This moment of your life will generally look much like the moment before it. The constant flow of moment to moment life comforts us. Subconsciously, it’s reliable – we know what to expect from the next moment because we just successfully completed the last one.
But, if you’ve ever heard the words…“you’re having a heart attack,” “you have cancer,” or…“there’s been an accident,” – like the quick snap of a twig, you know that life can change.
As we try to absorb the shock and reorganize our lives, we may unconsciously or consciously avoid healing.
It’s just an accepted thing that we will heal and move on. Most of us do; in time. But rarely do we consider how we heal and…who we are healing for.
Does this seem like a strange question?
Well…it seemed strange to me when I first realized that my emotions had layers.
I was living in Charleston and trying to finish my doctoral dissertation. I had gone home to for a visit and as I backed out of the driveway, I saw my father standing in the door of his workshop. For days, I couldn’t get this out of my mind…he died a few days later.
One morning while I was walking Jake, my dogs and sucking up the daily flow of tears, it hit me like a ton of bricks – yes, I was grieving daddy’s death but I was also grieving myself.
What I’ve learned in the years after my electrocution is that we can grieve our own passing; the passing of our “well selves” – the self…person with the healthy heart, without cancer, or the person who still had a father that she could hug.
I’ve learned that when something significant in our lives changes, we change and we’re left with two options:
(a) we can make ourselves crazy trying to still be the person everyone remembers. Very often we do this because we know “they” loved who we were and we aren’t sure they will love the “new us” or,
(b) we can grieve the passing of who we were and integrate all that we are learning about ourselves; all the current situation is teaching us to be.
I know now that I had spent too many years trying to be the girl my parents remembered, and along the way I neglected to be the person the electrocution was teaching me to be…until now.
Let yourself be taught by your experience.