I’m cracking my heart wide open with you today and I’m following this message I received today from my Wayne Dyer Daily Calendar (pic above)—I thought many times about not sending this message.
Because you see, for most of my life, I wasn’t rebellious.
I followed the rules.
They felt safer — even though they weren’t; they served to help me survive as best I could.
It wasn’t until my mid-30s when I really decided I would make my own scene (I waited around for quite awhile thinking someone else would save me).
Because no one spoke up for me when I was young, I mistakenly thought, what I needed, what I felt, what I knew— didn’t matter or even more scary, wasn’t true.
But you see, this is a lie.
A lie fed to me and one probably fed to you.
As children, we didn’t know any different– because whatever beliefs and traumas we may have experienced, the people who were inflicting them were also people we were told to love.
It wasn’t until my divorce that I even questioned everything I thought I knew about love.
My quest for the truth of love went even deeper last September. The day my mother committed suicide.
This is a truth that hasn’t wanted to see the light.
However, my heart knew the minute I received the phone call in the middle of the night.
In fact, I was waiting for that call since I was about 10 years’ old.
In the instant she died, I found this strength within me that was no longer willing to pretend the reality of my life didn’t exist.
I will stand alone, naked and afraid and share my truths out loud because the alternative could have me curled in the fetal position the rest of my life.
I’ll choose rebellion if it allows me to breathe.
To feel a freedom I never felt while she was alive.
I can’t ask you to look at your dark places and speak your vulnerable truths, if I am not willing to stand here too.
This past year has been a private and bumpy path of complex grieving.
What I’ve learned more than anything else– is that your path, your healing, your grief is your journey.
When you honor taking exceptional care of yourself more than anything else– you open the heart, you honor the pain and you invite whatever you’ve carried in the hidden spaces of your being to be seen, felt and moved.
I was bathed in a family of half-truths and secrets– where addiction, abuse, mental illness and so much more were never spoken of– yet were thread into daily life. Trauma was normalized and the conflict between truth and life was buried deep somewhere so as to allow you to keep getting up each day.
Half-truths never set any of us free. They keep us entangled in the energy of maintaining the lies— and it’s exhausting.
It has exhausted me– and that I’m feeling in my bones, even today.
Clearly, I have been victimized in my life, although I am not a victim.
Over the last 365 days, I have cried many tears that never felt free to be shed.
I have made many scenes this year, because even though no one stood up and made a scene for me when I was little — I can do it now.
And so can you.
If you carry trauma within you— you are brave enough to face it, feel it and speak it (and this isn’t something you have to do alone).
If you are scared to break the family patterns– I honor that and I say that you may be the one here to create a new way forward.
Someone will need to choose courage over comfort (thank you Brene Brown) in order to bring the toxicity to light and change what is possible.
Years ago, one of my mentors, Martha Beck– said to a crowded room “If you want to save the world, save yourself“.
I admit, this feels harder to do. I’d much rather work in a layer outside of my tender heart.
But every time, I return to myself— I change the world through my own witness, my own healing and my own voice.
It is enough.
Making myself smaller, dimmer– for the sake of upholding a system that could have broken me— yes, that is now a FUCK NO.
I now know I am strong enough to stand for me, no matter what happens or how someone else chooses to react.
Victims allow perpetrators to write their stories — CREATORS take the experiences and make it their own.
An alchemy founded in the magic that is within each and every one of us.
We can’t do it without taking an oath to ourselves.
A set of vows— that we can renew, over and over again.
Mine begin with ‘to thy own self be true’.
I would be lying if all this exposure doesn’t poke at the edges of what feels the most scary. Of course, then I remind myself this isn’t nearly ever as scary as what I’ve already lived through.
May my permission— be your permission.
May we be brave enough to choose Love.
Messy, all-in love. I’m willing every day to live that choice and accept the rebellion that may come along for the ride.
I’m just getting started.
Love,
Stacey
PS. Thank you for seeing me and holding space for me— even if what I say upsets you or you disagree, I honor that we all can be brave enough to be ourselves even in the light of unpopular opinion.