Shifting From The Uncomfortable To Healing
A tale of hurting, learning, and committing to the ongoing process that is healing
2016 was the year that pushed me into total chaos. For me, it was the year where everything seemed to either purge or destroy, even though, to the outside world, I seemed to have everything built up safely around me. To everyone else: I was starting a great career and I was moving to a new “dream” location, Sydney, Australia. I should have felt safe, happy, and overjoyed. Instead, I felt so much confusion, pain, grief, and lots of insecurities.
The Uncomfortable:
Starting my first real job out of grad school was exciting and scary. I had real expectations and real financial burdens; I was truly adulting. I was privileged and sheltered; and I really didn’t understand how much, until I moved to Australia.
Luckily, it wasn’t my first time travelling across land and sea, far from home, so the experience wasn’t all bad. The move, at first, felt invigorating. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t a great time to move because I was buried deep in my feelings over the loss of a long-term relationship that had ended five months earlier. (Unfortunately, that didn’t really end and we continued a toxic entanglement long after I left London, where I had been living at the time). Truth be told, I didn’t know how to function without this person in my life because our connection, as much as it was a good relationship, it was a very co-dependent one. (I wouldn’t come to understand what co-dependence was, and the toxicity around it until years later.)
I wasn’t ready to be on my own like that; completely isolated from everyone I knew and loved at the time. But a girl has got to do what a girl has got to do; and frankly, I loved my new job and it was a dream role.
When I got to Australia, I ended up sharing a house with a man that triggered all my childhood wounds. He was an older narcissistic sociopath who told me mostly everything that was wrong with me. I was “too strong, too direct, not feminine in my approach enough.” He would give me “life lessons” and I wound up hating myself even more. It wouldn’t be until another six months did I realize that I was essentially living with the personality of my father, and I had to get out. Not only was he deeply misogynistic; but I was essentially living with someone who consigned on what I heard all throughout my corporate career as a Black woman. I am “too direct, too straightforward, and brash.” While, if I were, perhaps, a white man acting the same way, I would have been praised for the way I communicated.
Then, there was dating in Australia. Dating was one of, if not the most dehumanising experiences that I ever experienced. Due to the lack of diversity, (and prejudice), so many guys would see me as their “Black girl experience”. This is when: a white guy dates a Black woman long enough to sleep with her, because to him, we are “exotic or hypersexual”; and he wants to squelch his curiosities. But, ultimately, he has no real intention to be in a committed relationship with us, because we are not his “ideal” type. I, unfortunately, spent the majority of my time in Australia trying to run away from my feelings for my ex; so I decided to just keep dating toxic guys, instead of dealing with those feelings. As a result, I spent most of my time getting into entanglements with these types of guys. The whole experience made me feel empty, undesirable, and broken.
The Shift
Healing happens when you get so uncomfortable with your reality, you have nothing left to do but find the answers to that un-comfortability.
A lot of things happened that led me to choose the path to healing. As mentioned, I was going through A LOT. But I was also experiencing a lot more awareness in that timeframe. 2016 marked the year of my Saturn return. Saturn, the planet most associated with work, change, and discipline returns to the same point in the sky when you were born. It usually happens around the age of 25–29; and the impact usually lasts until 31–34 years old. This astrological event usually allows you to gain more of an awareness and understanding. But, given it is Saturn, a slow moving planet, you usually receive this awareness through diligence and at a slow pace. Biologically, it is also around this time where one’s brain fully develops; and you gather a better understanding for abstract and complex concepts.
Naturally, my brain was starting to understand the concept around self-love and self-hatred in a way I hadn’t before. I started to understand attraction too. Specifically, due to my self-hatred, I was attracting people, or surrounding myself with people who validated those feelings. I also started to understand that my actions, thoughts, decisions, all derived from me. My interpretation of anything that happened to me, was totally in my control. Therefore, even though I had people hurt me, how I interpreted their hurt and internalized their hurt, was what was truly keeping me stuck in that cycle of pain. If I wanted the cycle to stop, I had to make a choice to do something different. I had to make the decision to choose new actions, emotions, thoughts, and take new decisions.
The decisions that were currently affecting my life were those that fed into self-hatred and self-abuse. Either mentally, emotionally, or physically, I would feel pain and then recreate the pain I was feeling. I would either drink too much, get deeply suicidal, cut myself, or let people hurt me. And, if I continued on this path of self-hatred, I was going to die, because I was going to kill myself. I couldn’t live with this much pain and sustain any longer. Life would not have been worth living. And, feeling bound by some semblance of self-preservation, I didn’t want to choose death. So, I chose life; and I had to find a way to live it. That’s when my healing journey began.
Starting to Heal
Initially, I started going to counselling. I had been in and out of psychiatrists and psychologists’ offices all throughout my childhood; and though they barely helped at the time, they did validate a lot of my feelings. When I saw a counsellor in Sydney, she validated a lot of my feelings regarding the environment I was living in and the people I chose to hang around with. It was a good starting point for me.
Of course, all my questions weren’t answered and I started seeking non-traditional methods too.
If at first you don’t succeed, then dust yourself off and try again. (Aaliyah 2000)
I’ve always had a deep belief in the Divine. At the time, I had chosen to be a Catholic for the last 14 years. But, my belief in organised religions was waning due to all the hypocrisy I was seeing. I was very lucky growing up; because I grew up with parents who were atheists. I was in a very privileged position to comfortably question organised religion at will. So, the moment I no longer felt aligned to it, I didn’t feel pressured to attach myself to that belief system anymore. Instead, with my newfound awareness (i.e. my Saturn return and my brain fully developed), I started questioning my own spiritual beliefs. Particularly, my understanding of the concept of polarity; and what represents the “Divine”. I questioned even how I could speak to the Divine, how prayer worked, what was the law of attraction, what my role in the Universe was, etc. etc. That is when I started to learn about tarot.
I connected with the divination practise pretty immediately; even though at one point in my organised religion journey, I was led to believe it was heresy. I found it was a way that I could connect with my intuition, even though, at the time, I was still questioning its validity and its power.
Learning from my path of healing
Maybe as a result of tarot being a divination that is literally about posing questions to Source, or Divine energy to find answers. Or, maybe it’s because I’m a naturally analytical person. Either way, I will never stop seeking out information that can help me progress on my healing journey. Tarot was one way to find those answers; but so were others. I tried reiki, theta healing, yoga, more therapy, alchemy, existentialism, Buddhism, kambo, and more.
This journey to healing didn’t happen all at once. Even after 5 ½ years of being on it, I still have a lot more work to do. But its a continuous process that never stops.
There are always new experiences and new information we receive about what serves or no longer serves in our lives. I had to get comfortable with the uncomfortable idea that this journey never stops.
Healing is a commitment to analysis. I would even go so far as to say it is a scientific method. Like the scientific method, one has a hypothesis, they test it, they get a result, which usually leads to new hypotheses. Once I started looking at healing in this way, everything clicked for me. I started committing to a daily practise. I don’t freak out when I have a new challenging period in my life that pushes me to change perspectives. I just keep asking more questions and seeking more answers.
Also, I’ve learned that healing is NOT always meant to be easy. As soon as I feel like I have a handle on things, I get triggered, my anxiety flares, or there are people, places, and things that I don’t know how to deal with. Then, it is back to the drawing board. The only thing that gets easier is that I have built up less resistance to seeking new answers to my questions.
Once I chose to commit to the idea of healing as a scientific method, I chose to commit to the ongoing process of understanding and learning to manage the uncomfortable.
