It's Spring Time... No Really!

 Someone much wiser than I am once asked me why i was afraid to have it all, that person went on to assure me that it was okay to desire and have anything I wanted in life. At the time i just kinda swept that idea under the rug, like most things I'm not ready to hear or deal with, and i moved on ... back to my daily routine and didn't think about it again until today.

As of a few days ago it has been 6 months since Sean has been in my life.  This relationship had a profound impact on me. At the time I was shaken to the core, I literally was broken on the inside and it showed on the outside. Due to unforeseen events in the wake of this break up I suffered further. It got to the point where I desired nothing and no one. I just wanted him to suffer the same way I was suffering and feel the pain I felt on a daily basis. As time went on the pain lessened but the hurt was still there because I had never fully let myself feel it, instead it manifested inside me just waiting for an inappropriate moment to show it's self. 

I never really listened to the cues my body was giving me until a few months ago. I continued my routine post Sean because it was easy, it was just easy to hurt, and i beat myself up on the outside (over training, becoming highly obsessive about eating patterns, binging...etc.) to mask the real pain i felt on the inside. Yet nothing changed it was like I was a moment frozen in time, nothing got better, and nothing got worse life just was. 

In hindsight I can honestly say that this break-up was a gift. I have learned things about myself and who I truly am, I have been stronger than I ever thought I could be, and I have done things I never thought were possible. Most of all I have become closer to the most important person in my life... Myself. 

The past six months have become an interesting challenge to discover who I've always been. I learned the gift of loving someone else unconditionally from my relationship, but i had never put that into practice on myself. I am the kind of person who will consistently try to change to "fix" myself or become "better" because I've never really thought of myself as good enough. Self-esteem issues and self doubt have plagued me for most of my life. However an interesting concept that I have been thinking about lately is the idea that: I never needed to be fixed because I was never broken. Now this idea is something that I am still trying to wrap my head around and really understand.  Yet, I decided to dive deeper into this concept and I have since begun to learn and understand that truly loving one's self is a lot harder than it ever was to love someone else. The more I love and the more I try to listen to my body the more little epiphanies occur.  Its almost as if they are little rewards like the gold stars we used to get on our homework when we were younger. It has been these rewards that have been the most telling on this journey.

So back to the idea of having it all. Today feels like the first day of spring for me, its like the dormant flowers within me are blooming and bursting to get out. The past few days I have really felt my body, I have started to desire again, to actually want things and people in my life, to feel what its like to have those relationships. I think the most telling moment came today as I was driving home from the grocery store, I realized that my body never lied to me during my relationship. In fact I could take it one step further and say that my body is the one piece of this relationship that always told me the truth no matter how hard it was to listen.

Even though I always felt it was betraying me during my trips to see Sean, or his to see me, it was in actuality telling me he was wrong for me before I could mentally realize it for myself. So I tried to control it rather than listening to it taking massive amounts of hormones, including birth control to shift the balance back to what I thought normal should be. I thought for the longest time that this was some sort of betrayal i needed to change and fix, I cried and agonized over it. Yet since that time I have not had another occurrence of these issues. Being off all the medications i was pumping myself full of every time I was with him has been liberating. I know now that I was not broken that I was exactly who I always been, and that I have always been enough just the way I am.

In that moment I got it, I understood that I truly can have everything I desire in life. That the gifts of love may not be shown in the way I think they should manifest themselves but that they will always be there. I don't have to be anything more or less than who I am, and who I am is everything. Someone once told me that I already had all the answers I just needed to take the time to listen to them. While it hasn't always been easy -in fact i still doubt myself on a daily basis- and I haven't always gotten answers I wanted to hear and/ or listen to, this lesson of love has been the most rewarding journey I have ever taken ... and its only just begun.