Trusting My Intuition

 As a child, I didn’t have much choice.

I was expected to do what my parents told me to do.

Their decisions were the decisions.

Their feelings mattered.

Their rules were to be followed.

I learned early not to question the people who were supposed to know better.

But somewhere along the way, I carried that lesson into adulthood.

I still listened too much to the advice of other people.

Doctors.

Experts.

People I believed knew more than I did.

These past few years have brought that pattern into sharp focus.

I have listened to doctor after doctor give me direction, hoping that the next treatment, the next procedure, or the next answer would finally bring relief.

Some were wonderful doctors.

I don’t believe they were careless or didn’t want to help me.

But I’ve come to realize that no one person can always see the whole picture.

They see what they have been trained to see.

They have their knowledge, their experience, and their perspective.

But I am the one living inside this body.

I am the one who feels what is happening.

And somewhere along the way, I began to understand that I have another source of wisdom.

My intuition.

It took me many years to even recognize that I had one.

It took even longer to trust it.

Perhaps that is because trusting my intuition requires something I wasn’t taught as a child.

Trusting myself.

Listening to that quiet voice inside me.

Paying attention when something doesn’t feel right.

Allowing myself to ask questions.

And giving myself permission to say, “I don’t know if this is right for me.”

I don’t have to reject the wisdom of others to honor my own.

I can listen.

I can learn.

I can consider advice.

And then I can go inside myself and ask,

What do I know?

What does my body tell me?

What feels right?

Maybe this is another part of becoming the safe place for the little girl inside me.

She spent so many years being told what to think, what to feel, and what to do.

Now I want her to know that she has a voice.

And I am finally learning to listen.

Too Many Goodbyes

 My heart feels heavy today.

It is carrying a lot of sadness.

Eight years of watching the disease of addiction take more and more of my daughter, until eventually I lost her completely.

And then there is my grandmother.

She came to live with me in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s.

Of all the people in my life, she was one of the people I loved and trusted the most.

She was someone who made me feel safe.

And then I had to watch the disease slowly take her farther and farther away from me.

At first, there were little things.

Things she forgot.

Moments that didn’t quite seem like her.

And then there came a time when she didn’t know me anymore.

That kind of loss is difficult to explain.

Because the person you love is still physically there, but pieces of the relationship begin disappearing before they do.

It feels like a death before the death.

And there have been other losses too.

So many goodbyes.

The last was my partner.

He had been my rock through so many of the losses in my family.

When so much of what was familiar to me was disappearing, he was the person who remained.

And then I lost him too.

His absence left a tremendous hole in my heart.

I think about how many goodbyes my heart has had to endure.

Watching someone slowly disappear.

Letting go.

Losing.

Then learning how to live with the empty space they leave behind.

Maybe that is why my heart feels so heavy today.

Sometimes we grieve someone while they are still sitting right in front of us.

Sometimes we say goodbye a thousand times before we ever say the final one.

And perhaps that is what my heart is carrying now.

Not just the loss of my daughter.

Not just the loss of my grandmother.

Not just the loss of my partner.

But all the goodbyes.

All the pieces of people I loved that disappeared long before I was ready to let them go.

I have survived so many endings.

But surviving them doesn’t mean they didn’t leave a mark.

Today, I don’t think I need to make the sadness go away.

Maybe I just need to let my heart be heavy.

To honor what was lost.

To honor how deeply I loved.

Because perhaps the depth of the grief is also evidence of the depth of the love.

Letting the Rock Crumble

 Since I was a little girl, I quietly assigned myself a job.

Keep everyone else happy.

Make things better.

As a teenager, my friends came to me with their problems.

I listened.

I comforted.

I searched for answers.

Helping other people felt as natural as breathing.

Years later, a friend stayed with me for a while.

Most of my life, I positioned myself as the strong one.

The rock.

The dependable one.

The one who carried everyone else’s burdens, even when my own shoulders were already heavy.

When I think about my life, one memory takes my breath away.

The day of my daughter’s funeral.

It was the worst day of my life.

As people came to hug me and offer their condolences, I found myself comforting them.

Even then.

Even in the deepest grief I had ever known.

I instinctively reached for their pain before my own.

That is how deeply this role had become a part of me.

Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that rocks don’t get to fall apart.

They don’t get tired.

But tonight, as I write these words, something feels different.

I can feel that rock beginning to crumble.

I don’t really know what that means.

Part of me wants to gather the pieces and build it back exactly as it was.

Another part wonders if it was never meant to last forever.

Maybe the rock isn’t crumbling because I am becoming weaker.

Maybe it is crumbling because I no longer need to carry a role that was never mine to begin with.

Perhaps beneath the rock is a woman who needs to grieve her own pain.

I don’t know exactly who she is yet.

But for the first time, I don’t feel the need to stop the crumbling.