The Catalog of Mysterious Bruises

It starts with my hand. I notice that my right hand feels strained and achy. I flex my fingers and roll my wrist to see if the pain is worthy of ice or ibu, but it's fine, just an ache. Then I notice that I have a bruise on the top of my hand. How did I get a bruise on the top of my hand? I don't remember anything happening in the water that would make that happen -- oh wait! Yes, when I was swallowed by a wave, I put my hands up to protect my head from my board and it hit my hand. Must have been then. Later in the day, I put my feet up on the couch to sit and read, and I see a giant bruise on my thigh. When did that happen? Looking further, there are bruises on my right knee and both shins. Huh. I don't remember doing anything that might have caused that. It was rough day out in the water, really choppy, and I fell a lot, but nothing out of the norm. That evening after a shower, I see a giant bruise on my hip in the mirror. How did I...?

Photo credit: Surf Sister Sue at San O

This is the Catalog of Mysterious Bruises. A weekly inventory of minor injuries incurred from the day's surf session. Muscle aches in the shoulders and lower back and possibly neck from paddling in proper cobra position -- boobs off the board! Arms tired out all day. Bruises everywhere. Sometimes, a bump on the head. Always grateful when there's nothing more serious. Generally, surfing is a great sport to start if you're older and worried about injuries. You fall in water, so most of the time, it's fine. But other times, it very much is not fine. Surf Sister Toni is back in the water now after her freak broken ankle incident. Surf Sister Kathy got a huge bump on her forehead from a collision with her board once. The girls who surf Doheny are always talking about collisions there, because it's so crowded. In summer, it's also full of beginners who don't have great control of their boards, so you can get hit by a board with or without a rider on it. Many of my surf sisters wear helmets under their surf hats for this reason.

My wrist ached because I was holding onto my board a lot in the rough surf after I fell off. I'm not skilled enough yet to ride a whole wave to its end and then pop back down on the board to paddle back out. There is always a separation when I fall off and I need to keep control of my board as much as possible during that separation, so my board doesn't hurt anyone, including me! The water is so cold, the waves coming at me so fast, and the neoprene so tight, that I often don't feel the injuries and aches until later. These mysterious bruises remind me that so much happens beyond my awareness, and we're all like that in a some ways: without some kind of practice of awareness, the only way we know how we're hurt is when some feeling -- physical or emotional -- starts speaking up like an ache in the hand. The only time we can look at it is when we're out of the rough water, out of survival mode and into some kind of safety. I had no idea that my emotional self was malformed, twisted -- a product of my wounds more than anything else. I've been busy both dissecting the old and assembling a new, more integrated sense of self now that I've arrived in safe harbor. Over nearly two years, cataloging my wounds has been an integral part of that process.

A not insignificant stage of this whole thing has been seeing my own wounds -- seeing them at all and then seeing them in a new light -- and feeling the shame of being exposed. Like I'm walking around the world naked, oblivious -- did everyone else know I was fucked up before I knew? Could everyone else see this when I couldn't? I needed to be out of the rough surf in order for my bruises to rise to consciousness. I needed to feel safe before my emotional wounds could do the same thing. And the only way to see it is to pay attention to the aches and pains, the big feelings.

This part of the journey started with the pain of anger. Follow the anger. Anger is a good place to start, because anger is a tricky emotion; gives us important information, but it can also burn things down. Anger is the only emotion mentioned specifically in the Zen precepts: we are told to cultivate "non being angry." No other emotion is in the list, I think because anger can be so hurtful and destructive to others. It is a really important emotion to get to know. Anger can be a cover emotion: anger is a protest, an alarm sounding, a notice of a boundary violation or the presence of injustice, and often covers for other emotions, particularly fear and shame, which are harder emotions to deal with. Anger gives you energy to defend yourself and provides relief from deeper feelings of fear and shame, but it can also sound like blame, resentment, and rage.

