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Labyrinth of your life

We do not ask for life. We are born into the world without any idea of how to survive it. There are some skills that are hardwired into our DNA, but the evolving world is different than what our ancestors were accustomed to. Humans have advanced rapidly and evolution can not keep up. Everyday there is a new app or meme that is going viral and it can be hard to understand where we fit in a world where media becomes irrelevant within hours and our peers expect us to be up-to-date. Just know that you are not alone in this vast ocean of cyberspace. You fit into the world exactly how you are meant too. With 7+ billion people on this Earth it is impossible for you to be the only one struggling through a problem. This doesn’t make your problems meaningless, if anything it should make them more bearable knowing that your life and other lives are intertwined in the same labyrinth of obstacles that must be overcome. We all have a labyrinth of our own that twists and turns and changes and is just as individual as ourselves, but our labyrinth is not always complicated. Sometimes the path in our lives is a straight line in the labyrinth. You need to keep walking through your labyrinth because around the next wist or turn could be a birthday where you get the one gift you always wanted, or love from an unexpected source, or a promotion in either work or life. The labyrinth of our life is never ending and there is no way to know what comes next, but there will always be a reason to keep on walking. Sometimes it is as simple as that.

 

England, Wiltshire, Longleat Maze, aerial view (C) Jason Hawkes / Getty Images

The Strong One

I have always been deemed the strong one. The one that you could rely on. The one who always offered a shoulder to cry on. The one who you had never seen shed a tear. The one who always had the right words of comfort and truth which allowed you to grieve without feeling judged. I am honest to a fault, but that allowed me to get to the deeper issues that others were facing and ask the hard questions that needed to be answered. If you do not allow yourself to hurt, you will never heal.

But what happens when I need to cry? What happens when I need someone to listen to my troubles and ask the hard questions? I find that no one is around and willing to do what I have done for them. They don’t enjoy the uncomfortable conversations if they are not the ones benefitting from it. They don’t want to ask the hard questions for the fear of overstepping. They don’t know the right words to say or how to listen without judgement, so instead they say “I’m Sorry” and walk away.

I grew up facing my pain and struggles alone, since my parents didn’t feel comfortable seeing me in a vulnerable state. They didn’t want to talk about my emotions or how I was handling the demons in my heart and in my head. They watched as I suffered, but knew that I would always manage to find my way back to the strong girl they knew. I had to ask myself the difficult questions, and I forced myself to answer them. Everyone thinks of the hard questions, but if they are not voiced then you can get avoid answering them. I didn’t have a choice. Had I tried to bury my monsters I would have died. Likely by my own hand.

I was the strong one. The one who held a gun to my head, but couldn’t pull the trigger. The one who had to take medication to stop the demons in my head from ruling. The one who sat alone in the darkness of my room for days on end, while everyone else was enjoying the Spring sun. I was the one who was always tired, both physically and emotionally and spent most hours sleeping off the ache of hating myself. I was the one who had to be hospitalized and have my stomach pumped to remove the medicine cabinet of pills I had consumed. I was the one who always had a smile, a fake smile, but still a smile.

You see me as the strong one. But I am only strong for the people around me. You see me with a constant smile and a witty joke ready to make you laugh. My humor may be dark, but who doesn’t have a dark side? Who would ever expect me, the strong one, to not be strong at all. To be the weakest of the bunch. To be the one who really needs to be saved.

I will always be the strong one. That is until I can’t be strong any longer and those at my funeral will wonder how they didn’t see it. How they didn’t know. They’ll think, ‘This can’t be right. She was the strong one. She would never take her own life”. They will always think of me as the strong one, and my funeral will be packed with the people who I was strong for, and they will all wonder why I could not be strong for myself.

I am the strong one. For now.

The Art of Apologizing

I was raised in a household of proud people. We were stubborn and had to always be right. We were unconcerned with how our actions could affect others. My family liked to yell as we had a ‘discussion’. We might all be on the same side of the argument, but we still needed our voice to ring out over the others. If you wanted to say something, then you had to interrupt someone else and scream your thoughts to the heavens. A civilized conversation was not something my family could have. We had pride, but sometime that pride can get in the way.

