Oh, if we only knew then what we know now, how our lives would have been so different. Let me retract that statement. If we only had the compassion for ourselves back then that we do now, would we have been able to see that what was challenging us was also setting us up for greatness? But like they say, hindsight is 20/20 vision.
When I was 23, my partner committed suicide, leaving me four months pregnant with my first child. I had no idea how I was going to take care of a newborn while caught between the emotional turmoil of his loss and my nonstop existential questions.
What was the purpose of life? What happened after we died? Was my partner even him anymore or was he something strange now?
My grief was so strong, and my mind hostage to the endless questions about existence, that all other areas of my life suffered. And not for the next few months, but for the next few years! Being a new parent was hard. Being a single parent, harder still. But being a new, single and bereaved parent made some days impossible. I had no direction anymore, because I couldn’t envision a new life.
What was wrong with me? What was I missing? Why couldn’t I just ‘get it’ and be better?’ I asked myself, staring up at the transient ceilings I slept beneath.
I felt defective.
Botched.
Ashamed.
In fact, I was deeply ashamed. I was ashamed by my lack of ‘success,’ or what I thought success to be at the time. And I felt worthless because I had nothing to show for it except a bedroom I shared with my child and a minimum-wage job.
You’re a single mother, on assistance, a hot mess that will never go any further than a few rungs up the ladder of a dead-end job. And don’t forget, you have a little girl relying solely on you. Oh, and when you get some free time, make sure you keep reading about metaphysics, otherwise you’ll always be lost. This was the narrative running through my head, day in and day out. And I believed it. I believed it so much, I took it as truth.
Looking back on that time of my life, what I find to be another tragedy was the way I treated myself. Why wouldn’t I have struggled? I had just lost my partner and the father of my child. Why wouldn’t my life be confusing and rocky? A tragedy had just torn it apart. And why had I put that pressure on myself to have all the answers, when only time could give me that clarity?
A slower approach
And this is how many of us treat ourselves after loss. Our lives are shattered while we watch the world still going on around us, somehow insensitive to our needs. But if that’s not the time to slow down and show ourselves compassion, then when is?
Society places a high value on production, and I fell into that trap, as do many of us. But all that trap did was add to my already insurmountable grief and poor self-image, when what I should’ve been doing was loving myself and my daughter, ruthlessly.
It wasn’t until I began to take a different approach that things finally began to change for me.
A slower approach.
An approach not from a place of expectation, but from a place of empathy for what I had been through, and a shift in focus from what’s ‘after this’ and ‘out there,’ to ‘right now’ and what’s going on ‘in here.’
Who did I want to be? What did my ideal life look like? What sort of people did I want to share it with? And what did I want to share with the world?
For the first time in years, I felt like I’d glimpsed the horizon. A new life was out there waiting for me. It wouldn’t be the life I’d known, and my partner wouldn’t be part of it. But there was something worth fighting for, if I could just be brave enough to go after it. For if I could dream it, I could reach it.
The more I focused on that life and the person I wanted to be, the more I realized just how poisonous the narrative I had been listening to for so long was. Deconstructing an entire belief system was no small feat. It required a lot of discipline to keep from falling back into my old ways of thinking. But it was the only way I could make the journey from where I was to where I wanted to be. And so, the more I stuck with the process of continuously checking in, asking the right questions and patiently cradling that vision, the closer I got.
That’s when my definition of success changed.
As I watched my life change for the better, because I had changed for the better, I began to feel a sense of gratitude for all those years. The gestation period I had been going through and the birthing pains I had felt hadn’t made me a failure. Rather, they had shown me that the only thing I failed to do was see that I’d been undergoing a time of deep transformation, and recognize what would later be the cornerstone of my future endeavours and success.
Making discoveries
It was then that I realized I was never lost. I had merely been making discoveries.
Discoveries about myself.
Discoveries about who I was in the face of adversity, who I was as a mother and who I wanted to become. Those years of hardship had only helped me see the gift that made me, well, me. And that was a gift that could only be unwrapped and appreciated with time.
In the words of Henry David Thoreau, not all who wander are lost. For more often than not, the path to figuring out where we are going isn’t one lined with flowers, but a gruelling one leading us through the trenches.
So, to those who feel lost and alone, take heart. It’s the hardest times that flesh us out the most, but all trials are temporary and pass. Maybe they linger longer than we’d like, and maybe we don’t understand them. But that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with us. Life is a sacred journey of both wandering and discovering, and finding our way, especially after a loss, takes time.
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image 1 Waldrebell de image: Pixabay 2 images par Gerd Altmann de image: Pixabay 3 images par Joshua Woroniecki de image: Pixabay
