Like The Dew

I walked out of my apartment on a brisk morning. The seasons were transitioning and it was evident in the scattered temperatures we felt over a duration of one week. 70 degrees one day, and 28 another. My SUV was swallowed by a thin layer of frost. Easy to crack, yet cold to touch. Baby girl, in all of her innocent curiosity questioned, “what is it?!” I explained to her that it was frost, like ice, but thinner. “Touch it!” She touches it, cringes and exclaims, “is cold mommy! It’s fweezing!”

Dew is the residue of a cold night met with the sunshine of the morning - increasing it’s heat to warm up the day. Like dew and frost, many relationships we enter still have residue of cold nights. But true to the nature of dew and frost, when the car starts and heats up after sitting for a couple minutes, the residue melts off. So why then, can’t we allow our residue to sit and melt itself off before we move on to the next relationship we have? 

What if, before we jumped into a new friendship after being broken, we took the time to dissect what was good, bad, and ugly? What if we healed from wrongdoings (ours and theirs) before we became social influencers? What if we considered that we have an attracting factor to a certain kind of person, and we can’t repel it until we begin to heal from the inside.

We then take our hurt selves, blame the other and move to the next friend or victim, while projecting the last relationship on them. It’s like we smell their vulnerability and are drawn to that - as opposed to their strengths; then dive in full throttle as if we can fix something great, as if we weren’t just broken. We treat them like the last friend because we thought we weren't wrong. Yet, we were destructing the relationships around us, not having dealt with our own internalized bleeding.

I have seen some people in mentorship roles operating under the God-Complex. The difference between God and these mentors though, is that He humbled Himself to endure the suffering of those He taught. Mentors I'm thinking of elevated themselves to titles, required 'suffering' from their understudies -sort of like a hazing to build them up - in the name of love. I've never read bi-laws that said ‘to be a better version of mentor, mentee must endure all mentor endured and more.’ 

Hurt people hurt people. Whether they acknowledge it or not. Until we step back and heal internally, we become iced out and celebrate our bad behaviors, justifying them. Then those behaviors become a part of who we are… or at least who we walk in; because we forget who we really are. Then, we create replicas of ourselves, unless they stop to heal. But what IF we were whole?

Frost melts on its own in the sun. 

Why is this relevant to me? Because I was a mentee - to a couple folks: from high school through my mid-to late twenties. I became aware of what traits I picked up, but didn’t like. I thought you were supposed to do certain things or have a specific demeanor - but it didn’t feel good inside. It wasn’t until I was betrayed by a mentor, that I acknowledged that it felt like dishonor to be compared to them. (To date, only one person knows the details of what I’m talking about - well two - but that information cut so deep I really had no choice but to address the other reoccurring feelings.) From there, other relationships exposed themselves because I now understood what I was seeing and that I didn’t have to deal with it. Furthermore, I acknowledged that I may have been the one doing the hazing in other relationships as the mentor. It didn’t have to be that way. 

Cold nights. 

I was experiencing the dew - a thin layer of ice - easily dissolvable with the right temperature.

I stepped back. I cried. I prayed. I self-medicated, because let’s face it, a loss is a loss whether you left on good terms or not. But I allowed myself to grieve. Then I got back up. I felt the sun and I allowed my residue to melt away. 

It took a long time to understand this dynamic. The most important takeaway for me is that mentoring can be treated as a position of power; and I recognize that I have to set boundaries in my relationships with anybody I encounter. It helped me not to cower in my talents, visions or stances because someone has tangible successes. It helped me see that the mentee can be the teacher, and that’s perfectly acceptable. It also showed me the characteristics in myself that I need to improve. I pulled great nuggets from these terminated relationships - because there was more good than bad in most of them (if not all of them). Most importantly, it made me value the relationships that truly were for my good, and have helped me understand trust and mutual respect and understanding. 

I like what one woman said in a book club. She mentioned we need to be taught wholeness earlier in life. She’s right. Why wait until we’ve been broken down to tiny pieces that need to be rebuilt? Why not start whole and learn how to maintain our wholeness as we get nicked? If we operate from a place of healing rather than a reaction to our trauma, our dew will melt on its own. But if we remain cold from the cold nights and continue to push with that frost encapsulating us, our skewed view is dangerous to us AND to the people on our path. Clearer vision, wholeness mentality, internalizing healing over hurt and stepping back and evaluating before moving forward with new friendships will be the solution to better relationships. I am confident in this.