Hello my beautiful darlings,
This will be my final #TransparentTuesday email of 2016, and I wanted to let you know how much I have loved writing them for you.
In fact, as I was searching for my barest truth for this email, all I could find within me was a desire to tell you how much I love you. So here we go.
An open love letter to my readers:
I know you’ve suffered. Bad things have happened to you, or near you, or to people you love. Bad things have been felt by you, even if they were far away.
You have experienced pain, and loneliness, and fear. You’ve been rejected by people who you thought you were safe to love. In various ways large and small, you’ve been crushed, devastated, destroyed, broken, and terrified.
Maybe you feel like you don’t deserve to feel these feelings. Despite what has actually happened to you, you know that other people have it worse. Despite how much you have suffered, you still feel like one of the lucky ones.
I see you, dear reader. I see all your pain. I see your guilt, and conflict, and turmoil, and darkness.
I also love you. Not in spite of your darkness and suffering and pain, but because of it. I find your darkness stunning.
I am in love with you, and your pain, and your darkness. Here’s why.
You are sensitive. Sometimes people say that as an insult, but I mean it literally, the way scientific instruments needs to be sensitive to pick up on subtle changes.
You feel the subtles echoes of pain and fear that roll off the people around you and getting passed forward from generation to generation and person to person. While these echoes might be invisible to someone else, you sense the danger of someone who is looking to continue the ripple effect of his own pain, and you sense the hopelessness of someone who has turned all of her ripple effect inward.
These barely perceptible signals run through you, and you feel them.
You might not realize what you’re feeling. You might not understand what’s happening. But it affects you, constantly, and it’s the source of much of your suffering.
The crazy thing is, despite this constant subtle suffering, and the burden of nobody else seeming to understand why you feel the way you do, you’ve had go on.
So you’ve built up the strength to keep going anyway. Which means that you are not only a finely tuned instrument, highly sensitive to the pain of the world, but you are also a survivor and a warrior and a fighter.
You had to be, because there is nowhere in our world for people like us to go to feel and heal our intense feelings.
Instead, we must also cook dinner and pay the bills and do laundry and raise families and solve problems and put gas in the car and try to be happy.
Which makes us not only sensitive and strong, but also incredibly capable leaders.
Like training for a marathon while wearing a weight vest, you have undoubtedly developed an uncanny ability to survive, to multi-task, to fix, to learn, to make the best, and to fucking persevere.
I believe that you are called to feel the pulse of pain running through the world, because you are the only one strong enough to heal from that knowledge and do the work needed to help. Your sensitivity is an invitation to suffer, and your strength ensures that this suffering won’t destroy you.
Why?
Because you were meant to lead.
Sometimes your superpowers can feel like an awful curse, I know. Sometimes on the journey to using your gifts to heal the world, you will rage that the world has so much healing left to do.
Sometimes you will sit in a room alone and sob until you have no tears left. Sometimes it will feel unfair. Sometimes it will feel hopeless. Sometimes it will feel like falling in love.
All of this is normal.
I expect you to rage, and to cry, and to quit, and to hide, and to learn, and to heal, and to ultimately change the world through whatever channel you are called to.
I expect this, because I too am a warrior. I too am called to alchemize pain into love, to turn my hurt into healing, and to lead women inward toward that healing for themselves. I know how it goes, and I know why you read everything I write.
The important thing to remember is that I was not born a healer or a leader. I was forged into one, under the fire of my own pain and suffering.
I am only brave and strong because I was constantly scared and hurt. I only became a leader because I was lost.
This is why I am in love with your pain and fear and suffering. This is why I find it so dazzlingly beautiful.
You are being forged.
You are becoming the leader you are meant to be.
The leader the world needs you to be.
Oh, and I have good news. If you’ve been training with a weight vest, you are not going to believe how fast and free you feel when you run without it.
I love you, <3
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