A Jaded Healer

To be honest, this is the same headspace I was in when I started my spiritual journey in 2012. It felt like the rug had been ripped from beneath my feet, and I was completely lost in the transitions that were happening in my life. I didn't understand why they were occurring, and I didn't trust them. It's hard to trust The Universe when you feel as if it NEVER gives you what you asked for, and those life lessons just keep rolling on in. Tougher than ever. 

Sometimes I feel as I'm adrift in an ocean, clinging to a small piece of drift board, The night stars twinkle above me, beautiful and unfazed by the nightmare scenario billions of miles below them. It is confusing. It is utterly confusing to even try to understand a journey like mine. I asked myself tonight, "what would my life have been like had I never met certain people?" I can only imagine what my fiery, vivacious, beautiful 17 year old self would have done with her time and energy, had she not been chasing the love she didn't receive as a child. It seems odd that one would be further punished for chasing love, and many of the spiritual teaching's of today aren't adding up for me anymore.

"God wanted this to happen to you", "You were supposed to learn this lesson", "It's karma", and my favorite, "it made you a better person." Bitch, it gave me Post Traumatic Stress! I quit every job I start, because I can't handle the world's normalized version of stress! I can't even fathom opening my heart to love, because inside every human is a demon, waiting to unleash it's self on me. You know, that whole core wound thing. The law of attraction is bullshit, if the law only works for those of us born into privilege. Hey, Kim, fuck your advice on how to be successful. We all know it's being born into a life of privilege. 

Where my favorite tarot readers used to give me hope and inspire me with those golden nuggets of wisdom (spiritual based ideals), I now roll my eyes and sometimes even unfollow them if the irritation is flared up enough from whatever privileged ass ideal has once again been thrown in my face. Spirituality shouldn't make you feel ashamed. It shouldn't hint that abuse has made you the beautiful result of a person you are, a SPIRITUAL WARRIOR! Nobody wants that, and it's a bullshit answer that further antagonizes a wound that won't heal.

There is no spiritual reason good enough for why a beautiful, vibrant, sassy young woman was beaten into a twenty year coma. There is no answer good enough, so stop fucking trying to heal real pain with hurtful and cliche answers. God didn't want that for me, for those of you who pray. I wasn't some regular person born with some rare gene that made me battle ready and able. Fuck that. I was a child. I lost twenty years of my life, and there is no reason good enough. The poor won't find success just because they think positively. The broken aren't healed just because the spiritual community tells them they can be.

This path makes no sense to me. It led me to a daycare where the spirit of my past unborn child now exists in another child. A child I can't take home with me. And I'm happy for him. I love his family for him. They couldn't be better for him, but now I love a child that isn't mine. One that will never be mine. What sense does that make? 

I remembered my past, but now I'm angry and hurt, and embarrassed. I do not understand why I was led back to memories of loving people who I had to become estranged from. People who let me down. People who still aren't the kind of people I should have in my life, because they lack true integrity. They have only aged, not grown up. I guess this is the epitome of a pity party, why me? Why did my path collide that night with a man who would bring nothing good to my life? What love is worth this? What good can come from any of this?

Spiritual people would tell you that you gained something, you learned something, and now you get to be the teacher. They would convince you that you can heal others through your pain, but this is an ideal most of us in pain never actually reach. We just suffer through lives that make no sense instead, and we quote Buddha, which brings a minute amount of relief from time to time. Is Teal Swan really healed? She's got some toxic traits they'll excommunicate you for bringing up in the Teal Swan fan club, doesn't she? She's giving love advice, four times divorced. 

I may be jaded, but at least I'm not a liar. I may not be who people elect to be their spiritual teacher, but at least I'm legit. There has to be a season in life when the real ones get credit where credit is due. We can't live entire lives based on fairytale spirituality, that feels good in the moment, but never actually brings us the change we hoped to see. 

If I had to force an answer right now, here in this moment, for why I think my life happened the way I think it did, it would be so that I might be led back to my heart. And that I might find myself a little bit at a time, fragment by fragment. But there, even that, is an ideal that feels superior to what I'm actually feeling about spirituality. I had to lose my memory, my life, and my feeling of safety to find a heart that was taken away by abusers I had as a child? Fair ...

We really need to stop and look at how we talk to abused children, teenagers, and women. We can do better! We should never glorify their pain, their struggle, their journey. We should also never place the blame on their shoulder's, as in "you created it", "you wanted this life struggle", "you opted into this life". and "you're a healer, because of the pain you chose to go through". I mean, can you feel the toxicity oozing in each of those well meaning statements. Instead, be bold enough to say "there is no reason good enough ... " 

There is no reason good enough for you being drowned as a child.

There is no reason good enough for your being targeted and repeatedly hurt by sexual predators starting in your toddler years.

There is no reason good enough that you had to shut up and stay quiet, so that your entire family wouldn't be slaughtered.

There is no reason good enough that the men you have loved have raped, punished, abused, and put you in danger.

There is no reason good enough that you've been victimized over and over and over again, and then the blame was put on you with weird bullshit spiritual beliefs, such as "you wanted this to happen to you ..."

There is no reason good enough that you were hurt, tortured, used, burned at the stake, because you were different.

There is no reason good enough that you were raped, beaten, and robbed of twenty years of your life.

There is no reason good enough that the life of a real child was beaten out of you. 

There is no reason good enough that your body and your spirit were used as a dumping ground for people too lazy to do the spiritual work themselves.

We can do better. We can help each other heal by not forcing shaming beliefs onto those already suffering. And we can embrace them, every part of them, whether or not they ever heal. We can listen to their "bitter rantings", when they are triggered by something, back into that space of being too little or too helpless to protect themselves. We can assure them they are already whole, and that there is no need to change who they actually are for the world's comfort. 

We are never ugly survivors. We are all beautiful. Even if we don't feel that way. We are beautiful because we are, and that is good enough. Scars may be forever imprinted in our flesh, fear embedded in our DNA, but shame never had to be a part of the human journey. And if you are ashamed, good for you, you learned the lesson well. But you can unlearn it. 

I am not broken, flawed, fucked up, or a mess. I am a fucking masterpiece, made with colors and mediums I never would have used myself. And still, I love myself. I am angry, and jaded, and maybe I will be until the day I die, but I am healed. I do not salute my abusers, thanking them for their contribution to the pain I have had to carry. I am not that fucking delusional. And I am not at all grateful for the life of pain forced upon me. 

But I am still a spiritual teacher.

And my voice matters. It matters a lot.

I am, currently, a jaded healer. 

Who would not have chosen this path.

Who will not glorify my suffering for you comfort.

Who will always choose true authenticity over an image that isn't even based in half truths.

Love me or hate me, I'm me.