My Blog
Tools and strategies for owning, valuing, and celebrating your life.
She said, "Oh that's good, because we don't really have many people of your kind at our school and she'd probably have a hard time fitting in."
"What kind are we?" I asked, completely baffled and wholly curious to see what was about to come out of her mouth.
"You know... broken," she said, shrugging her shoulders and smiling apologetically, "We don't have any broken families at our school."
Oh. Broken.
It was almost my turn to speak. In our close and huddled circle, each person had already spoken in hushed voices and long pauses -- each taking time to go within, to listen and to wait -- bringing forward only what they had found to be true about their experience, sometimes with the look of astonishment as though they had just discovered something they didn't even know they knew. To sit with someone as they tell the truth is to witness something holy, one of the greatest gifts of our shared human experience.
A while back, a woman wrote to me asking me to talk her out of being a fool. She'd met a guy and for whatever reason there was a spark. Lightning even. She said that she knew better than to believe that it could go anywhere.
It’s like I closed my eyes for two minutes. Maybe it was just a blink. I swear, it couldn’t have been that long. Fall came and went. My daughter now too old to be taken door to door by her mother, made plans to trick-or-treat with friends. Did we even buy a pumpkin this year? I don’t think so.
I needed to speak to you: lost one. You know who you are, the one who wrote to me for help. You're the one who reached out in those last hours of your life. You are the one who told me your story. You're the one who doesn't go a day without crying. You're the one at rock bottom. The one whose been too far lost now for far too long.
I think this is what happens when a heart gets broken too many times. When a person gets criticized too many times. Or when a body is lonely for too long. To save our own lives, we cut pieces of ourselves off in an attempt to drag ourselves to whatever we are desperately seeking.
These were little compromises, tiny seemingly-harmless shape-shifty-things. I'd backed myself into a corner of a very small cage. And I wasn't okay in there. Something needed to change.
In an effort to find quiet space in my house, somewhere that I could find solace -- a place to be able to write in peace, I decided to move outside. Our back deck looks over a canopy of oaks stretching from our home down the canyon toward the beach. I created a luxurious outdoor room with a super comfy sectional sofa and overstuffed pillows. I stocked it with cozy blankets (heated ones for cold and foggy mornings) and music (Sonos: I love you). My outdoor living room gets nuclear amounts of sunshine at certain parts of the day, so we hung some extra long outdoor drapes that can pull across part of the deck to shade the patio area.
The problem is that many of us confuse people-pleasing with actual kindness. And these two are easy to confuse because on the outside the behavior can look very similar. Yet, internally, they are vastly different and the key to their differences comes down to one thing: motive.
Courageous Intimacy is the sharing of all of one's heart with one another. And I'm not talking about sharing the pretty parts - like love and joy - with each other (although that's great and I encourage you to do so). I mean sharing all of you: the good, the bad and the ugly. Sharing who you really are—which is a practice of unending vulnerability.
