A Widow’s Self Reflection on Healing.
It’s easy to preach about living in the moment when we’re numbing out or avoiding reality.
When we create false moments through parties, drinking, shopping, drugs, food, gossip, social media, etc. In order to avoid our feelings about our actual reality, it’s so very easy to tell ourself that we live in the moment.
I was numb for a very long time. So numb that I had to seek outside sources of pleasure for myself in order to remind myself that I even had feelings at all. I was not totally dead inside yet, but my soul definitely slipped in and out of a coma-like state for a while.
Pain and trauma do that to a human. Our bodies are hard wired to shut it all down and encase the tender parts of us with iron clad armor.
*Note: before you tell yourself that you haven’t experienced pain or trauma, I challenge you to look honestly at your life. And the truth of it. It may not have been a tragedy that made headlines, but most trauma is quieter than that. It’s quieter than the word itself. So quiet that we tell ourselves it was nothing, dismissing our tender feelings and opting to suit up with the armor instead.
The thing no one could ever truly convey about healing, because you have to live it to know it, is that it gets ugly. The mind and body will literally battle the soul, clinging to the armor that protected the whole of the three so well, for so long.
Living in the moment, truly living in the moment, is actually brutal when you are recovering from something. Peeling off the armor, then removing the distractions that numb us is beyond uncomfortable. It is painful. The truth of our trauma is painful and forcing ourselves to feel it, is counter intuitive to our human nature to survive.
It takes patience and bravery to let the soul take over the mind and body like this… because the soul knows best; it also takes a type of self love that most of us are not nearly as used to giving ourselves as we should be.. (I’m sorry for that… because we all deserve to love ourself.)
If we can get here, if we can force our ourselves to peel away the armor, remove the distractions, look at the truth and feel it for as painful as it is, it will truly suck.
It will truly suck.
This process brings us to a breaking point, and just when we think we will break, we choose something better than the numbing distractions of the past. We call out to Him… and feel the relief.
There’s relief on the other side of that pain. There’s pain on the other side of that numbness. There’s bravery in venturing past those hurdles…. And there’s whole wide life to be lived on the other side of it all.
Remember, life is going to hit you hard with a lot of crappy stuff. Might as well live anyways.
I believe in you,
Meg
Might As Well Live 