Brave Enough To Be Bliss

So many times, in life, we say, or we hear other people say, life is short, we need to live everyday as if it were our last. And yet, how often do we feel that way right after someone passes, but then a few days later go right back to living life like we a lways had. We all think we have time, until we don’t and personally, I don’t want to waste any more time not being real even if that reveals my imperfections. I want to live my life letting people know what they mean to me, sharing my heart and soul as scary as that can sometimes be, because at the end of my life, I want someone to share a story about how I exuded love like my friend’s dad did and how that love helped them love others better and so on. Every single day we each have the opportunity to be more loving, giving, kind and compassionate people. One of the reasons for this party was I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to personally say thank you to all of you who have touched my life in such meaningful ways and to be able to have you help me celebrate the fact that I am finally actually living. Life is hard, there is no doubt about that, but spending each day fully able to experience, embrace and share the joy and peace and beauty and yes, even the pain, but most of all, always, always the love, that is true living. As many of you know, it’s been a bit of a rough past year physically, but it’s been a year I wouldn’t trade for anything. Not only am I getting the ability to run back, but I have created many special new friendships that have impacted my life in so many w ays. It’s also been a year where many of my existing relationships have become stronger and the bonds much deeper. I am truly blessed by each person no matter how long or brief the interaction. If we are open to it, we can learn something about each other and ourselves if only we pay attention and truly listen to understand. When I started to remember the fact that I had been raped, I began to find that I could write again. I found my words. As I started to work with Ginger Rothhaas, the wise woman who changed my life by teaching me self compassion, I began to be able to verbalize my thoughts and feelings without carefully analyzing each word before it left my mouth. I found complete safety in her presence for the verbal expression of my words. I thought there were things so awful I would take them to my grave, but I’m glad I f ound the courage to share them with her because once those thoughts and words came out, I was truly free in a way I didn’t know existed. Kylee was going to get a tattoo about four years ago and I decided to get one with her. I eased into body artistry with a simple semicolon on my ankle, but within a year after that, I had the words Be Brave tattooed on my leg so that I had a daily reminder staring me in the face when I put lotion on. There were days and nights when the last thing I wanted to do was to be brave. There was sobbing, there was grief, there was pain, there was anger, there was defiance…and yet, the more I fully felt all of those emotions, the more I was able to feel connection and compassion and trust and joy and love. In the book I’m writing, Brave Enough to be Bliss, Chapter 5 is titled, Motherhood & Madness. It’s one of my favorite chapters because being Kylee’s mom is the greatest honor of my life. I want to share an excerpt of that chapter with you now… “While she’s married and in her mid -20s now, when I hear the James Taylor song, Your Smiling Face, I smile from ear to ear still feeling like I did back then. I would play that song on the ride home from daycare almost every day and eventually she learned to sing it along with me. To me, there is just such true joy in that song, and it seemed to capture how I felt at that time. I wouldn’t have been able to describe it back then, but it was the unbridled joy that comes with feeling free to love someone without hesitation and without condition, and to be able to be completely who you are in front of someone who also loves you. That is a love I had never known before. Perhaps people had tried, but I hadn’t been able to be open enough to receive that kind of lov e or felt safe enough to be able to give it. But in those early years, I knew she couldn’t know any better than to love me, so I was free to sing in the car, to dance in the kitchen, to make silly faces, to read story books using funny voices and still feel loved by her, and most of all give her all the love I had stored up in my heart from being too scared before to give it to anyone else.” Friend by friend, and even stranger by stranger, I began to share more and more of myself, my struggles, my story, my healing and I learned very quickly that the more I shared, the more everyone else shared with me.

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