It’s Just Me

What happens when your core gets reduced to ashes?

Another blog, eh? Must be my fourth in over a year, I’ve started them feeling great for a short while, optimistic but found I quickly dipped and burnt out again. I’ve learned recently that the ashes that come from those periods of overwhelm aren’t necessarily the end of something. They’re what’s left when everything unnecessary has burned away. It’s almost a reset, a moment of pause and what grows each and everytime from those ashes is someone stronger, has more clarity, wisdom and is somewhat quieter than what came and was before. When I see online people talking or posting about a phoenix rising from the ashes of trauma, like it’s a dramatic, cinematic moment, but in reality, or at least mine, it’s slow, uneven, and often invisible.

Healing definitely isn’t linear. We hear all those phrases, and I’m like, haha, you’re telling me it isn’t! Healing from any sort of trauma isn’t a checklist of well if I do this, if I do that, I’ll be able to heal myself, but we surface level think it is. Sometimes, the things that we rely on or have helped us deal with things before stop working as well. I know because I’ve tried everything that had worked before, and I still struggled to find myself again. But I’ve realised over time that the wound I’m dealing with is different this time around, and I was going to have to go much deeper to heal it. I had 25 sessions of EMDR that honestly was a godsend, therapy reminded me of coming to meditation classes when I started university and through that I was lucky to have found a path into Buddhism. As I delve further into the teachings (and I’m doing a lot, daily prayers and study), I’ve realised that so many things I’ve been saying for years and I already align with them. I seem to have this natural sense for other people’s suffering, and while that doesn’t mean (even though I have in the past) I no longer have to tolerate bad treatment or behaviour, but it does mean I can hold compassion, understanding, and still keep my distance from afar. We can’t change anyone, but we can see that however they act comes from a place of extreme pain.

I constantly remind myself that nothing and no one is fixed, and we forget or don’t even know that, but I’m learning that everything shifts. We don’t need anyone’s permission to become someone new, everything is always changing and I won’t even start trying to explain emptiness. Where I am now is I’m someone shaped by what I’ve survived, but I’m not defined by it anymore. This feels slightly different from the other times I’ve rebuilt myself or even started a blog.