I can’t tell you how happy I am to be digging this blog up from the grave. But my mind is also overwhelmed with where to start and what to say– because there’s just so much! The last 6 years have been the most transformational, humbling, healing, painful, confusing, lonely, beautiful years of my life. 6 years ago, I was 26. I had just returned back to The States from France due mostly to logistical reasons, my teaching job had come to an end and I was quite frankly PANICKED. I was the opposite of grounded during this time. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t taught to ground, nor did my body know to instinctively do it. I didn’t understand what I needed to give myself. If only I had known the necessary healing that was in store for me. I sigh and I wince as I type this, because of course I wished things had gone differently. That’s hard to admit. A friend of mine was just about to move to Spain at the time and she had expressed wanting me to be involved in a new venture of hers in Barcelona. I remember being on the phone with her, frantic about money and my Visa and all the things that I didn’t have the answers to. I’ll never forget her saying to me, “I think you’re letting fear get in the way”. She was right. And I knew it. But I didn’t know what to DO about it. It’s hard to say what would’ve happened if I had tried to stay over there. Because what I needed wasn’t just to overcome my fear, I needed to overcome myself. I needed to REGULATE my nervous system. I needed to create safety within the confines of my body. That’s a tall order for a 26 year old who didn’t even have a therapist at the time. That kind of soul healing and unlearning takes time and daily practice and support and acceptance and self-awareness. All of which I had tricked myself into thinking I didn’t have. My cognitive distortions were running RAMPANT. I had all sorts of limiting beliefs, self-destructive thinking patterns and I was selling myself massively short. I simply didn’t know what I didn’t know. I wasn’t tapped in. I was hurting. I didn’t realize the feeling of being on edge and perpetually worried was actually a choice I was making and not a reality I was forced into. I also didn’t know there was a way to heal that part of myself. I thought that part of myself was simply who I was, no changing it. That was the age for me, where I was just becoming aware of the fact that I actually knew nothing. That everything I thought I knew was either a construct, a projection from someone else or a conditioned belief, not actually part of my core being. I hadn’t yet begun pealing the layers off, and therefore I wasn’t able to see myself.
When I lived in France, it was the first time in my adult life where I actually felt removed from all of the conditioning I had grown up with. I was thousands of miles away from everything I ever knew, and there was a delicious amount of freedom in that, it felt like GOLD and I wanted to desperately hold onto it. Returning home felt like defeat. I was a deflated balloon. I felt like someone was forcing me to put up my white flag. “I give up. This freedom was nice while it lasted. But clearly I’m not meant to actually escape my former reality. Otherwise, why would I be on a flight back to the desert?” It was such a unique and striking kind of pain that if I close my eyes, I can still feel the sensation in my bones. When I was living in a different country, on my own, I was for the first time– my own person. No one knew who I was. They didn’t know my name or my family or my past. I could pretend to be a completely different person if I wanted to. But was it really pretending? Or was it becoming? BECOMING a completely different person– the person I was always meant to be. The person I’ve always been before the world made me feel like I had to be someone else. And why did I feel I could only really blossom into this person, in a completely different country? What’s up with that? Is the conditioning really that strong at my origins? At age 32, I can honestly say yeah, it was and it is. America just isn’t for everyone. And it’s certainly not for me. I rebuke social conditioning as if it’s a sin. To me, France represented freedom. Say what you want about the French but those people do not hesitate when it comes to exercising their right to free speech. Travel represents freedom. Because as soon as you step foot onto new soil, you are metaphorically released from the shackles of who people think you are. All of a sudden, you’re just being. You are just existing. You are who you think you are. Not who others have been crafting, curating, expecting in their minds. There is suddenly space. There is ROOM. SO MUCH ROOM. But the thing is, I hadn’t explored the inner depths of myself. I wasn’t friends with my shadows. I hadn’t dared yet peak behind the curtains of my darker thoughts. I was still running from myself, and I used France as a tool to facilitate more distance. But what I was about to learn that there is no running from self. Wherever you go, there you are. And that was an excruciating reality for me.
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