Feeling Wrong

I’ve spent a huge part of my life feeling that I was just wrong.

Everything I wanted, everything I was interested in, everything I did and said, what I looked like, what I studied in college, the job I have, the way I dress, the way I express myself, everything about me is or was wrong.

Part of this is because Jamie molested me as a kid. I grew up thinking I was somehow complicit and to blame for his actions, and that this made me just wrong as a human being, wrong in my very existence. Wrong in my soul.

Jesus God, that is so heavy. Odd, sometimes, that I never fully appreciated how heavy these burdens I was carrying were until I look back on them, until I have started healing and releasing them….

But I digress.

I’ve learned through my healing process that nothing about me – not my hair, not my job, not my clothes, not my hobbies, not my interests, not my soul – nothing about me is wrong.

What’s wrong has been my blaming myself for things I was not responsible for.

What’s wrong was hating myself – hating everything about myself from my body to my thoughts and desires…. Hating everything that makes me, me.

What’s wrong is trying so hard to be part of a culture that is broken.

What’s wrong is trying so hard to be someone I’m not.

What’s wrong is trying to deny, hide, bury, and change the things that come naturally to me, the things that resonate in my belly, in my gut, in my heart, in my soul as the truth of my being.

What’s wrong was listening to all the voices who said I was wrong.

It is they who were wrong.

There’s a book I love, one that I last read a long time ago – so long ago that I think maybe it’s time to pick it up for a re-read. It’s Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama.

This story is of Pei, a woman sold as a child to a silk factory by her father, who cannot afford to feed her. She is there out of desperation and necessity, like the other women. It’s an unusual fate, but one still seen as honorable in the Japanese culture of the time because the women are virtuous and industrious.

Pei has her own thoughts, her own desires, her own way of speaking and doing things. This individuality sometimes leads her into trouble with other folks – tense interpersonal interactions and so forth – but her unique and independent spirit also turns her into a leader within the factory and the workers union. In the story, she doubts herself, wondering if she shouldn’t become more like the others, shouldn’t try to fit in more, be more “normal.” Because it would be easier, wouldn’t it? And her best friend says to her, “Just because you do things differently does not mean that you are wrong.”

That quote has been with me since I read the book, but I never had the courage to truly act on it until I’d done some real healing.

And now, now I have discovered this for myself. I’m discovering how good it feels to honor the things inside me that feel natural, feel genuine, feel like ME. In many instances these parts of me are not shared by mainstream society and culture. Most of what I’m interested in is on the fringes, and I’m learning to enjoy that instead of being intimidated by it.

There is no one way to think, to act, to look, to appear, to live. There is no one way to BE, and that’s the lie our culture tries to get us to swallow. I’m not buying it anymore.

I don’t think I could say this better than Krissy Van Alstyne, so I’ll leave you with this, gentle reader:

What if, all this time, you were right?

About your thoughts, your feelings, the way you do things?

Well.

You are right!

You always have been.

We are just so used to surrounding ourselves with other humans who don't know that how they feel, think, and the way they do things is right for them either.

So they cast that on us and we listen to the words they have spoken to us.

It's ok. We didn't know any better. We've all been there.

We start to believe we are a problem that needs to be fixed.

We replace another's view of us for our own and we carry that weight of lies everywhere we go.

Until.

One day.

When we, for the first time, feel what it feels like to be handed the permission of being - right.

We get so used to being - wrong or broken or not enough because of the external noise but eventually, when we are ready to challenge this - and get curious that maybe we are right, and that's the day your life shifts.

That energy brings people into our circle who are ready to show us just how right we are.

That curiosity and truth energy will grow so fast that now we will find ourselves standing in a space that sees the lies we were living and the invitation to keep walking towards our actual truth instead.

Keep walking.

Keep watching that old restricting part of you fall apart before your very eyes.

Let that anger and frustration release as you start to see it's all been a lie.

It's ok.

We didn't know any better.

But we do now, like we always do.

And your truth is the most powerful freedom you will ever feel.

Stand in it.

Feel the release it brings and all the flood of other emotions that inevitably come with it too as you crack further and further open.

You were never wrong.

You have been right all along.

Welcome home love.

-Krissy Van Alstyne, Unleash Your Truth