The first time my father apologized was when I was an adult and he almost put my brother through a wall because their ‘discussion’ got physical. He never had apologized for all the times he hit us over the head, or stepped on our toes (literally and figuratively) or any of the times he made us cry or laughed in our face when we opened up about our feelings which he deemed “stupid”. He was a proud man, and that pride cost him his children.

I was raised to be prideful, but I taught myself the art of apologizing. I thought of all the times when an apology would have made me feel better or could have changed the tide on how I feel about my father. I think of all the rifts in our family that could have been smoothed over with a sincere apology. I remember all the times an apology was all I wanted, so much so that I craved it. An apology from my father was as elusive as a snow leopard; I knew it existed, but my hunt for it always came up short.

I grew up never wanting to admit that I was wrong and in my fathers eyes an apology was the acknowledgement of wrongdoing. I now know that this was a dreadful way to live. By not admitting to your faults, you can never learn from them. By brushing off others feelings you were only hurting them more. An apology is a beautiful thing and it can alter the course of your relationship with someone if you genuinely mean it.

I know I am a stubborn person and can be hot headed at times. So I remove myself from the situation that is causing a crack in my composure and take a moment to cool down before thinking about what is really happening or being said. Was I jumping to conclusions? Was I right to to be angry or sad? I think about the situation from the other persons point of view to try to understand where it all went south. Then I construct an apology. An apology about how I have reflected on the scenario and realized it is not worth losing a friend or family. I may not be the only one at fault, but I make sure to own up to what I might have done or said that could have made the situation worse.

I don’t try to get the other person to apologize or see my point of view. This isn’t about who is right or wrong. This is about taking responsibility for your actions and trying to make amends. Not all apologies will be accepted and that is okay. Hopefully that person will also reflect on their actions and come to their senses. If not, then they are not someone you need in your life, trust me. If you are the one who is not accepting the apology, ask yourself “What or who did you lose to win?”

We are all so concentrated on winning the argument or getting someone else to admit they are wrong, but what are we losing to win that argument? Who are you pushing away just to be right?

Never let your apologies be elusive. Never let your loved ones second guess your adoration for them. Never let a small argument ruin a lifetime of friendship because your pride got in the way.

Never assume you are always right.

Flat: The Void of Emotion

My depression didn’t come with tears or sadness. It came with the void. The void of emotion. I had no real way to cheer myself up or even feel sad or angry. I had no interest in engaging with anyone or anything. I would sit in bed and stare at the ceiling and just contemplate life and if it was all worth it. I slept most of the time, since any activity that required me to interact with others and pretend to have emotion was exhausting. It was a chore to socialize and I was always left with the emptiness at the end of the day. I didn’t really attempt to escape this void because I couldn’t understand why I was feeling this way. I was flat. A static character in a book that was no more dynamic than a white sheet of paper. I had no reason to be happy. I had no reason to be sad. I had not a care in the world other than the overwhelming need to sleep off the ache of spending my energy wearing a mask of who I once was. I was utterly and truly a shadow of who I use to be. My mind was a dark cloud and my moods even less visible.

I was 17 when one of my close friends died. I sat next to her empty desk every day for the rest of the year. It was our senior year and I had known her for over 3 years. We were suppose to play Softball together in the spring, but she was gone in December. My whole world shifted after she died. For as long as I can remember I had tried to make my dad proud of me. After she died, I realized the only person I need to make proud is myself, and I had not been doing a great job of that. I questioned everything. Most people don’t want to think of themselves as a bad person, but I sure wasn’t a good one.

Why was I still alive, when my friend was dead? She had her whole life planned out. She knew where she wanted to go to college, what she wanted to major in and what she wanted to do with that major. She even planned on taking a gap year to help make money for college, and knew what job would pay her the most for her work and time during that year. Her life was set out in front of her and she had it all mapped out. Yet she died the night before she was to take the SAT. I still had some of her notes from the class we had together that I was borrowing for the weekend. I never got to return them. They sit in my desk drawer because I don’t have the heart to throw them out even though the notes are no longer useful. Her obituary was beautiful and encapsulated who she was. I still read it every year.

My family didn’t know how to handle this type of situation. When I came downstairs to tell my parents after ending a phone call with a mutual friend, my dad yelled. It was the only thing he knew how to do. In any situation, good or bad, my father was yelling. It startled me and the truth began to sink in. She was dead and I would never see her again. I sank to the floor as the tears started streaming down my face. Eventually after a long silence, I went back to my room to cry alone. Alone is what I was in that moment, and it was then that I realized I had always been alone.

