The Other Side of Fear

To quote Drew Barrymore in one of my favorite movies, Never Been Kissed, "To write well, you have to write what you know." Well, this is what I know. I abandoned myself a long long time ago when I was a child. I thought that was the only way to protect myself from the sexual abuse, from the fighting, from the neglect, from the ridicule, and from "being too much." Thing is, what I thought was protection was anything but. It was damaging and programming my subconscious mind to believe I wasn't worthy or good enough to be loved. I now know that those are lies and that way of thinking was teaching me self hatred. Always just going along with what others wanted so that I could be accepted. Then throwing a fit when I couldn't take it anymore. Dr. Nicole LePera said, "Emotional abandonment in childhood makes us desperate to be chosen in adulthood." Oh how I felt that. When I woke up to a world where humanity has been destroying itself from the inside out for many many years, I felt it for the rest of humanity too. Living life in the past keeps evolution and growth of our species at bay, to make human puppets more malleable. I was taught that we learn history so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past and while I believe learning history is important, it doesn't change past mistakes if we humans don't also change. We are the reason history repeats itself.

I was spinning around on my hamster wheel of the day to day grind that I was comfortable sitting in, living with my head in the sand. Trauma gave me a victim mentality even though I insisted I was not a victim. My worries and fears of life kept me in a cage that I basically was fed to believe was my destiny. Am I making enough money to pay my bills and feed my family as a single parent? If it's not enough, do I then get a second job and have someone else raise my kids? Why wasn't my career as a certified veterinary technician enough? Where is the disconnect between working hard and still struggling? We didn't live extravagant. Most of my apartment was furnished with hand me downs or Goodwill finds. Didn't make much sense to me. It did, however, keep my brain so occupied that even though I was frustrated with the system I continued to go along with it. That was just life, right? I mean, that's what our society taught us anyway. "Work hard and you can have it all!" And if you don't have it all yet, work harder! What about when you have it "all," but still live paycheck to paycheck? Or were fed lies throughout your life that you weren't a whole person without the "other half" and you still didn't have the "other half "or had a failed marriage? No one tells you what to do then except to say you need another half and all your problems will be solved. At least, that was what my interpretation of it was. So does all that make me a failure? The anxiety of it certainly made me feel like a failure...until I woke up. And it took a whole lot of trauma to wake me up, but I realized I'm not broken, I'm just part of a very broken society and we live in a paradigm that doesn't make sense anymore.

I read once that it's not our job to wake others up. Thing is...maybe it is. Maybe that's exactly what we're supposed to be doing right now. It's time. Time to change our world. The paradigm is shifting whether we want it to or not. Our world cannot continue as it once was and COVID-19 has shown us all that. We can keep denying it as a species or we can transition with it. Truth is, no one is coming to save us, we have to save ourselves.

COVID-19 wasn't quite here yet when I left my abusive situation. Boy am I glad I left before all that! He would have killed me or I would have killed myself being stuck together in lockdown. Not trying to be offensive or dramatic, that's just how bad it had gotten and I know others have been there and I pray everyday for them. Leaving a 2 year toxic abusive relationship where the perk was financial freedom was the most terrifying and liberating thing I have ever experienced! This new thing I felt for myself, love, I had never experienced it before. Not like this anyway, I mean, I thought loving myself just meant that I didn't hate myself and since I considered myself to be a decent caring human being, I didn't or at least I didn't think I did. No. This. This feeling was different. It was like in a moment I recognized all the mistakes and forgave myself and others, no longer holding anyone in judgment, including myself. Recognizing that were are all human and we are all operating from some sort of trauma. Realizing that no matter how much I punished myself, I could never change what had already happened. Remembering that I am a spiritual being living a human experience, and not a single one of us is getting out of here alive. That's the brutal honest truth of it whether we like it or not. We can't do better until we know better, but once we know better, we gotta do better.