Birthing Someone New
There’s so much discomfort, standing in the rubble of what once was. A former identity, a belief that was load bearing, a story that had been carefully constructed with surgeon-like precision. Everything is fragile when it’s been built on lies. It’s like playing Jenga with all the block s teetering on the point of broken glass. Nothing is safe, you can’t even trust your breathing. But it all must come crashing down. The facade must be broken in order to reveal the undiluted truth of who and what we are. I know this might sound very deep and esoteric but if anything that I’m saying makes sense then you’ll know that all of these words strung together in this was is expressing the most honest betrayal of the lies that we all uphold. Lately I’ve felt a pressing, an undeniable crushing intentionally meant to break the stucco facade that is me. Only, what I thought was meant to break me has only been wringing me out. My creator is squeezing out all remnants of falsified identities down to the last drop. Make no mistake that this pressing is most definitely painful, or at the very worst uncomfortable. There is no escape from discomfort. Pain can be numbed away, even anesthetized. Discomfort must be endured until the action causing the discomfort surpasses. And there is no guarantee on the timeline as to when this discomfort will end. We can only bear down our teeth until it subsides.
I imagine that this is what a baby in the womb may feel like. Tucked in its comfort zone, nestled and protected from the outside world, oblivious to what the next phase of its life is going to be. Suddenly it begins to feel pressure. The environment that once felt safe is now changing. Floating in the warmth of the amniotic fluid the muscles all around contract, compressing its tiny little body. To this baby it has no idea what is about to happen, no understanding that this womb that has been its home for the past nine months will no longer be the comforting place that it has always been. And it can never return. Once it emerges into the new world, the other timeline of its life, it must now adjust to this foreign way of life. The old ways of being and living no longer work and each thing presents a new challenge that it had never to content with before. In the womb there was no need for language, the energetic bond between parent and child were locked in even in there was turmoil in the external world. This infant must now interpret sounds into meaning and use muscles that it never had to use before. It must move its body as it takes everything in as data. And all of this is just to mast motor skills and life, we haven’t even gotten to understanding social cues and understanding the complexities of relationships as those relationships change each and every moment.
There is no playbook for this new human and yet we give it all the grace and compassion in the world for it to take its time in learning how to be human. Somehow we forget that we are continually learning, even when we are in our forties, fifties and well into our eighties if we’re fortunate to live that long. Environments, people, habits and behaviors all change. Sometimes those changes are so subtle, just barely registering the slightest awareness from us, but they are there. Change is painful, change is hard and it is also unavoidable.
“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
For quite some time I was avoiding my own change or trying desperately to not change. I know I’ve done myself a disservice in attempting to stall my own changing, and in that tantrum attempt I ended up causing myself more harm than good. But all things work together for the good of those who love. I know the scripture says those who love God but as I have learned throughout this journey God is LOVE and CHANGE and MAGIC. All of that is encapsulated in the Self. I’m about to dive into a different topic that I want more time and space to write about so I think I’ll end this post here. But before I go I want to tell you that when you feel yourself on the brink of a shift, a change that you can smell in the air like in the middle of the summer heat when you can smell rain coming in the late afternoon, know that it’s ok. It feels scary because it’s new. It feels awkward because you’ve had no practice and you’re going to have to learn on the fly. But this new is going to expand you in ways that you didn’t even know you needed before. You’ll be able to take up space and stretch yourself out to the edges of the universe. You will be a new creature, transformed and illuminated.