Walking In the Hallway
The dreaded blinking cursor. Watching is started to cripple me…until I realized it wasn’t the cursor at all. Just me…cloaked in fear and choking on the fact that I felt like I couldn’t just write it out. I mean who wants to constantly feel like they are in a back and forth life. I know that I am walking in a door of healing and growth, but that door way turned out to be a long hallway out of a suspenseful movie that has required many doors to be opened…and many wounds, triggers and fears to be exposed.
Losing my dad has exposed so much. The fact that this kind of grief isn’t something that is linear…that healing from a loss that was also filled with a lot baggage makes you realize that you have things to heal from you didn’t know existed before. That things that you thought you were behind you were actually just tucked away in a bag waiting for the right trigger…that loss doesn’t just hurt you, but has an incredible ripple effect that reaches all the relationships in your life in different ways.
You see who is for you. You see who isn’t. You see that pain of the broken relationship and how what broke it just seems like something that could have benefited from a real good conversation and maybe would have never broke at all. You feel the fractures of a brokenness in your family…you see who in your life needs you to always be an ear and understand, but can’t understand that you just can’t do it today.
Loss, whether through death or maybe a choice to break a relationship, rips open the chasm of every relationship in your life and exposes all of the tender spots, the healed spots, the ones filled with joy and the ones who you learn really aren’t real at all.
So even in the door way to healing. To seeing a light at the end of a really long hallway, you start to realize that this was meant to be more than a quick journey from one end to another. That the deep need to find yourself has become an intense need to find yourself and to mend all the broken pieces at the same time…so now the journey becomes long and you begin to question if you will ever find your way back to you.
As my dad’s birthday approaches this week…the loss of him feels really raw this year…last year I was still in a place of feeling so numb and just trying to survive it all…this year I feel that emptiness. Those moments of missing him calling…the loss that he never met his first great-granddaughter that shares that birthday…the loss of how much he won’t be here for…most of all, I find myself trying to heal from all the things that him and I missed out on together throughout my life. Things that are forgiven, but you find yourself wishing they could have been different because the anchor of memories feels a little light.
Relationships have been the hardest thing in the exposure that the loss brought to light…from the moment my dad passed, I started to really feel the truth of relationships in my life…not just friends, but with family too. Some it was the absolute truth that they are for you. Their love, support and ability to just be everything you could need them to be…then it was the realization that for some relationships, they weren’t at all what you thought…
As I have started on a path to healing and processing all of that from the past year and a half…a process of understanding old and new triggers…a process of realizing that there is a huge value in showing up for the people who show up for you…that sometimes what you think is right and important has to more about saying it then just thinking it….learning about boundaries and how much you really should say yes to and how much you should give… and that sometimes the person you really need to say yes to and give to is yourself.
I feel like I have had so much back and forth this past year…I feel good…wait I don’t…oh I actually do…oh never mind that was just a passing moment…bless. It is okay to not be okay all of the time and since the doorway opened and I felt the start of healing, I realize that was to be able to sit in this hallway. To walk through all the doors of emotions, relationships and to grow. So, I will grow in the hallway…and I know that some days are going to be rough. That relationships will probably change and that healing is not always easy, but it is necessary.
I know that He has never left me. Never forsaken me. I know that there is purpose in all of this pain and I know that He has a plan. Even in this really long hallway with a whole lot of doors. Through prayer, worship and His Truth I will find my way.
