Messages

​There is something magical about hanging out on top of a mountain, eating cherries, and laughing with your friends over life’s odd moments. 

I find it easier to talk when the world - with all it’s distractions of pings, clicks, likes, advertisements, shoulds/buy me/pay attention to what I’m saying because if you don’t you won’t be accepted/wanted/valued - is far below you. 

Even better when your cell service is listed not as 5G but as SOS…(which I define as shizzle out of service).

I was with two beautiful humans, both of whom I’ve known for over a year.  They made me smile with their genuine openness to exploring the complexities of being who they are, in a world which constantly tells ALL of us we are created somehow wrong as we are.

The messages we are inundated with daily claim that we are too short or too tall, too skinny or too fat, the wrong orientation or sexuality or identity. And of course, we are wearing unfashionable clothing because it went out of season five minutes ago, and on and on and on. 

The messages are suffocating and deafening in their loudness. Is it any wonder that most people I know seem to have some type of anxiety or depression or exhaustion?

For a year, I was like that too. 

Having crying jags in the middle of the streets. Feeling like something was wrong with me. I couldn’t figure out HOW I got to this place, when on the surface so much seemed so right with my life.

It didn’t help that the people I love, love, loved, who loved, loved, did they every really love me too (I wonder now), told me something was wrong with me. 

I WASN’T:
-strong enough, 
-resilient enough, 
-trusting enough, 
-didn’t have faith enough in them and their messages of love love love…

As though it isn’t enough that the world tells us we are lacking, the people I trusted told me I was as well. 

I believed them. 
I accepted their words, and allowed their actions, to inform the way I viewed myself.

Until the distortions I saw in the mirror were far more than the body dysmorphia I experienced. But rather a soul distortion in which fragments of myself kept disappearing.

I shrunk not only in body, but into a smaller, less vibrant version of who I am.

This probably would have continued indefinitely until I disappeared. 

However our bodies and minds have a way of alerting us to WAKE UP and pay attention. The panic attacks and crying jags were an alarm shouting “Something is hurting me!” Yet for a long time, I didn’t listen.

I ignored the signals of my panic attacks - despite never having had them before. 
I accepted the diagnosis of my loved ones that I was broken. 
I believed that they were right, and that I knew nothing about myself. 

It’s funny how we trust those who know us least, yet speak with such condescension and authority. 

We trust and trust and trust, everyone except for ourselves. We let their words drown ours out.   We get quieter and smaller and less certain that we know anything, without them telling us it is true.

Until one day, I didn’t trust they were right. I stopped letting my words be silent. I stopped crying. I screamed back.

The night I came alive again, ironically was a result of one moment of silence. In which someone I loved, loved, loved, said yet another thing so hurtful and rude, that I removed myself from the situation, and went for a walk. Called a friend. Cried harder. 

And then got very very quiet.

In that silence, I felt the message my body had been screaming at me for months. That there was NOTHING wrong with me. But there WAS something wrong with the company I was keeping, and the messages I was accepting as true.

The world shifted in that moment, and I felt myself grow taller and take up space again.
It wasn’t a perfect moment. 

I suppose that in a perfect world, or a carefully constructed movie moment, I would have been more eloquent in my words and actions and assertions that this situation needed to STOP. That I was no longer going to accept the lies I had been fed, about something being wrong with me.

No it wasn’t a perfect moment. And I was far from being my best version of myself. How could I be? I forgot who I was.

It was a messy moment, and it was LOUD. Only this time, it was MY VOICE taking up space and filling the air with messages.

I’d love to tell you that after that moment, I stopped listening to messages that made me smaller and less than the wonderful magical being that I see when I look in the mirror at myself many days. 

But the truth is, drowning out the noise of others, and of society, takes practice. It takes building muscles of resilience, and confidence, and acceptance, and love. 

It helps, however, when you do it in the company of those who actually DO love and accept you as you are. 

So I found myself sitting on this mountain top the other day, laughing and sharing and being REAL with two beautiful friends. Letting the noise of the world be so far below us, that it couldn’t reach us to even matter.

What a gorgeous day it was. The first of many to come.

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