A natural result of committing to this inner work is it tends to expand one’s capacity for duality. To hold multiple things at once. To allow two seemingly opposing things to be true, simultaneously.
I am sitting here this evening both devastatingly defeated and overwhelmingly grateful.
I am watching as my partner modifies our home yet again to meet our family’s needs.
I sat here in silence looking at the job half done, tape on the ceiling and screw drivers on the floor, while he sat in our child’s room putting her to sleep – meanwhile I was wishing it was me.
I want to be able to put my child to sleep. And, admitting that I often can’t (anymore) feels like looking shame in the eye as it threatens to soak into my bones.
After years of being stretched further than my body could manage, years of my body showing us that my health was giving out, it came to a slow and disastrous, complete crash in fall of 2023. For a while I couldn’t eat or speak or get out of bed on my own. My partner had to take on multiple new roles and now, after 2 years of recovery (10+ if you count the unwell years before pregnancy, a period of remission, and the years after pregnancy leading up to this crash – but perhaps all that’s a different story) we have begun to see more and more signs of health returning. My capacity has certainly expanded, I am out of bed most days, I can often leave the house if I need to as long as I don’t need to too many days in a month. As of this past summer I can even walk to the park down the road without my wheelchair again.
I am so grateful for all of these things, and not a moment of it gets taken for granted.
And, I still find myself wishing I was further, more able.
When my partner or child’s support needs are greater than my capacity to hold both myself, and them;
When my own support needs or symptoms threaten my presence;
When even my greatly expanded capacity just isn’t enough;
When I manage to get up at a reasonable time of day and spend hours with my family and it stretches me beyond what feels manageable for my recovery…
Despite being so acutely aware of how far I’ve come, it has this icky way of feeling like defeat.
As I write this I’m watching my partner doing manual and cognitive labour, getting creative with problem solving to bring something to life for me that even if I was well, even if I had never become ill in the first place, I don’t have the experience or education to do myself.
My gratitude is mixed with shame, because I had to interrupt him to do the role I feel I should be able to do. The role I once did full time. The one I wish I could still do consistently.
And even though I know I fulfilled more of that role today, this week, this month, than I had been able to in the last couple of years, it still doesn’t feel good enough.
Today stretched me.
Often, I notice what stretches me and I feel good about it, a little bit like what I once used to feel after a really challenging, but good, workout.
Other times, like today, I notice that alongside the gratitude, alongside the knowing in my bones that under the current circumstances I did well, it still feels like shame and defeat.
I notice my thoughts of admiration and gratitude as I witness my partner, blending with the questioning, of “will I always be enough?”.
The parts of me that have, in the past, contorted myself as a protective mechanism to make myself more palatable, are loud. They want me to weave the silver linings that I always know are there, clearly through this writing. They want me to leave you, the reader, feeling comfortable, inspired and at ease. But while there is ease flowing through and in between all that I am holding in this moment, it is not what’s at the forefront. It is not what is asking to be spoken.
In a society that often struggles to hold nuance and to allow multiple things to be true at once, it feels safer to spell it out more clearly. To explain away the discomfort. To express each variant and part. To not only say “am I going to be enough for him?” but also, “will he always be enough for me?” – but that’s not the truth I’m sitting with today.
The unadulterated truth of human experience doesn’t arrive packaged neatly with a bow.
It becomes, and then unravels, layer by layer in the messy and magnificent beauty of unbecoming.
It leaves us raw and exposed, mimicking the vulnerability that we once experienced as a child. Fresh, new, just born. Naked, exposed, and suddenly alone without the warmth of the womb to hold and nurture us as we continue to grow.
Those parts of me that want to package this up all pretty, holding the reader’s hand and enforcing their comfort – those parts are uncomfortable with the raw vulnerability that comes with experiencing this human life in its wholeness.
But I am not those parts and if my soul has chosen this human life, I give myself permission: to live it fully, whole, messy and raw.
