Bring on The Cake!

How is everyone today?
Lemme ask y'all something. Straight up.

Isn't it fucking hard to show ourselves when we are in a period of deep struggle? Like, how many of you try to put on a happy face and be the person everyone expects ( and often depends on) you to be, when what you really feel like doing is hiding on the floor of your closet?

Yeah.
Me too.

Everyone has ups and downs, and although those times are challenging, I am talking about a different kind of place.

A raw, bleeding, dark, pulsating place.

Every one of us, at one point or another in our lives, will find ourselves crumpled in a broken pile of pieces on the floor. Like we have been hit by a Mack Truck. It feels like we are within an inch of surviving. And there is no rescue rope. And we are searching for a way to function and even perhaps do the most mundane of tasks like brushing our goddamn teeth.
I have had more than one of these moments, as Life would have it, lying broken on the floor in a puddle of my own tears and snot. The sneaky thing is, as it turns out, this raw point of vulnerability is the touchpoint of creativity. Of empowerment. Of learning to live for real.

If we can embrace the brokenness and allow ourselves to lay there for a while, not hiding what we feel or what we are experiencing in an effort to keep others around us from freaking out or feeling bad (because that's what we do, isn't it...hide our true emotions sometimes so that the people around us won't feel uncomfortable or weirded out), then we can actually find the deep strength it takes to move forward. AND we get to design what "forward" looks like. Sometimes the people around us who love us the most, want to design our experience for us, and they mean well. But it often comes from their scared-shitless place and their deep need for us to not be in a kind of pain THEY can't solve or fix immediately.
Who do you have that can sit in the dark with you while you hurt? And not try to throw every light in the house on? Who can look you in your face and say "that sucks as much as you feel like it does, I am so sorry, I have been there", instead of throwing out solutions left and right? Even better, maybe offer you some chocolate cake while you are down there on the floor of your closet, AND sit there and eat facefuls of it with you? These are the folks that rock.

Allowing the vulnerability to be present is something it is taking me years to learn. I still work with it daily. It's the damn 3 am "bathroom" voice that kicks my ass usually, hijacking my thoughts from sleep state and sending me reeling into a crazy swirl of beating myself at 42 rounds of the "second-guessing everything I did and said since last Tuesday" game. Who the hell can go back to sleep after a thrashing like that??

I have always been kind of a straight-faced, feel no pain kinda girl. I don't like messy. Okay, that's a lie. I fucking HATE messy. I want to clean up the messy in a big fat hurry before anyone sees it, because god forbid a neighbor or friend would get the slightest hint that I am not perfect or have all my shit together in the face of the most epic storm.

Oh perfectionism.....
That mother trucker will be the topic of tomorrow's post.