Where do we go when it sucks? When it’s dark and scary and… way too real?
Every spiritual practice will tell us to just stay, to welcome it—or if welcoming it is too much of a stretch, to witness it.
Indeed, welcoming it can feel like self-abuse when we don’t clearly understand what welcoming suckiness means. Actually, welcoming it is self-abuse when we don’t fully understand it.
So the answer to my question seems to be to stay in the thick of it. We ask our spiritual guides where we can go to escape, and the answer is invariably, annoyingly, to stay right here. That the way out is on the way in. That if we refuse to stay, the further we go, the deeper we’ll fall into the quicksand we’re trying desperately to escape from.
Which basically means that to learn how to trust ourselves we must first learn to distrust everything we believe our self is saying. To tame that voice urging us to run, and choose to go against all our deeply-rooted survival mechanisms—because that voice is not actually Self. That voice is the reflection of our conditioning.
It’s a very humbling and disorienting experience. It pays off… I’ve been trying to do things this way for more than three years now and my life has already transformed beyond my wildest dreams. And, yet, today I'm asked to stay in the thick of it and that’s still not the answer I want to hear. So I thought I would write about it.
Part of me holds so much shame on those days, and showing up on the page as a wounded little bird in need of a caring hand and healing water feels more than vulnerable… It feels like a failure.
“People don’t come to your writing to learn about your deepest trauma and fears leo! Be a beacon of light, a well of hope, a channel for love and an instrument of peace. Do not drag people into the darkness that lives right under your skin. Don’t share your doubts and your tears, no one wants to hear it. Be useful, be inspiring, be magical—or at the very least don’t be weird. Who do you think you are to allow yourself to waste someone’s time with your pain, your nightmares or your shortcomings? Man up. Be positive or SILENT. Contribute. OR disappear.” That’s what Bully brain’s dictating right now.
A very reassuring plea, isn’t it?
And yet I wonder... Is it true?
First of all, is “Manning Up” even a thing or just the heartbreaking conditioning that was first imposed on men, and then on the women who thought that their only way to survive in this world was to follow their lead? Do I admire those who never let anything phase them, change them, move them, deepen them, those who never seem to smile, cry, care or even breathe? I do not… The men I admire make me feel safe, acknowledged, seen. They tear up when it’s needed and they smile wholeheartedly. They show the strength that comes from an armor-less body who surrenders to a dream. They hold my hand and say “I’m here and I know you’ll fix this”. They don't fix it for me! And they are still ready to hold me if I need a break from all the fixing—or a muscular arm to do what my arm would get hurt by doing. They don’t shield me from my challenges, but they shield me when I need a small break from all the wind. They elevate me when I need to be, and they hold me down when I lose my footing; but they never do either against my will. They do it because I let them, because I asked them, because I trust them and because they believe in me. That’s what manning up means to me. So that's not a reason to fall into a forceful bravado and pretend that I’m okay with not being okay. Pretending is not being brave. That’s called denial, not courage.
Second, the women I admire are not bubbly little avatars of toxic positivity. They’re truth tellers. They show up with the rawest insights and the fiercest honesty. They love with all their beings and they understand that Love does not lie, Love can’t lie, Love doesn’t even know what lying is, because Love is all encompassing and lying is what we do when we don’t have the capacity to acknowledge what is, what is not, what could have been and wasn’t, what could be but probably will not. Those women know that Joy is sacred, and that sacredness is to be honored and revered, not faked. Joy is to be found, not to be superficially portrayed. We’re not here to follow a script that makes people feel good, we’re here to write the story of who we are and to follow what feels good on our way home. Those women sing wholeheartedly and scream their anger on top of their lungs, when anger is warranted. Those women nurture all that they see, allow their men to open up as softly or buoyantly as they choose to and their women to break open by alchemizing their chains into gold and rainbows, as women do.
Third, what saved my life was not witnessing how well those who came before me had learned to hide their scars and their tears. What saved me were the stories they told about being in the thick of it—and how you survive what feels unfathomable, unacceptable, too terrifying to put into words, too shameful to be written, shared, or recognized as true.
