Lessons from My De-Construction
Waiting to kindle your courage?
For the past month, I have felt myself dissembling.
This isn’t an easy space – it has been dark, tearful, punctuated by despair and dread. Many of my family and friends have worried about me, have wished me to be happier, have cringed at the raw that is my only available gear right now. It is a space that, if I believed I wouldn’t get out of it, I don’t know if I would choose to live forever like this.
It is my current stop in a de-construction journey that has unfolded in ways I never imagined when I set it in motion three years ago by leaving my long-time job. Even though I didn’t see it then, it was perhaps always going to lead here. I understood then, and again as my marriage ended, that much of the scaffolding was coming down: a career path, a home, an intact family, all the routines and implied future of all that. What I didn’t see coming were all the ways that my emotional scaffolding would disintegrate, too: the patterns and ways I behaved to cultivate perceived safety would all become useless and undesirable tools.
Yesterday morning, I woke up in tears – not uncommon for me right now. But these tears were like a dry heave: nothing released, nothing satisfying or alive about them. And into that state, my friend texted, what is in your God-shaped hole?
This language comes from the addiction community, the idea that each of us has wounds and fear inside us, a place devoid of spirit and one many of us would rather die than face, so we spend a lifetime trying to fill it: with monkey mind, with other people and love and sex and food and booze, with addictive and patterned behavior, with maladaptive choices. We try desperately to fill it because when all the noise is stripped away, it is the place where our darkest lies-disguised-as-truths live. And it is scary. It’s where unprocessed grief and trauma hang out, waiting for us to kindle the courage to heal.
What IS in my God-sized hole? Shame stories of, I’m not enough or interesting enough or lovable enough. The belief that I will be abandoned. The idea that my value is contingent on others: that my tree cannot fall unless someone is there to validate that it made noise. Invisible lives there, too.
And how have I filled that hole? Over my life, I’ve made choice after choice to feel less, to cultivate “safety,” to stay under the radar. To stay numb and not fully present. I’ve escaped into fantasy of books and movies and my own imagination. I’ve slept – a lot. I’ve made it my life’s work to be “good,” so people would have a reason to love me.
And being de-constructed, for me, means that none of that is available or of use to me anymore. And there is uncertainty and unknowing about what comes next to fill in that void. Sometimes, I can’t find the edge of the pool to grab and catch my breath.
But here’s what I am learning and what I am trusting is true: there is a way to fill that hole. And what that looks like is to un-create the lies that live there, and fill it instead with spirit – God’s (thus the God-shaped hole) or our own spirit, as we believe. For me, it means I have to learn to become the one who witnesses my own tree falling, and be the one who comes forth with self-compassion. It is to really surrender to the fact that this isn’t a place anyone else can rescue me from. It is to stare down this lonely and treacherous landscape, and believe that something else is possible. To believe that my own eccentric vibration is what I’ve got: my loving heart, my smart and my funny and my longings and my bad-assery. My creative. My vulnerability.
It is to surrender to the shatter, because I believe the facets created will shine and reflect light beautifully. And to discover that, even in the hurt and the sad, there is potency. And Trust Everything: there is so, so much for me to learn here. And so, so much to become.
And in my dissembling, I have NEVER felt clearer, more intuitive, or more present as a coach. Let’s talk.