“I just feel so…”
I waited patiently for Claudia to find the right word.
“…heavy”, she finished, and I recoiled slightly in surprise.
It was Wednesday night, and we were gathered at a woman’s circle to celebrate International Women’s Day. Claudia sat next to me with her blonde hair cut into straight bangs across her forehead. Her eyes were a vibrant blue, and open wide as they usually were, her lips bright red and full.
“It’s just… everything was so new and fun last year, and it was all going right, and now when I wake up in the morning I have to figure out how the hell I’m going to get out of bed and do what I need to do”.
Oh.
Now that feeling I knew well. I had done the same thing many times over the last eighteen months, often having to devote the entire morning to self care practices (meditation, reiki, naps, yoga) to try to pull myself out of the funk. Sometimes, even they didn’t work.
I listened to the rest of what Claudia had to say, most of it familiar. I looked around the room and saw all the other women nodding their heads compassionately or smiling in recognition. They had all been there, and they understood.
Claudia was one of those rare people that knew how to speak the truth (if there were more people like her, we wouldn’t feel so isolated by our pain). Still, I was surprised. She was supposed to be happy, wasn’t she?
At least that’s what I had always thought of her. Every time we had met, she had held her chin high, her mouth turned up in a contagious smile as bubbly conversation flowed easily from her red lips.
I suppose that’s what most people would think about me: Happy and bubbly with an easy smile. “Living the life,” they’d say, after another trip to Indonesia or Hawaii. And I was living the life, from the outside looking in.
But one thing I have learned to accept as truth: we can never know what another’s inside is like.
The women’s circle fell in the middle of the 7 Day Gratitude Challenge that I was doing with my community, and I had 250 people signed up. When I first decided to put challenge together, I had NOT been feeling good.
I had been in Claudia’s I-don’t-know-how-to-get-out-of-bed stage for far too long.
Of course, there were many days during that time that I felt happy, content, and like life was going well, but the rough days came far more often than I was comfortable with. It seemed like nothing I did would stop them from showing up. It was frustrating and confusing, as I rode the roller coaster up and then down, over and over again.
You could imagine then, that my biggest concern launching the challenge was my own authenticity. The thought of being one off those new age spiritual entrepreneurs trying to sell you a dream that I didn’t have made me want to vomit.
I had to go deep and ask myself, can I spend a week telling people to be grateful when I cant even do it myself?
The answer was yes, I could. Because somewhere inside of me I knew that it was time to embrace some lightness. I had been grieving for over a year, and if I launched this challenge, then I would be forced to live up to my own teachings.
I would have to look for all that was good in my life.
I was, essentially, building the very life raft that would pull me out of my wreckage.
Guess what.
It worked.
Not only did I feel full of gratitude and appreciation, I came to understand something else equally important. It isn’t just Claudia and I having these troubles.
It is the majority of humans living on this earth.
Through reading the posts that my participants put in the Facebook group, and from emails or messages they would send me in private, I came to understand that we are all doing the same thing. We are living life, to the best of our ability (which sometimes isn’t very good) while simultaneously searching to feel, or be, better.
We have a kind of collective suffering that we are connected by, and a shared desire for joy. We are bonded through our search for contentment and happiness, and we are made brothers and sisters by both our admission of dissatisfaction, and our quest to be satisfied.
Back in the incense laden women’s circle, I contemplated the theme of the evening. It was “I feel so I can heal”. I thought about the way I had allowed myself to be in darkness since resigning from the ambulance. I had honoured my grief the best way I could. I did not distract myself with partying, men, tv, wine, or escaping (much).
It was hard, but I refused to not grieve. I think that was difficult for some of my loved one’s and friends to understand, and maybe even confusing to me.
But when we feel, we heal.
It’s tricky though, because if we feel too long, we run the risk of owning our sadness, of identifying with the struggle, or of becoming a victim. In that place, the depression is happening TO us, instead of FOR us, and we are helpless.
I couldn’t help but think that life is like a high line (or tight rope), and we have to find that perfect balance point between knowing how to honour and allow what we feel (grief, anger, loneliness), and putting in some effort to be grateful, positive, and energetic.
If we try too hard to be positive, we run the risk of denial and distraction, and in that space there is no way to learn, grow or heal (though it feels a lot easier at the time). If we wallow too much in pain, we can fall into depression and victimhood.
Somewhere there, right in the middle, is the place where you can walk along the high-line of your life, one light foot at a time.
