“They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.” –from Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (you've gotta read it)

July 2017; my old restaurant gig in Ocean City, Maryland; my friend’s birthday celebration. I can’t find any candles to put on a dessert for her. I ask my boss if we have any, or where I can go buy some in walking distance. It’s late, and I assume that’s why he acts like he has no idea how to answer me. I find the nearest mini-market and purchase the pack of birthday candles, snag a dessert from the cooks in the back to shove them in. We sing.

It wasn’t until later that night, after he realized I meant birthday candles, that I began to understand why he’d acted so strange about the whole thing. He’d thought that I was referring to the kind of candle you light in your home on your bedside table. I started laughing, and asked him what the hell I’d want an actual candle for at midnight.

“Well, I don’t know… I know you’re like a really deep person. I see the stuff you post; I read your blog.”

What. I managed a giggle and half-ran away before he could see the embarrassment on my face. The encounter left me feeling like someone had ripped some mask off of my face, like I was totally exposed. A really deep person? Someone that, when asking for birthday candles for a cake, people would assume was looking for a candle so they could hold a damn séance after their shift? 

I’m sharing this story not only because I find it hilarious (now), but because it felt so significant in that moment. I’d really thought that I was hiding so many parts of myself from these new people: My emotional, sappy nature. My spirituality. My passions. My quirks. The real stuff. Qualities that my close friends would list off immediately, but that I "hide" from the rest of the world because it leaves me vulnerable. (God, even the word’s jarring. Especially in italics.)

By this time, I had begun to reveal a new layer of myself with my blog, with my social media. And I knew that, like, my mom was reading it. But my boss? But that friend of a friend? That other friend’s girlfriend? The mask I’d held tight over my face for so much of my life was slipping off. People began to approach me (IRL) about what they’d read, the ways that it inspired or helped them or kept them reading, and I realized quickly that revealing myself was much easier to do behind a page or a screen.

And then my next thoughts: too bad.

Too bad because “easy” never got you closer to where that gnawing in your heart was pulling like a freight train barreling and barreling down it’s tracks. Too bad because hiding away, all hunched up at the coffee shop writing in your notebook won’t get your words to that one woman who needs them. If a shitty Wordpress blog reaches an arm around someone’s shoulder, right now, that’s enough. Too bad because there’s a reason these lines flow through you, and it has nothing to do with you and your fear, anyway. Has nothing to do with you, anyway. Too bad because all your dreams rotting away in the pit of your stomach need release, love, and changing the world looks like standing right in the center of it. Shoulders down and back. Ribs splayed. Heart-bared. Looking dead in the eyes at what hurts, what heals, what matters. What actually matters. Looking dead in the eyes at god in every person that you meet.

Telling myself these things once didn’t work. But telling myself these things over and over and over, recommitting and recommitting and recommitting…

Began to feel like relief.

And then shock. (Something like, “oh, wait… people still like me? For who I am?”)

 

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ― Brené Brown

 

My last few months in Ocean City were more full than I’d ever expected them to be. In a town crawling with drunk partiers and sloppy hook-ups, neither of which I’m into (these days), I found sanctuaries. I found space for real connection and creativity. I found friends that felt like coming home to a home I never knew was waiting for me. Opportunities to show myself, over and over. Me. All of me. Roots to stems to wide-opening petals.

I realized in hindsight that I could have chosen to be whoever I wanted to be there. No one knew me. The whole damn town was in and out once a week. But I chose to be myself. That deep-down, real-ass self. And in choosing her, everything I needed flowed to me freely. Everything I didn’t removed itself on its own, or didn’t even come close. In choosing her, I began to actually want to. What a gift.

♥  ♥  ♥

 

Last October, I moved home abruptly, knowing just three days before I left Ocean City that my time there was up (a long story for another blog I’ll never get a second to write). But I had no idea what I was doing. I traveled for a short time, but even as I was driving around the entire island of Iceland and running the maze of Barcelona streets, I felt myself longing for home, like I was the yo-yo on a string and the hand at the top was all the way back in York, Pennsylvania.

 

 

And it was not where I wanted to go.

I went anyway. Unsure. Confused. No job to go back to. No real purpose, I thought. I moved back into my old apartment and started to live on the money I’d made at the beach, spending my days floating around the city and visiting friends and family, waiting for a knowing of what I was here for.