I have a lot of rage, fear, and shame from living in a home where I was constantly criticized sharply and not protected. I was living in a home in which criticism and abandonment lead me to believe that something was deeply wrong with me. Under these feelings is a belief that I am inherently unlovable (shame), that I am in real danger because of this (fear), and there is nothing I can do about it (rage). Following anger allowed me to face these feelings, cry it out, console myself, and release some of that fear and shame. These feelings that I did not even know were there were running my life, and I have been able to walk right into their conclave of chaos and soothe them with some excellent guidance and support. Feeling unlovable, unworthy, and the deep shame associated with that is the core wound I keep bumping into.

Anger continually shows me the ways I have been hurt, and then how I have impacted others because of my hurt. Hurt people hurt other people, so the main point of getting clarity on my own hurts is to be a better human for others. Wounds turn into buttons, all too easily pushed by really basic and normal life events. Unprocessed hurts make life difficult, for me and for the people with whom I interact. It's just hard to deal with people who are so defensive all of the time, lashing out or hiding out, and I was living from behind several shields, acting out in response to my wounds like a soldier on a battlefield. Every time things didn't go my way, I got angry. "Things not going my way" is a form of suffering we all experience. I created whole systems of beliefs around this suffering and I am continuing the process of untangling those beliefs from my sense of self.

The First Noble Truth is that suffering is an inherent part of life. It's normal. I think some Buddhists believe that suffering includes all kinds of feelings: passion and love are as much suffering as hate and greed. Pathos writ large. One of my first lessons was suffering is normal. I didn't do anything wrong to incur this suffering. Buddhists assume suffering is a normal part of life, not "things not going my way." So, oddly, some amount of fear and shame was alleviated by this simple fact. Our society has a disposition toward happiness: if you're not happy, then something is wrong or you're doing something wrong. The Buddhist belief that suffering is normal removes this pressure.

The Second Noble Truth is that suffering is caused by attachment and clinging. Clinging to what we think we need, to our egoic version of the truth, to our individualistic survival. How things are SUPPOSED to go, what people SHOULD do, which is what I was doing with my work situation at the beginning of this part of the journey. When what I want to cling to eludes me, then I get angry. Looking back on the journey over the past year or so, I’m now grateful for my anger. Anger is more adaptive than despair. Without my anger, I wouldn’t still be here.

The essence of suffering, called dukkha, is found in the three poisons, our specific attachments which put us in survival mode. The Three Poisons organize suffering under three main headings: greed, hate, and delusion. These correspond to grasping or clinging, aversion or avoidance, and ignorance. Moving toward, moving away, and confusion. Greed is the hunger I wrote about last time; the need for achievement, to be healed, to be perfect. Hate is what I feel when I compare myself to others and feel lacking, imperfect, not enough. Confusion is thinking I need to compete in the first place, that perfection is possible, that I am unworthy at all -- that I am deficient in any way is a deluded belief. Trauma has impacted my ability to form a healthy self apart from these beliefs.

At the retreat I did the other week with Matthew Brensilver, a participant asked a question about how trauma interacts with self and the Buddhist idea of emptiness. Emptiness is connected with ideas of no self or non self, impermanence, the interconnectedness of all things or interbeing, and dependent origination. Emptiness is the idea that we are not a solid, fixed, unchanging, independent self. That everything about us is always changing and who we think we are is dependent on a thousand other causes and conditions that have affected us throughout our lives. We do not exist as a separate entity; we are interconnected with all being. These ideas allow us to loosen up our attachment to our fixed ideas about ourselves. If I know myself to be something not so solid, that I have already died many times in this life, had many different identities and beliefs, then my current set of beliefs and identities are simply a work of fiction I'm writing now. Emptiness is great for people with secure attachment. If you already have a strong sense of self, a basic feeling of worthiness and trust in the world, then letting go of ardent beliefs won't necessarily add to your suffering.

