seem less heavy.

You are not alone.

And even though I convince myself otherwise - I am not alone, either.

I love you, friend.

And I am learning to love myself, too.

That is all. x