Sometimes we just need to say it out loud or hear our beloveds say it to us instead: I am perfect in my imperfections. Or: I am not my body. Or: I am more than how I define myself or how the world defines me. I don't fit inside a box and that is ok.
We struggle. We carry baggage and scars, our souls and hearts riddled with holes we patch with tape and daub with glue. It's hard work to grow up and bumps and bruises are part of the package. Me? I struggle with forgiveness. There is one thing I fear I will never forgive- because maybe I don't want to. The anger about it feels so good sometimes, a drug I can't bring myself to quit though I know it's killing me inside. I'm quietly, slowly, learning to let it go but there are days when I wonder if I can.
I struggle with fears of being left. There are days in my past I wish I couldn't remember- and things said and done that I bitterly regret. There's a particular feeling in my stomach I used to get that only comes every once-in-a-while, but when it does, it sends me reeling backwards to being 9 years old and feeling like I didn't have a home and that I was being split into too many pieces. I lay low. I let it pass.
I struggle with trying to please others too much. Last year, I got so tired of it that I turned my back on it and reacted in a way I never could have imagined. I stopped accepting and started asserting. It was hard and scary and made me cry. But it was liberating. I felt so free and in control, in a way I never had before. I had a voice and I had the right- finally- to use it. That may have been the moment when I decided that I liked who I was, despite my flaws. Despite the tape and the glue and the never-going-to-have-it-completely-figured-out. That I was going to accept her and help her, instead of tamping her down. I am going to let that soul glow out through the scars and the taped-up parts, shine through the holes and onto others.
I'm still struggling. We all are. But I can help carry someone's baggage as I dab on some glue and press down the Band-Aid. We heal each other. We heal ourselves.
