new beginnings

Life's had many new beginnings for me over the past few months. Honestly, I could summarize the nearly first half of this year by the phrase. While this post signals another such beginning, this site—well, this most recent iteration—is merely a rethought continuation of something intrinsic to who I've known myself to be for many years. Still, a part I allowed myself to bury in the last few months due to a bit of negative feedback and a fragile ego.

With every beginning comes an end or a transition. After all, ends and beginnings are just as transitionary as middles to stories, perhaps even more so. Therefore, this beginning comes with an end that my mentor and coach helped me finally bring into being just this past weekend. The genesis of this blog brings with it the end of a period of self-conscious silence.

We were talking about shadow work—you know, light stuff—and he commented offhand that he preferred to put his shadow into the spotlight by being more public about it. Automatically, I blurted out that I needed to get back to writing. After he responded that he didn't know what that meant, I explained that I needed to return to blogging as writing is one of the best ways I know to process life.

So, here I am.

I've blogged off and on for over fifteen years now, so this isn't exactly new, but how I approach it—vulnerably, with self-compassion and awareness—is undoubtedly a shift. It's all too easy for me to identify in my writing with the part of me that believes I'm worthless and would rather live a small, unfulfilling, but safe life. However, where I sit today, that seems intolerably dissatisfying.

To put it out there bluntly, my great fear is that I'm the devil in living flesh and beyond redemption. Because of this, I have caused and experienced tremendous amounts of pain in my relationships and for myself over the years. I have tried on innumerable masks, taken on countless personas, convinced they were more lovable—to earn my place in relationships—than plain old me.

It doesn't take a genius to understand this is a recipe for disaster reflexively, and it has been just that. Unmitigated. Disaster. Yet, this is something both avoidable and predictable.

Growing up, we all received messages about who we should be—how we should show up and what we should present to the world. We met circumstances where we rationalized the disappointments and hurts we experienced as somehow our faults because that was how our logic worked and kept us from the depths of intolerable pain in contemplating that sometimes adults failed us. We understand on some level that we need the adults to help keep us alive, so we create clever rationales to save ourselves from the terror of this tragic fact; the problem is that we carry these schemas close to our chests throughout the rest of our lives.

This formulaic thinking that when things happen, someone must be to blame is pervasive for many of us. I know it is for me even still. In my case, I typically assume it's my fault, which leads to a sense of shame.

The shame arises because of this correlation between a negative event or outcome, which is supposedly my fault, as the line of thinking goes. This means that I have necessarily done something bad, which often leads to me thinking that I am bad. This doesn't always happen, but it happens frequently enough, and the results are never good.

Receiving negative feedback from a few people within a couple of short months to some words that I'd written only confirmed to me that my internalized shame was indeed accurate and valid. This is the trap for someone trying to be vulnerable but not having done sufficient work to ensure I was doing so with the necessary internal resources and external support. It hurt deeply, and I allowed myself to crumble inwards, getting small enough to keep myself safe once more.

Too many months passed, but it was precisely the time that I needed to reckon with this part of my shadow and accept myself more fully. I'm grateful to have found a supervisor and mentor who has challenged me over the past few months to confront this professionally. However, one mantra I repeat with some frequency I first heard from Richard Rohr is the phrase, "How you do one thing is how you do everything," which I think is one of the most accurate things I've heard.

I'm attempting to live into expansiveness and possibility, which embraces both the freedom and unpredictability that smallness attempts to avoid. This beginning is a personal attempt to be me bravely and vulnerably because that is what this world needs most—people living life as the Self. I hope this inspires some of you to examine how we make ourselves small because we still believe it to be the humble, safe, or familiar choice.

So, I appreciate your support, attention, and kindness to those still reading. I wish you well and hope you'll return for the following report from this journey we call life. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, Beloveds.