By AL
My inner infant feels shoved into this beautiful disaster of a life, my inner child is a beautifully feral snarling beast, my inner teenager is a delightful storm of emotions, my inner young adult is blissfully disconnected. And my 30-year-old self feels the deeply maternal need to care for them all.
30, single, and struggling to navigate so many facets of my life is not exactly how I pictured this particular trip on the floating rock in space playing out. My childhood dream? Become a mermaid, have lots of mer-babies with my beautiful mer-husband and live on our somehow self-sustaining mer-farm. My adult goal? Don’t get pregnant, never get attached to the people you’re dating (they will leave) and try to figure out how to travel without going broke. To say things did NOT go according to the original plan would be putting it lightly.
In having these kinds of conversations with my friends over the last weeks/months has really opened my eyes to the fact that no one’s life goes according to the first plan… or the second, third, or 900th plan. And we damn sure put a lot of pressure on ourselves to no only make the plan, but to see it through. I read a statistic somewhere yesterday that 90% of people marry their high school/early college sweetheart. What the statistic didn’t relay was the divorce rate of those 90% of people.
The lesson here: take your time, get to know you, heal those wounds from childhood. Get your heart broken and learn how to comfort yourself in the moments where you’re so lonely you can’t see your way around it. Learn to comfort that inner child that tries really hard to snap your fingers off every time you chat with her. Learn to cook your favorite meal for yourself – and share it with no one. Decorate your house exactly to your heart’s content and force people to respect your space while they’re in it (and out of it honestly). Take up that hobby you’ve always been so curious about and become an expert. Set silent, small goals. Crush them all. For yourself – not because of an artificial timeline you or anyone else came up with.
Now you’re probably thinking “really great advice there – I already knew that. The question is always how?” Well, I can’t tell you that. Those are very complex and messy waters you’ll have to navigate for yourself. What I can tell you is that once you’re doing it, those are the clearest, most blue waters you’ve ever seen. And floating in that pool of healing is the most refreshing swim you’ve ever taken. There is always discomfort in healing, that’s why we avoid it so much. But there is also a great deal of beauty in healing, a great deal of learning. You’ll learn things about yourself, about the world, and about others. How do you start? You sit with it. You do the hardest thing first and you sit in the shit. You sit in the sit of the baby born to parents that were not ready to be parents. You sit in the shit of the child that was abused by so many people and never really loved or comforted in a way that healed. You sit in the shit of the teenager that fell in so in love with the boy she thought she’d die without him… and then almost died because of him. You sit in the shit of the young adult that had no idea what she was doing and she did it anyway. And you absolutely sit in the shit of the 30-year-old that’s struggling to figure it all out.
Sometimes that looks like tears, sometimes yelling, sometimes staring blankly at the wall for 3 days until you can pull yourself out of it. Whatever it needs to look like for you, it’ll be perfect. And you’ll feel it when you get it.
I challenge you to write a letter to yourself sometime this week from a place of vulnerability. Connect with those parts of you that hurt that you’ve held apart for so long. Cry, scream, wiggle, dance. Whatever you need to do is okay to do and authentic to you. But please remember to be gentle with yourself while you’re doing it. Identify the feral beast… and be damn sure she knows she is beautiful and fierce. And in the words of my favorite extraterrestrial goddess living in human form – please be kind to my friend.
With all of the love in the Universe… Namaste,
A.L.