No More Places to Hide

 When I look back at my life,

I can see all the creative ways

I learned to avoid the things

I didn’t know what to do with.

Before recovery,

I hid my feelings of unworthiness

by helping other people.

I threw myself into creative projects.

I excelled in my career.

From the outside,

I probably looked like I had it all together.

But I knew how I felt about myself.

Others didn’t.

I carried a tremendous amount of shame,

but I became very good at hiding it.

Helping people gave me purpose.

Creating gave me somewhere to go.

Work gave me something to accomplish.

And all of it kept me busy enough

that I didn’t have to look too closely

at the emptiness inside.

It looked like I had a charmed life.

But appearances can be deceiving.

Inside, I felt empty.

For a long time,

I thought I was simply being productive.

Now I can see

that some of it was survival.

I had learned how to build beautiful places

to hide in.

But eventually,

there came a time when

there were no more places to hide.

Recovery began to turn the lights on.

And once the lights were on,

I had to see myself.

The shame.

The fear.

The unworthiness.

The little girl who had been waiting

to be found.

It wasn’t easy.

But perhaps that was the beginning

of becoming whole.

Because you can’t heal

what you keep hiding from.

And today,

I don’t want any more places to hide.

I want to know myself.

All of me.

And finally learn

that I don’t have to accomplish,

create, or rescue my way

into being worthy of love.

I already am.

Hitting Rock Bottom

 Sometimes we can’t rise

Until we’ve exhausted every resource.

Until we feel chewed and spit out.

At least, that’s true for me.

I can’t count the times

I’ve tried everything I know. I can be determined/hardheaded.

But eventually,

there comes a moment

when there is nowhere left to look.

Nothing left to try.

No more answers to find.

And that’s usually when I surrender.

I’ve learned that surrender isn’t failure.

It isn’t giving up.

Sometimes surrender is finally admitting that I don’t have to figure everything out.

I don’t have to control the outcome.

I don’t have to find the answer.

I can simply let go.

And strangely enough,

surrender always seems to be

the right answer.

Heart and Soul

 For me, there are only two things that cannot be changed:

What resonates in my heart

and the truth in my soul.

Fear has often tried to step into my life.

I was raised on fear.

I learned early how easily fear can change our choices,

steal our peace,

and take things from us that matter.

But I’m learning something different now.

Fear may speak loudly,

but love is steady.

Fear can create doubt.

Love creates knowing.

Fear can make me question myself.

But my heart knows what is true,

and my soul knows the path.

I don’t need to understand every step.

I don’t need to know what comes next.

I only need to listen.

To what resonates in my heart.

To what is true in my soul.

Because fear may visit me,

but it doesn’t have to lead me.

Love does.

And I trust that love knows the way home.

When It’s Hard to Let Go

 There are times in life when we are called to let go.

Sometimes we know it long before we are willing to do it.

Two moments stand out to me.

The first was just before I got sober.

I had tried many times to quit and failed.

But eventually, I reached a point where the pain of continuing was greater than the pain of letting go.

That moment was a blessing.

Nothing short of a miracle.

The other time was with my daughter.

For eight years, I held on tightly while she struggled with addiction.

There was no way I was going to let go.

I was determined to find a way to save her.

I’m not sure that was what she wanted.

But I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Until one day, the pain of holding on became too much.

I had become spiritually, emotionally, and physically sick.

I had tried everything I knew to try.

There was simply nothing left.

I had to make the most unselfish decision of my life.

I had to stop rescuing my daughter.

Two weeks later, she was gone.

Forever.

I don’t think there is a harder kind of letting go than that.

But letting go doesn’t mean I stopped loving her.

It meant I finally understood that I could not save someone who didn’t want to be saved.

Sometimes love holds on.

Sometimes love releases.

And sometimes the hardest act of love is opening our hands when every part of us wants to keep holding on.