I forget who I am.
I’m a sea of vulnerability, questioning and insecure, and while we stand in line for soup before the show, I attempt to voice in shaky, reaching waves this internal grappling.
“Restructuring,” she illuminates my current state with that one word, and there’s an instant breath of enlightened ease.
Yes, this is inner restructuring, an implementation of raw truths reckoned and realized and ready to be forged into the pillars of my foundational being.
And while this reorientation occurs, I forget who I am.
I forget who I am so I sacrifice my personal power.
I let him define me, and I hate myself afterward.
My heightened self-consciousness abandons me as prey to projections, and I reel in feeling emotionally whiplashed, and I reel because I am not there to tenderly catch myself and adamantly discern and soothe between what and what is not my truth.
The anguish burns, and I decide to stay in the flames until there’s a shift that informs the healing.
“Who feels like love? What feels like love?”
Go there.
I call the woman who raised me, who sees and celebrates me in my entirety. She answers and tells me of old letters found from my time in Denmark, a vibrantly purposeful phase of my life that still emanates bliss. I study human rights, human trafficking, modern-day slavery with women who overflow in empathy and fierce advocacy.
I remember wearing a belted blue dress and in sweet solitude dancing in circles outside the law school and savoring an ice cream and feeling so alive in bliss.
The woman who raised me is my holder of memories that rekindle a sense of my truth.
I stagger to the poetry of Nayyirah Waheed’s poetry. I soak in her words to nourish my sensitivity:
“flower work is not easy. remaining soft in fire takes time.”
I listen to Iyanla Vanzant, and her teachings ripple sun rays of honeyed healing:
“You matter. When you don’t know you matter, you will make somebody else’s crazy about you.”
I drench the tacos in salsa verde. I relish every bite.
I text the friend who compassionately gifted me “restructuring” and send a hug of thanks.
I cancel the commitments that drain. My main commitment is to myself.
I practice restorative yoga. I place the back of my heart into the support of bolster, into the nurturing support of the ground and breathe into the dark and deep chambers of my being.
I soften back into forgiveness – because lately, I’ve spitted criticisms that stem from insecurity. I witness what happens when I feel lost from myself, and I see how I project, too, how my hurt hurls hurts. And in this noticing I am bolstered in this truth: when you know you are, who you really are, when you’re secured in your divinity, when you’re compassionately embracing your humanness, then love flows forward, and boundaries that allow love and cultivate self-love stay stable, too.
I’m restructuring.
I forget who I am and soften, soften, soften.
I call upon my spirit word “SPEAK” to keep me present in the last lap of my twenty-eighth year.
SPEAK defends, discerns, determinedly returns me home.
And in the homecoming, in the reconstruction of an internal space, I affirm that there’s nothing to improve, there’s a fire that’s setting conditionings ablaze for a wilder and freer expression of self, and in the meantime, I am enough and I am whole.
So, Loves.
On the days that you are lost, that you have forgotten who you are, that you so fucking matter and what you do and how you are matters, then slow time and scoop it all back toward yourself.
Who feels like Love?
What feels like Love?
Go there. Go there. Be there.
Be there until you remember that you are LOVE.
Be in charge of your own magnificent healing, and know this is an ongoing journey, so we’ll be getting stronger in our softness, we’ll be getting stronger in our internal being, and this is the strength that will be our lighthouse in our effervescent evolutionary unfolding.