A Look Back

This year has been my year of become - a year of process. A year to focus on myself and this person that continue to unfold, the phoenix reforming from the ashes of her former selves. This year is almost over. Right now I still see ashes. I'm still sifting through them, teasing out truths from the larger scraps and breathing in the ones that have crumpled down to dust. Everywhere I turn, my heart screams this isn't how we wanted this year to end.

This summer turned into this fall and the me that I was becoming seemed to be hidden away again, pushed to the back burner by circumstances beyond my control or my choosing. I tried to hold onto this self, to shove her forward. I tried coaxing her out with e-Courses and art supplies. Those things worked when she was first forming, surely they would work now. Only they didn't. I was left with newly awakening dreams and ideas, and no spark.

The howling began again - that ache in my chest that reminded me with every breath that I'm not done healing yet. Every time I sat to write, to create, to see - the past came bubbling up, spewing pain and toxic sludge through everything. I went silent, wrote just for myself. Too quickly that turned into not writing at all. The dreams seemed to taunt me, to serve as one more reminder that I'm a failure, that I'm too damaged, too broken, too fill-in-the-blank, for these dreams to ever be more than a mockery of hope.

Many of those dreams circling around the idea of offering hope to others. I want my life to be a flickering light in the darkest places. I remember how badly I needed that hope in the form of someone who had been where I used to be, whose life was no longer driven by the desperation that drove my self-destruction. I want to be for others what I didn't have, but so desperately needed. Yet three weeks ago I was being eaten alive by my own darkness, yet again. It wasn't as bad as it's been in the past - I have more options, more tools, more awareness of what's happening and what actually helps.

I've been feeling this shift coming internally, a shift that once again asks my eyes to see the beauty in these ashes. Not because of what they may one day become. Not because of what they once were. But because in their shades of grey, there is a fragile beauty for my heart to stop and notice. I'm still afraid that I wasted half of this year. That I got off track and failed. But those arrows aren't sticking today. Today they don't hold power over me and for now that's enough.