I am Allowed to Belong to My Own Life.

Have you ever felt the overwhelming feeling of gratitude for your life … and … yet somewhere in the back of your mind you feel a nudge, a pull, a stark contrast of disconnection to the gratitude that makes you close your eyes and wince if you let it any further into your thoughts? 

For many years, I felt this. Trying to make my life fit rather than actually feel like I belonged to and in my own life. It felt like the good days and the bad days flowed with such precision, it was like a river cutting its path through the limestone. One day I would feel like everything was flowing in the right direction, slow and steady resembling a calm and peaceful river and the next everything was chaos and fear, raging like an overflowing river. There was the person I felt I was on the inside and the person I presented to the outside. It felt like the person inside was watching from above the person on the outside move through our life towards a destination predetermined by someone entirely separate from us. The two versions of me yelling at each other asking which one of us was in charge, when all along we both knew it was neither of us. I was disconnected from myself trying to be someone I felt like others were telling me to be.

It took a lot of time and effort internally and externally to first even recognize this disconnection and then more time and work to heal it. Below I share a few things that I was able to realize through this process.  

Boxes to check as my road map

From the beginning of my adult life I felt like I was on the ‘right road,’ moving towards those ubiquitous boxes I needed to check in order to live a fulfilling and successful life. Good grades, good schools, good jobs. Check, check, check. These boxes became bigger - get married, buy a house, get a better job, buy bigger things, check, check, check, and check. I was doing everything I was supposed to do and yet felt like I could not breathe, my anxiety ran ramped nearly every day. I felt like it had to be the next box I checked off that would bring me that fulfilling and successful life. I was doing everything right; it had to be right around the corner. So, I kept checking the boxes and wishing and hoping that happy life that was just out of reach was waiting for me to check all the right boxes. More and more boxes checked … less and less my life felt like my own.

Shame and guilt as fuel to the fire  

Amid this back and forth of checking the boxes and waiting for my ‘perfect’ life to show up, the guilt and shame began to creep in. Slowly and strongly, it made its way in and took ahold of me. How dare I even question this life of mine? How ungrateful and spoiled could I be?  I had so many privileges and opportunities in my presence, shouldn’t I just shut up that voice in the back of my mind and tell it to cut it out already. We are good, we should be grateful for this amazing life. Guilt and shame are reckless emotions, they can cut you down so quickly and so forcefully you are paralyzed to make any move – forward or backward or anything in between. My shame and my guilt for waking up some days and feeling trapped and stuck in my life was overwhelming at times. I felt like I could not escape any of it.

Numbing as survival

To deal with the shame and guilt, I began to numb. I cannot remember when it really started. Like the shame and guilt, the numbness crept in slowly and strongly until I was so far in, I could not recognize it. I numbed with alcohol mostly, sometimes food or hours of tv, but that was always accompanied with alcohol. If I was going to spend the rest of my life just making everything fit and then feel guilty and ashamed for not being grateful, I was going to numb it all away. I was numbing away these feelings significantly for many years, until the numbing became too much, too scary, creating even more disconnect in myself. For me, I was trying to numb away the anxiety, the guilt, the shame of not loving every bit of my life, while in fact I was fueling that all more and more each time I had a drink. I started to try short stints where I did not drink, a weekend here, a few weeks there. Yet, it always found me again, the deep and shameful desire to numb away my life. I did a solid 6 months in 2017 where I was able to start to really get some clarity about this feeling of gratitude AND my life just not fitting right. It found me later that year though, taking its hold again. In 2018 on January 1st, I gave myself 365 days without alcohol to see what I could make of my life. This fully changed the trajectory of my life. I began to see how deeply I had desired to make my life fit into the boxes, escape the guilt and shame, numb it all away. I knew the way I had been living was not how I wanted to continue. I needed to start working on healing this deep disconnect that had existed in me for so long.

Communication as healing

The biggest healing came from when I started to truly communicate with myself. I set aside the boxes to check, the roles to fulfill, the desire to fit into what I believed others wanted for me and from me. I began to ask myself questions like, at the end of my life, will I be proud of how I lived it? Is what I am striving for something I genuinely want, or is it only because I think it’s what I should want? Who do I want to show up as in my own life? No one is going to invite me to my own life, so when am I going to invite myself? Creating true communication between the person I was on the inside and the person I presented on the outside allowed me to begin to bring these two versions of myself into alignment. This began to transform how I also communicated with others. I was able to say yes fully and authentically to things I wanted and/or needed and to say no to the things I really didn’t want and/or need. I was beginning to define my life on my terms and no one else’s. I was able to be honest with myself and others in ways I had never really had been before. I was able to fully name my anxiety and the guilt and the shame I held. I was able to really begin to understand what I loved about my life and what I had been holding on to only to make me fit into my life.

Belonging as true gratitude

The more and more I uncovered about who I was and who I wanted to be, I was able to recognize the pieces that were missing and the pieces I needed to let go. I could still be grateful for the pieces I was letting go and also be grateful for the space I was making for the pieces I needed to welcome in. I was learning that to truly belong to my life I needed to move through it from a place of connection. It was up to me to connect the pieces in a way that created true belonging for myself. That it was okay to evaluate and reevaluate and continue to ask myself … is this who I am and who I want to be? If something feels like I am just trying to make it fit, why is that? I can still be grateful for my life AND work to make sure I am not compromising true belonging to just make something fit because I think that it should or because someone else tells me it should. For me, this will be an ongoing journey I take myself on. Today, I am incredibly grateful for my life AND I am also very much aware that my gratitude can and will always exist among my doubts and fears and desire for more. True belonging begins with letting go of what is no longer working and letting in what is truly meant to be – this is where I continue to anchor myself when the river begins to feel strong and the current faster. I am allowed to let go so that I can let in what is truly meant to be. I am allowed to belong to my own life.