Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Chapter 11 — Messy in the Middle

“Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.” Robin Sharma

While I don’t think there is any general timeline for healing that can be predicted, I would guess the more traumas a person has experienced, the longer it could take. Regardless, no one should get nervous that theirs will take as long as mine has and even if it does, I want to assure you that after the first year, I had experienced enough growth that my desire to die was significantly reduced and there were times periods in which I was very happy to be alive. While perhaps not sustainable for long periods of time yet, that was marked improvement. The middle certainly wasn’t as painful, but sometimes the messy middle felt even harder to me. It felt unsettled. I liked quick progress, big gains, reaching goals, moving up the mountain consistently. The middle wasn’t that. It was more like moving up the mountain a little, feeling good about it, and then I would slip and go tumbling back down the mountain. At times, I returned to feelings of hopelessness for brief periods of time…but I never lost hope. Those are two very different things. I had gained significant knowledge, but putting that knowledge into practice during times of significant stress proved to be most challenging. I read about the concept of a surrender box where one can write worries or desires on a piece of paper and place them in a special box. The idea is that by recording it, we are freeing our minds of it and turning it over to the universe or Higher Power. Others recommend ceremonially burning pieces of paper with things written on them or photos or small momentos symbolizing what we want to let go. For me, after I had worked through the issues, that would have been like a celebration piece of having done the work, but without doing the work first, I wouldn’t have been able to change my thoughts and behavior simply by the ceremony. It’s great if other people truly can and have it be permanent, but that’s not how my mind works. It’s the same for other types of courses or programs I tried. I learned something from them , and I think they were part of a good learning process, but they weren’t fixes, they were more improvements. I share that only because it’s good to be aware of that fact when starting anything new otherwise if you find what had been promised to be a fix isn’t actually a permanent improvement or what you thought was going to happen based on the marketing, it’s easy to feel like a failure. I had so much to learn that after feeling the failure a few times, I started to tell myself that everything I could learn was a stepping stone toward improvement. So if something looked interesting, I would try it, get what I could from it, apply what I wanted to my life and feel good that at least I was trying to learn instead of staying stuck where I had been. When Kylee moved her things out of the house into an apartment, having a boyfriend with a truck definitely came in handy. It was fun to watch the two of them work together to get everything moved down the staircase inside, then down the steps outside and into the truck. They worked well together and didn’t seem to get frustrated at all. I offered to help, but it was clear, it was time for me to take a back seat to the action. It was the first time I was only watching and not playing an active role. It felt different than when she was at KU or even when she moved into the first apartment for those few months . And while I didn’t fully understand it at the time, I would come to realize the difference was that she would never be living at home again. This marked the start of her new life truly on her own…and I guess, mine too. She would no longer need me like she had. There might be periods of time when she would need me again, but not like before. She had other people to count on and they would be there for her now. It was as it should be, and I truly was happy and excited for her. I just had to take a pause and get used to this new reality for both of us. “A mother’s job is to teach her children not to need her anymore. The hardest part of that job is accepting success.” Rochelle Weinstein

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