I’m 28 years old, and by many accounts you might say I’m all grown up. I did a bunch of adult things in this past decade: got married, bought a house, got a dog, bought a car, sorted out my life. Now I’m doing this big grown up thing I never wanted to do and never thought I would do, and yet I have made such spectacular peace with it: I’m getting divorced.
We’re always growing and changing, but all of us experience personal growth spurts throughout life. This past year and a half, dealing with depression and anxiety and an existential crisis, I have had no choice but to grow if I ever wanted to heal. I have had no choice to but look at all the ways I have conditioned myself to think and act in an effort to be safe, instead of true. And when I started challenging the safety mechanisms of my own mind–when I started to acknowledge parts of myself that I had been stomping down for years–old wounds, new wounds, hopes and fears, truths and lies–my life started to fall apart.
The tricky thing about healing is that many times when you take your power back, the people who met you when you were giving your power away don’t know what to do with you. When you start to set boundaries, the people who benefited from you not having any boundaries tend to get upset.
It’s messy.
But worth it.