I went to her viewing. It was my second funeral, but the first for a friend. My first funeral of a child. She was 18. My mother drove me since I was an emotional wreck. There was only one other person there that night during the viewing, we wept together and looked at the preserved corpse of our friend. Her hair was a mess of cowlicks just like it was while she was alive and she was wearing blue jeans and her favorite band t-shirt. She had just seen their concert less than a month before she passed. I left the viewing with tears in my eyes and no one to talk to. I was the strong one. In my group of friends they always counted on me to keep my cool and stay grounded. I didn’t feel strong that night, I felt helpless. My mother whispered “She looks so small”. Her personality was huge, so her short stature went unnoticed to those around her, but the coffin made her look confined, which is something she never would have been in life. We left the viewing and all I wanted to do was go to sleep and a small part of me didn’t want to wake up.

My mom asked me if we could stop by Winco on the way home from the viewing so she could get her grocery shopping done. It was a Friday night and the funeral was tomorrow so she knew I wouldn’t want to go then. My eyes were tired from crying and my mind was tired from feeling so many things as once, but I agreed to please her. I was unashamed of my tears. I mourned for a friend, a sister, and for the family I knew all too well. So the tears fell at Winco, with seemingly no end. Maybe my mother was attempting to distract me, but all I could think about was how the first time I went to Winco was with my friend who was now lying in a wooden coffin less than 5 miles away. I sat down in the middle of an isle and cried while my mother took a phone call and when she came over to check on me I pleaded to go home. Her face went white and I think in that moment my mom realized just how much this affected me. We hurriedly finished shopping and checked out. The tears fell, but since I didn’t make a sound no one said anything to me. They all looked at me with pity and worry and even curiously, but no one said a thing.

The funeral was packed, standing room only. Many people I didn’t recognize and many I did. I sat with other softball team members as well as the coach. He cried more than I did that day, and that fall he placed her name and number on the roster for every softball game. I played for her that season. I wanted to quit many times, most nights I would leave practice and I would cry as I drove myself home. I would sit in the car and just scream into the steering wheel before I went into my house where I was expect to be okay. My voice lost in the void. My emotions soon after.

I never talked about her. I brought her up in conversation a few times, but no one wanted to get into the gritty details of what I was feeling. No one wants to talk about death. We like to pretend it isn’t there, so that we don’t have to face it. Instead of making people uncomfortable by talking about it, I bottled it up. This was when my emotions went flat. There was no outlet, no where for all my feeling to be released so they all melded together until they were seemingly nothing. This is the biggest mistake anyone can make.

Talk about the hard stuff. Have the uncomfortable conversations. There is no reason to bottle it all up. There is no reason that we should ignore the pain and suffering we feel. I have found that the more open I am with others, the more open they are with me. Everyone wants to talk about their struggles and work through them out loud with another person to validate their feelings. It can be hard to open up about the demons you have hidden, but once they are shown into the light they become less scary. Let the dark cloud over your mind pour its rain and feel what is meant to be felt, so that the cloud will lighten its load and eventually vanish.

Worth

Never, ever think you are worthless. Don’t you dare insult yourself and others by thinking you are not loved. Those who interact with you everyday will miss you when you are gone, but they may not know how to show it. Just because someone doesn’t say “I love you” doesn’t make their love for you any less. It can be difficult to put yourself out there and tell someone that you love them, whether it be romantically or platonically. It can be hard to bare your heart to someone and hope they don’t step on it if they walk out. Love can be shown in many different ways, such as planning a day at the beach for you to relax and unwind. Love can shown by bringing your favorite drink, whether that be a tall nonfat chai latte, or a kale carrot mange smoothie with extra protein powder when they know you have been feeling down. Love can be cleaning the apartment or office space because they know you enjoy cleanliness. Love can be as simple as a text message asking how you’re doing, or noticing when you’re not quite yourself. Love is something we give away the most, yet fear we receive the least. Love is all around you, you just need to understand that it won’t always be blatant. Love is in every sunset and in every cool breeze on a hot day. Love is already within yourself, you just need to find it.