I wish I would have figured it out sooner. I wish I would have been more aware. I wish I could have seen just how lost I was. I think I was so distracted. I think I thought I was already doing the best I could. Maybe I was.
My twenties were HARD. They kind of felt like walking through a haunted house. Which I know that sounds awful, but hear me out.
You enter into adult hood excited, scared, reluctant but ready. It’s just like waiting in line at the haunted house right? You’re there with your friends, maybe your significant other. Maybe you’ll cling together upon entrance, maybe it’s each man on their own. Much like your 20’s. Relationships either become closer than ever, or fall apart. Each scare, might make you laugh when you walk away from it or might leave you screaming and running back for the entrance. You must move forward though, there is no going back. You must face each new trial in the haunted house before you are allowed to leave. Somehow, you survived. You exit the haunted house relieved, happy and feeling okay with life again.
It seems strange that you could define an entire decade of your life in one way, but it feels so relevant. For me, I literally feel like I put on my 30 year old shoes and things weren’t so scary anymore. The let downs, the failures didn’t feel so impactful. The biggest realization being, I survived. I made it through that time and I learned lessons that are going to help me through the rest of my life. Now, I realize that’s not true for everyone. We all have that one person in our lives who is much older than us but somehow still seems to behave like they are reliving year 23 on a repetitive sequence. Hopefully that’s not you! Haha… sigh.. anyway…
If I have any advice about surviving these trials and tribulations that will continually be thrown at you throughout the course of your life because they don’t stop, we just become better at handling ourselves, it’s to remember how strong you are. Remember how many times you’ve stood up to something hard and made it through it. You’ve been here before, you’ve survived. Be proud of yourself because it wasn’t easy. Celebrate what has broken, because you made it through it. Celebrate your strength. Be proud.
Now I know what you’re thinking… maybe you’re thinking, well sure I survived but I didn’t leave it unscarred. Ok, so there have been a handful of times in my life where things got hard, I mean really hard and I did the worst thing possible, worse than acting out. I buried it. There’s this hilarious scene in this movie with Kevin Hart and the Rock where the Rock is explaining this horrible thing that happened to him in high school and Kevin Hart responds very empathetically and asks “How did you get through that?” The Rock says “Well, it wasn’t easy but I just took all of that pain and I buried it. Buried it deep, deep, deep, all the way down.” I think we can all relate to that. When you have an inability to cope and deal with the hard time sometimes it feels easiest to run and hide, but the very unsurprising part of this is that it does eventually surface. A lot of times it surfaces at the most unpredictable and inappropriate moment where we are suddenly screaming at our sibling at Christmas and end up leaving early in a teary eyed mess. To be clear, this is not something I’ve done, but I’ve seen it happen on a Christmas in my home between siblings.
So what can we do when we’ve runaway. How do we stand up to the things from our past that lurk in our memories, or deep, deep, deep down in the pit of our bellies? It’s hard to say, and sometimes it’s very much like when your car breaks down, you can tell something isn’t right but you don’t REALLY know until it actually breaks. So when you do break, I think its good to pause for a beat. Don’t react. Stop. Examine. Let it sit for a day and then start to pull it a part and if you’re not good at that sometimes enlisting an outside party is the right tool. Some things are so much easier for another person to easily see and not so easy for us to see ourselves. Whether it’s a family member, a close friend or a therapist, make sure its something you look up to, and someone you value. Someone who won’t judge you but isn’t afraid to tell you the truth.
Then even upon taking those first steps to pull it apart. Celebrate your bravery. It takes so much to be able to face up to that dark past, look it in its ugliness and let it know it’s not allowed to live here anymore because you are a SURVIVOR! If it was something you did that you feel terrible about but have been too afraid to face it, that apology is your first step out of the dark and if they person you’re asking for forgiveness from isn’t willing to forgive, still be proud of yourself for trying. Never, ever feel like you failed.
I’m not saying it will be easy, but I’m saying you’re strong enough to do it. You have to believe you can make it through it and you’ve got to celebrate it along the way. Life is a mess, and it’s your life experience that’s going to get you through it. So take every bump as a lesson and every curve as something you’ll learn with practice. You’re doing great, just keep your eyes on the road.
intentionally Winging it,
Tif