In my stagnancy, the few months after became a series of some of the deepest self-work I’ve done since I got sober three and some years ago. The deeper the year crawled into winter, the more I hid myself like a bag of bones. All my practices in sanity suddenly didn’t lift me up, and any attempt at giving in to old comforts from the past—keeping myself numbingly busy, an ex, old habits—quickly stopped working and were taken away. Everywhere I tried to run and hide, there I was.

By November, I was losing it. That’s the best way I can sum it all up. Isolating is not my style, and the living room became the furthest place I’d go on most days. Sometimes, that only lasted minutes, and I was back in my bed in a sea of pillows, eyes covered with heavy black blankets. A lot people still didn’t even know I’d moved home.

I watched days pass by. Then weeks. Regardless of all the love in my life, all the passions I held, I couldn’t feel a thing. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t get back to my yoga practice. I couldn’t connect or be present with my family or my friends who were so grateful to have me home. Nothing I cared about meant a thing. All I could comprehend were the layers and aspects of myself being revealed to me, the walls that I’d built around myself. All I could see was me: my blocks, my shadow, the weights I was carrying. 

Out of pure desperation, I went back to therapy for the first time in years. I dragged myself to 12-step meetings that I didn’t think eased the ache anymore. I got a job. I clung to anyone who’d let me. I read book after book about self-inquiry and trauma and shadow, until I could only look at my best friend and say, I can’t fucking do this anymore. I think I need to burn all this shit.  

For the record, she told me I should. And that would have made for a more dramatic ending to the story. But, instead, I kept army-crawling my way through the work. I completed an intense, immersive 100-hr yoga teacher training. Then another. I started to show my face in the world again. I started to teach. I started to let go of the stories I had about my life, the old ideas I was gripping onto about myself that weren’t true anymore. I started to grab other women by the hand and pull them along with me. Show them the way up and out, too.

But honestly, I was just granted enough grace to be willing to not give up on myself. That’s all. I was just granted another window of opportunity, as I have been again and again, to be willing to do whatever was placed in front of me to change whatever needed to change. To transform.

And here’s just one thing I've learned, I’m definitely “deep.” And probably, I am someone that would be looking for a candle for some sort of ritual at midnight on a Saturday after work…

And so what? So what, Lizz? 

And so in breaking down more layers—in integrating these parts of myself by accepting these parts of myself—I am more whole. I am more human. I am more able to look at god’s creatures in their eyes. To see them. But even more so: to let them see me.

I’m still working on this. On being unafraid to be seen. On being able to show up in the world as my whole, authentic, imperfect self. Not buzzword authentic. Real life, dirty and slimy authentic.

It's a lifetime process. And I’m more and more aware of that each time I come to a new crossroads and don’t know which way to turn, each time I’m lonely and scared and aching for something just out of my reach, each time I think I know something about how it all works—about god, about love, about the universe—and I’m reminded that I don’t know a damn thing. I never did. Each moment is new.

Thank God.

“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.” ―C.G. Jung

 

So, last but not least, in an effort at further integrating my shadow—which just means, essentially, blasting aspects of myself that I reject so that they hold less power over me…

Here’s a list of things that I am or that I have been:

• Hypocritical
• Skeptical/untrusting
• Controlling
• Scared AF
• Codependent
• Wavering in my faith
• A coward
• Self-obsessed/ego-centric/selfish to the bone
• Manipulative
• Judgmental/self-righteous/snobby
• Unsure about everything
• Obsessive
• Self-pitying
• Ridiculous
• Ignorant
• Impatient
• A victim in my life
• Fat
• Harsh, blunt, and cold—bordering on cruel
• Withholding of my love
• Gluttonous/a hog
• Totally unaware/delusional
• Dirty, trap-house trash
• Lazy/unproductive
• A liar
• A thief
• A fraud
• Inconsiderate of others
• Unwilling
• Asleep

But you know what I’ve never been? Undeserving. Unworthy. Unloved.

You either. We are never. Please know that.

"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” -Late Fragment, Raymond Carver

Then, empowerment. An exhale. Release.

 

*Anyone with questions about/interest in shadow work, please see the book “The Dark Side of the Light Chasers” by Debbie Ford or (and especially) Lacy Philips’ work at Free + Native. Or ask me. There’s nothing I love more than leading others back home to themselves. Love you all. Thank you for listening.

♥