You might not come to this page to learn about my deepest trauma and fears—because that would be very weird if you did—but you have better things to do also than reading heartless motivational quotes that no one can believe in until they’ve experienced what the person who wrote them had to go through and overcome.
I’m not here to save you or save the world, I’m not a hero nor an angel, and of course, I understand why this feels very disappointing to Bully Brain… but if you’re here to read what I’m writing, it’s safe to believe that it’s not because you think I’m the savior the world awaited. It’s because of my willingness to write about all that makes me human, all that makes me hurt, all that makes me grow and how I find a way to stay into the thick of it.
And we cannot stay with our pain if we refuse to believe that pain exists. We cannot heal a wound if we’re busy covering it. We can’t overcome what we run away from. We can’t free ourselves if we pretend that our current cage is the entire world.
I don’t believe anymore that I’m meant to disappear every time I get dysregulated. Nor do I believe anymore that everything we do is meant to be a contribution. I believe our trauma allows us to understand how to shine brighter than ever before, if we let them reach the part of us that is connected to the divine, to all of us, to all there is. Because that’s the hidden gift:
If we have no reason to go explore the depth of our inner world, we stay comfortably seated on the surface of it all, watching those who struggle in the arena, hoping we would do a better job than them, but never willing to go down and give it a try or prove it. Because we know, actually, we would not be doing a better job. First, because there’s no such thing as a good or bad way to walk our path of integrity. Second, because it’s paved by trials and errors; it’s supposed to be messy. It requires patience, consistency, self-compassion and humility. A lot of humility. It’s not grandiose or flamboyant. It’s simple and it’s real.
And it is trauma’s hidden gift, because trauma throws us in the middle of it. There’s no going back, so we might as well go forward. If we can! And if we can’t? We learn to stay in the thick of it.
I also learned that we do have to exploit our pain to be allowed to express it, nor do we have to exploit our happiness to be allowed to proclaim it. Not even as a writer. As Anne Gadsby taught me, self-imposed humiliation is not humility. I’ll add to that that self-abandonment is no badge of honor, no matter what our culture has been teeling us. And as Brooke Castillo reminds us Life is 50/50. There’s no having the good without having the bad, and there’s no glory in focusing only on the bad either. Life is all of it. The wonderful. The unthinkable. The magic. The mundane. The “yes please forever more” and the “not even once ever again”. The ethereal sky and the is-ness of the Earth. The unforgettable past and the unimaginable future. The warmth of a summer night and the cold winter wind. The purest glimpse of awe and the muddiest flash of apprehension. The so-called good. The so-called bad. The tales as old as time. The new beginnings. The highs. The lows. The celebrated beautiful. The disparaged ugly. I’ll write about all of it on this page. Because it all matters.
And finally, I do not want to hide from the darkness under my skin, because darkness is not evil, darkness is the source of becoming. Darkness is not what destroys us, darkness is where all that there is was born—it is what everything that is was before everything that is came to be. It is not the undoing, it is the dawning.
Darkness is not the opposite of light, it is only where light is not. We tend to see darkness as a shadow cast on our world, but what if darkness was an unconditionally loving nest, in which the stars are born and slowly, safely grow, until they can light, warm and nurture tiny planets which can in turn hold life-giving little worlds?
The darkness under my skin is where all that makes me came to life and turned into love, into light, into words that you then get to read on this page… while I learn how to stay in the thick of it all.
So where do we go when it sucks?
Right under the surface.
We dive where the body meets the soul and where the soul becomes embodied.
We surrender to the darkness under our skin… because that’s where the source of our light is. That’s where we really are. That’s WHO we really are… A vast nothingness in becoming of something extraordinary… a human being.
Care.check: What does Bully Brain tell you when you want to tell your truth unedited, without a fancy filter or an editor to embellish the script?
And once you have listened to all that Bully Brain needed to share with genuine curiosity… find your own version of a blank page and allow yourself to drop into compassionate inquiry:
Is it true? Are you sure? Do you agree? Is there another way to look at this? Is there a truer truth? What is the darkness under your skin whispering?
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo