I feel like I’ve been in an incubation of healing for years. I first entered therapy a couple of months after turning 16, and I’ve been in therapy pretty much consistently, at least four times a month since then. What can I say? There was a lot to clean up when raised by a single mother battling cancer and having an absentee addict as a father.
Stripped of a lot of limiting beliefs and transformed after being raised with my mother being my sole provider and the person I depended on – visioning life without her was just something I couldn’t ever fathom. But here I am, a newly 33-year-old woman who has survived 13 years without her.
It’s tricky to consider when you think about living life without your sole provider and losing her as early in life at such a pivotal time. I had just finished my first year of college and wasn’t even old enough to buy alcohol before the bubble of life I was safely contained within burst, and I was forced to enter the real world.
Honestly, if you’ve ever gone through something as traumatic in life, then you know that rug ripped from under your feet feeling that I’m describing here. I learned a crash course in pregnancy prevention, credit scores, grown folk bills, and navigating family dynamics.
As I journeyed through each day, I learned more about myself, my mother, and her friends. I learned even more about the people around me, from friends, coworkers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and everything in between. After a while, I’d gained laser-focused vision of things that could be changed for the better since the day the casket dropped at my mother’s funeral.
The world and people I was discovering were total opposites from who I thought they were and how they portrayed themselves to be, and I found that I soon started seeing everything as a negative.
I found myself day in and day out, obsessing over things that, in hindsight, I believe I obsessed over to help me cope and understand how someone that I thought I would never be able to live without, I’m trudging through making it for.
I found that in this “incubator of healing everything,” I lost my sense of sympathy for myself.
I’ve been my own worst critic. I’ve beat myself up more than any person could imagine or try to. And I found that even when others try to take me out of my self-criticism, I’m never fully capable of removing myself from self-critique. Until I am pressed against the wall, and someone is treating me the same way I treat myself.
It’s interesting to come to this point because I never realized how poorly I treated myself or how badly I’ve spoken to myself until I’m looking back at a 3rd person POV and trying to understand why someone else would feel comfortable treating me that way.
Then one day, it clicked as I stood in the mirror telling myself how dare they think they could speak to me that way. How dare they think that I care about their opinion of me? How dare I even hear criticism when I know I am XYZ?
At that moment, I realized the energy I received from others was a projection of how I treated myself, but also how I looked at others who have come and lived life and set a path forth before me.
I was judgmental and wasn’t the nicest when I considered the paths that those before me had taken. It made me sit down and think about the buzzword of the year in the healing community “generational curses.” It made me stop and question.
Who am I to say that the decisions my ancestors made before me were not the best for them when they were faced with options? Why do I feel like the choices I make are better and are the “healing” path rather than thinking of the way that those who lived a life before me took set it up so that I could make different decisions when it was my turn?
The life I live now, versus my mother, grandmother, sisters, brother, aunts, cousins… is very different from the life they all live(d). Their decisions in their life were those that suited them best with the access and opportunities that were set forth for them.
So, I’ve discovered more empathy. Not only for myself but my bloodline and those who came before me and who will come after.
I no longer believe that I am “breaking generational curses” because, to me, that means judging those before me and saying they made mistakes and poor choices as if the choices and decisions I make are better. It means that the work my bloodline has done before me as a means of survival and sustainability wasn’t good enough. Who am I to say those decisions were curses?
So instead, I’m making a generational impact. I’m impacting the community and generations to follow by being the first in my nuclear family to finish college, live out of the country, chase their career dreams and make them a reality, make 6-figures legally, and see mental health therapy as preventive care.
The impact I’m making is solely based on my points of view and decision-making and not as a preventive measure to be different from others in the family. The impact doesn’t discredit the hard work that went into getting our bloodline to this timeline of life and to the point where I can exist and thrive.
I’m thankful for their decisions, which in turn allows me to make decisions that I feel work best but also include more empathy for myself, and the journey life is granting me.
No Comments