Healing: The Desire to Run and Hide.
I made a new friend this week. She initially found this work through an acquaintance, and then our paths crossed in another online universe and we became friends. She’s somebody who I am in awe of, both because of her professional achievements as well as her honesty and openness as a human being.
And although I’m excited to engage in a new friendship, I find myself facing (yet again) the same feelings that have pursued me for so long now.
A deep and profound desire to run and hide.
I know where it comes from. I also know that since I began this new phase of my journey a couple of months ago, I’ve been experiencing that desire at a level that has surprised me, and so I’ve cut myself off from many people who mean a lot to me.
Partially because I’ve needed time and space to focus on the things I need to do, but also because I have a deeper sense of shame and sorrow now, seeing all that I truly am as if for the first time.
And I don’t want anyone to see me the way I see myself.
Which I know at a logical level is not how they see me, but at an emotional level, that’s the way I feel. I’m caught between this strange collision of a desire to hide from the world, and a desire to take my place in it to do what I feel I can do to help.
I am coming to understand that I have gifts that allow me to help others in a way that is meaningful and profound, but to do so means I have to allow myself to be seen by many more people than I currently am.
Which make me really uncomfortable.
So why I am open to a new friendship when I’m doing just about everything I can to avoid others? Partly it’s because this new friend is someone who I think will understand me, and partly because I get the strangest instinct that she will, in some way completely unknown to her, be good for me.
Sometimes you find people who will, just by virtue of being themselves, show unto you a part of your path that you never understood before. It’s not that you require anything of them, rather that the example of who they are breathes life into a part of you that was waiting.
And since I’m trying to trust my gut more, and live more authentically, I’m going to venture into this new friendship against my desire to hide from the world.
Because it’s only by doing that things ever change for the better. Our universe is proof that everything left untouched devolves into chaos, and so no matter how much we might want to avoid something, there are just some things that you’re eventually going to end up having to do if you ever want to experience a sense of peace in your life.
So instead of saying ‘it’s go time’, I’m realizing that it’s ‘do time’.
Part of healing is rest, part of healing is reflecting, part of healing is silence…. But a huge part of healing is doing the things that will take you from where you are now, and help you find that place where your healing will lead you.
A place that is better than the one you healed from, a place where you can be the person you know you can be. A place where you can give out of the abundance of the lessons you have learned.
So in order to find my way there, I have to be visible both to the people I need to touch, and also the people who will guide me just by being themselves.
I sense that my journey will require both, and neither opportunity will show up unless I do.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings