From the Winter of Discontent to the Spring of Living

I sat there staring at the screen.

A curious little creature stared back at me.  Hands clasped together, in the shape of a gun, pointing at me.

Pew! Pew! Pew! Die Bitch!

The words stung me, as if I was staring down the actual barrel of a gun.

This was my website four weeks ago.

I had been hacked.

Two weeks later I received a phone call:

“Hi love, it’s Mr C.”

He sounded funny, not quite right.

“I’m just phoning you to let you know that I have been made redundant.  I’m on my way home.”

Two weeks after that, I am talking to my life coach who isn’t really a life coach at all – she is a life saver, an all round amazing human being.  She is asking me questions about paths I have taken in my life, encouraging me to explore the reasons behind those decisions.

BAM!

A sudden, massive, unrelenting, burdening, oh-so-heavy, wave of dark, thick guilt washes over me.  An iron ball I have been carrying in the pit of my stomach for over 24 years makes itself known.  It taunts me.

I am drowning, weighted down by all that has happened in recent weeks, and all that has come before.

It has been silently sitting there, eating away at my very soul.  A ball that has unknowingly informed every decision I have made since that time.  A decision that I have blindly punished myself for ever since, despite the gift that decision brought forth.

The tears flow.  I have no words.  A silent scream into the distance.

Exhaustion follows.  Fitful sleep.  Lots and lots of sleep.

Pain.  Extreme, unbearable pain.

The reckoning that must come.  The death, the grief, the wishing it were not so, the final acceptance.

This is how healing begins.

We must shine the light on that darkest part of us that we have buried so deep we forget it even exists.

Our soul knows it exists.  There is no escaping it.  Not in the end.  Our soul needs us to shine a light on it.  And it chips away until we do, or until we die.

But we fight it.  The dark side of us wants us to hide.  For fear of  the truth coming out.  For fear that the world will see how unworthy we truly are.  For fear that our deepest darkest secrets will come out and prove to the world what we already know about ourselves.  That we were a mistake, that our souls were not meant to be, that the choices we made are punishable by a life time of despair.

Yet, the more we deny it, the sicker our soul becomes.  Navigating the murky waters of life becomes like wading through tar.  Thick black tar that sticks to us, marks us with the black mark of the grim reaper, for all the world to see.  There is no hiding.  Only pain.

We feel unlovable, unworthy, uneasy with life.  Suicide becomes a sweet seductress, the mistress of pain relief.

Until we face the truth.

And in facing that truth, shining a light upon it, we realise that it isn’t as bad as we imagined.  We realise that all those years we spent in purgatory, all the time we spent flagellating ourselves over and over again until the very core of us was bleeding and raw and open and bare and spent, was just sending us further and further into the dark pit of despair, whilst all the while we craved the light.

And now we can sit in the light.  Possibly for the first time in our lives.  We can sit in the light and know that what we did was not right, but not wrong either.  It simply happened.  We can sit in the light and know we have punished ourselves enough.  We have done our time.

And we can sit in that light with those we love and trust the most and know that that is enough.  We can sit in that light and know that they love us and we are worthy of that love.  We can sit in that light, that warmth, and know that the spring, after all these years spent in the winter of discontent, has finally arrived.

Let the growing begin.

Until next time,