Monday, January 25, 2016

More Than Just Living

The past couple of weeks I have found myself once again in awe of where I am.  From the outside looking in I have lived a pretty awesome life.  I have been able to meet so many awesome people, I have seen so many awesome things...and one might think that I have always just been happy.   That I have been able to just enjoy all of what life has brought me with elegance and grace.  Those that know me best though....they know that life has brought a few curve balls my way and I have truly struggled.  

I was talking to a friend the other day, someone who is struggling with a lot of tough feelings.  Feelings that I have felt at various points in my life.  As I was talking to this person I realized that I really, truly no longer felt those things.  That in the rawest part of who I am, I am content with where I am.  It was a weird thing to realize in the middle of this tough conversation.  Mostly because I hate seeing other people hurting, especially when I understand the hurt.  Especially when I know those raw emotions that sometimes want to swallow us whole.  I know what it is like to want to push the whole world away because it is easier then dealing with the fact that you don't feel connected to a single human being anywhere.  I know what it is like to cry yourself to sleep at night wishing you were anywhere but in the bed you are sleeping in.  I know what it is like to feel so alone that you don't even understand why God put you on this planet, in this place, for this time.  You just really don't get it.  I know what it is like to want to scream at all the people walking around pretending that you are invisible.  I know what that is like.  

I have lived it.  I have felt it, and in the deepest part of me I still am sometimes that person.  I still am that girl who found herself in another country, scared, alone, and wondering what she had done to deserve the feelings she had.  I am still that girl who sometimes forgets how beautiful she is and allows the lies and words that others have been shouted at her to plague her mind.  I am still that girl that has been crushed, lied to, and left behind by those that promised to always be there for her. I am still that girl that has been used and treated wrongly.   I am still that girl.  

The difference is that I have decided to embrace that girl.  I have decided that she deserves a voice.  In those moments when I feel that girl wanting to be a voice I let her.  I listen to the doubts, fears, and insecurities.  I allow them to come in, and then I replace them with the things I know to be true.  I replace them with the promises I know will always be kept.  I let that voice vanish into a voice of love.  I allow that girl to know that those feelings, and those thoughts...they are okay to have.  In fact the best we can do is be true to our authentic selves.  To understand what has happened in our past has made us into who we are today.  

Allowing that girl to have a voice, allows the woman I have turned into to have one too.  I don't want to just live life, walking through the motions.  I want to embrace it, joyfully, authentically, and in all its messiness.  The tears will still sometimes fall.  I will still get lost in the voices of the past, but truth and love will always prevail....always.  

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