I choose kindness.
Or kindness chooses me.
Meet me as I am, she graciously dares.
Radical acceptance, radical compassion, radical realness.
I unlock the past decade, the try-on twenties, and breathe in slowly to receive -- in complete honesty -- the heart-hungry feelings I’ve been chasing, striving, stressing to achieve.
My twenties are a dizzying dash of me trying too hard: trying to fit in, trying to prove that I am professionally competent, trying to be so soft and so understanding that he will choose me, love me.
I upset my nervous system by staying in toxic relationships. I wreck havoc on my skin in a quest to perfect nothing that was wrong to begin with. I over-pluck my eyebrows.
My twenties rollercoaster in exhilarating highs, too. I do leap in full-fledged commitments to causes and work in nonprofits that I greatly admire and respect and am gifted professional opportunities to channel this fire for social justice, for community wellbeing and creative empowerment into work that satisfies as soul-work.
I devote my energy into the doing, and now I see this is a subtle and governing form of punishment, escapism, too. I forget to advocate for myself while I advocate for my causes, for students, for visions of equality and peaceful safety.
I don’t believe I am worth advocating for. This is a sneaky thread of self-hate suddenly made visible.
Self-hate. Self-sabotage. Self-deprecation.
The shadow now seen, and I can look directly at the shadow without despair, fear, blame because I love myself more today than I did when I was twenty. I stand by my side a bit more today than I did even a year ago.
This is the work of a lifetime.
And I decide to show up in the mess and beauty of it, and will do so with kindness.
Kindness eases the edges of my thoughts.
Kindness grants me grace from self-evaluations of my emotions.
Kindness enlightens full-breath acceptance.
Kindness cradles me inward. Let’s the inner universe of myself circulate around a core of golden honey.
Kindness energizes my connection to my true knowing, a knowing informed by the lessons of speak. I know who I am. I know how I want to show up this world, and that my being has a purpose, and the purpose is love.
Kindness keeps me protected and strong in discernment by asking this simple and forward question: Is this kind or is this not kind?
Is this friendship kind? Does this decision feel like an act of kindness? Are my words flowing from my inner source of kindness – toward others, toward myself?
And the invitation is to pay attention, to witness without analysis, and if there’s unkindness, something that doesn’t serve, freed from critique or justification, just like water rushing in another direction, shift course.
Is this love or is this not love?
Choose love.
And kindness accesses love. And I wish for the last year of this decade of epic escapades and dark-night-of-the-soul journeys to end with love, to conclude with a sunset of kindness that acknowledges, heals, celebrates the glory and grit of being sensitive and enthralled and alive.
Let kindness step beside the shadow in gentle company, and not attempt to erase, suppress, chase away the shadow, but let her be wild in dark and deep knowing, too.
Let the year of kindness be a return to wholeness – the wholeness I raced toward throughout my twenties recognized to be already here, always here. I ground in that revelation and proceed with my spirit-word to gently and gallantly guide me.