Through Your Greatest Pain Lies Your Greatest Awakenings

“You know what your problem is? You’ve spent your whole life trying to prove it to everyone else and now the only one you have to prove it to is you.”…

It was a statement my therapist had made to me during one of our meetings… it had been a year since we had lost my brother Matt, only two short years after losing our brother, Stephen… I still wake every day with purpose to find some peace in it all…

He’d be 43 tomorrow… but he left us too soon, ‘forever young’ he had mentioned to me in a conversation not too long before we lost him… there’s so much now that I’ve come to understand and know that I wish I had learned sooner… the wisdom that has come to me through all of this… the things I wish I could say to him now… before reminding myself, he knows… I still talk to them all the time… many times I feel like they are the ones leading me, guiding me, holding me…

It’s a hard line sometimes… trying to place my fear appropriately, trying not to let it control me… trying to show up for myself the way I’ve learned I need to.. while also showing up for my family the way I know they need me to… a balancing act that often leads me questioning myself, that often leads to exhausting myself… it’s why I’m so open with them, because I’ve learned that it’s the unspoken truths that hurt us the most… when we are left with only the dialogue that our own imaginations about ourselves are left to reach a conclusion on…

“I had to lose you to love me.” It’s a song… when I first heard it I cried… I still do… as it speaks to me so deeply… I realize now we were all struggling with the same thing… trying to find out where we fit into this world, trying to find our worth… trying to feel good enough… it’s the one thing I think we all have in common… living every day chasing or running away from an emotion…

The hardest, most grueling journey I’ve ever been on is one of self discovery… but I’ve learned that through your greatest pain lies your greatest awakenings… and its on the other side of shame… the other side of fear… the other side of failure…that brings you face to face with self acceptance… brings you closer to grace…

I pray you run towards hope and find it, if even just a glimpse right now… I pray you run towards peace.. towards grace… I pray you run towards a knowing that you are already worthy.. I pray you find your truths between the lies and realize…you were always good enough…