Unknown…Undone…Unfold

We come into the world unknown. Fresh from the womb we arrive, with only basic medical facts known of us. Wide-eyed, into this complex world, we emerge. We are reliant on our caregivers for some time, helpless and dependent, but our souls already have a plan. My beliefs in spirituality and metaphysics back this up. We show up, lifetime after lifetime, to learn the lessons and make the changes that we failed to in the last lifetime. In this way, our souls become more and more evolved with the goal of reaching enlightenment. These beliefs have been supportive to me in some of my darkest times. It keeps me from feeling victimized by the events of my life.

As a young girl, I was keenly aware of this “unknownness”. I often felt that no one understood me. I felt “missed”, even believing that I was misplaced in my family. I connected with them and parts of my childhood were incredibly sweet, but I was aware that my uniqueness was…unique. 

Often I dreamed that my true father, a king, would come and rescue me from this “other” family. 

My siblings were into their friends, partying and mischief. I was a straight “A” student with perfect attendance and attended church regularly, becoming one of the first altar girls in our neighborhood. The family joke, that I was adopted, seemed to be potentially valid. Always there was a hunger to be known. The absence of this left me feeling as if I were somehow alone in the world. It wasn’t until my Megan was 10 that I truly felt known. She gave me a tape cassette, having recorded all of my favorite songs. I still have it. This same year Emily gave me a notepad for list-making while driving and Caitlin gave me a homemade scissor case and made me a potholder. I felt truly happy, feeling “known” by these 3. I still have these gifts, evidence that I had made myself known to my beautiful girls. 

Then came the “undoing”. My life, like any other, had ups and downs and starts and stops, successes and failures. The undoing is something quite different. In 2011 I got myself into a relationship that would prove far more destructive than the adjective “abusive” will allow. As predicted by my abuser’s parents, my ex tirelessly, insidiously, and diligently worked at isolating me from every good thing in my life. I was not a victim. I made choices that kept me, like quicksand, in that relationship. I thought that I was the only one that could help his lost soul and believed that it was my duty and gift to do so, no matter what the cost. I held fast to the belief that this was a soul-calling and the work that it would bring was necessary for my own evolution. As I lost more and more of myself and my life, I always knew that there would come a day when I would have to choose between loving him and loving myself. My life was unraveling. I was becoming undone. Parts of my personality faded. My relationships and connections to family and church dissolved. I came close to losing my job, a career that I had fought hard to create. I neglected my health, my home and my dogs. By the time I lost my mother and brother, one year later, I was a mere shell of myself. 

I was losing my hair which had been thick and long and healthy for as long as I knew. My blood pressure was 200’s over 100’s which is seriously concerning. I developed 3 clots in my leg. I was not sleeping. Depression, shame and living with a psychotic person who used sleep deprivation as a tool to weaken and disarm me led my adrenal glands to all but die away. I was sick constantly. As per Ayurveda, my body knew long before my mind caught up. 

Shortly after losing my mom and brother, my other brother was diagnosed with the same cancer as the first. This, and the guilt born from not spending enough time with my mom and brother before they passed led me to start creating a plan to escape from the abuser. Sometimes I fantasized that I would feign my own death in order to escape, much like Julia Roberts did in Sleeping with the Enemy. There were many threats of hurting my loved ones, including my beloved dogs and always my own fear of being abandoned or hurt, now that I had alienated myself from every good thing in my life. 

And then in 2013, my second brother died. This caused more shaking of my sense of self, more shedding of pieces of me. I had been trying to extricate myself from the toxic relationship and had been starting to rebuild broken relationships. Losing my second brother was so painful. As I vacillated between staying with and leaving the abuser, losing these family members threatened to steer me in the wrong direction. And then Megan.

On November 3, 2014, finding her was like a lightning bolt in my life. Words cannot express the love or the pain. The visceral nature of the pain is mostly indescribable. I lost touch with reality, as the pain was too much to bear. Most days, still, 9 years later, the pain is still palpable at a level that sometimes surprises even me. Losing her caused me to deal with feelings of guilt, inadequacy, sorrow, despair. And in this, the most tragic examples of “undoing”, I had a choice to make. 

I never saw my abuser again. Megan’s passing assured that I was out of that relationship. There was no way that I would allow Megan to be aware of the extreme level of abuse that I was living with. In many ways, she saved me. I had finally made the choice: to love myself above all else. I was raw. My life had been torn apart in many ways. What I was certain of was now uncertain. What I thought I could rely on, about myself and others, no longer existed. My false self was shattered and blown away like dust in the wind. No greater pain had ever been experienced. And I lost the one closest to my heart. I was undone. 

And it is this, if you allow yourself to embrace it, that will lead to the unfolding as it did for me. It took me some time, an abundance of effort at healing, the support of loved ones and a commitment to be fearless about letting go to be able to carry on. I rebuilt my life, one brick at a time and as I did I realized that the transformation was less about changing who I was and more about revealing who I truly am. Herein is the moral of the story.

We can sit still or we can become more. We can run after life and let our passion drive us. We can reach and strive and then thrive. Or we can merely exist, get through, endure. We always have the choice to contract or expand. Who’s to say what is best for any of us? That is a question that we alone will have to answer.