For people with trauma, this idea of emptiness is tricky. Emptiness includes the idea of no self, and trauma already affects our sense of self, fragmenting it into bits, warping or twisting it into unnatural shapes. No self might be treated by people with trauma as another way to negate ourselves entirely, not meet our basic needs. Brensilver said this about how trauma affects the development of self, "At some level, it's like wound and self co-arise ... or they get tangled in some way. And so it feels like a kind of continuum where even in the fragmentation, where it feels like there is not a lot of rigidity and self, there really is a lot of a lot of energy, craving and aversion with respect to aspects of the self pattern, usually incredible amounts of shame and self recrimination and maybe unjustified diffuse rage or all these different kinds of states of affective dysregulation." [It's me, hi. I'm the problem, it's me.] Equally ineffective self development would be a hardened idea of self, rigidity -- so fragmented and rigid are two sides of the same coin. So how can we release this idea of self without further harming our fragile and sometimes fragmented idea of who we are?

Brensilver had an amazing answer to this question. There is a belief that healing helps us create a better sense of self, and it does -- I have experienced a wholeness as I have healed. But wholeness is not rigid. If on one side of this continuum of self development is the fragmented sense of self or rigidity, then, "...health is towards acceptance and love appreciation for self, but self love is actually a function of non-clinging. I don't think the journey to selflessness takes us through this intense reified sense of self. That's not really what I've seen. Self love is like a function of acceptance and tenderness and just appreciation and a little less craving, a little less aversion, and then the teaching on not self just takes us more radically into that." We loosen up. We move toward a more relaxed sense of self, instead of an invisible or a rigid sense of self. Accepting. Loving. Compassionate.

In the Mark Epstein book, The Zen of Therapy, he describes the life of Buddha in a slightly different frame than what I've heard before. He says Gautama learned of suffering and went all over to try to find the solution to suffering. He left his beautiful wife and child, relinquished all worldly possessions, and wandered as an ascetic trying to find a way out. It was the path of denial. Epstein wrote, "There was already a strong ascetic tradition in ancient India, and ... in his relentless search for inner peace, saw austerity as the surest method of detaching himself from his all-too-human body and mind. Filled with disgust and self-loathing, like many a self-hating or shame-filled person of our own era, he tried for a long time to remove himself from himself by deliberately renouncing all forms of pleasure."

And then, nearly dead from this choice, a joyful memory came into his mind and he doubted this approach. His awareness of his own mind and his willingness to go within to investigate the discomfort this memory caused allowed him to go in a different direction. The way Epstein frames the story, Gautama turned to acceptance of everything as the better path. Joy. A passer-by helped him, fed him, nursed him back to health. Epstein describes this period of time, "I think of these 49 days as a kind of liminal period in the Buddha's life, a time of intensive therapy in which he was able to make sense of his past and reach into his future, becoming the person he was meant to be." It was the turn around that led to his enlightenment. This is the spiritual path: turning toward what ails us, accepting it, and making a different choice.

The Three Poisons are balanced by three positive qualities: generosity, loving kindness, and wisdom. Different choices. Clinging is balanced by giving away. Hatred is balanced with loving kindness. And ignorance, confusion, or delusion is balanced with wisdom and compassion. The idea is to practice every day to cultivate the positive qualities and diminish the poisons. This is the Third Noble Truth: the way out of suffering is to work with craving. And the Fourth Noble Truth describes the path to get there. The basic idea of the spiritual path for me is to keep looking inward, keep facing these inner demons, and keep making friends with them. Full acceptance of my beliefs, patterns, and delusions. Meeting them, saying hello, and inviting them to teach me is the way to healing. Just like the Buddha taught. For me, the path has included both meditation and therapy.

Meditation allows me to see how the poisons work in my life, how I armor up, and practice daily to make another choice. Therapy allows me to process those poisons, how they got there, and how I might look at them differently. Like the Catalog of Mysterious Bruises, therapy allows my pain to be witnessed with compassionate attention, both by my therapist and by me. That witnessing allows them to be cared for -- not fixed or healed, no demand for change, just tended to with compassion. If we don't know that we're hurt, we cannot tend to the wound, and we continue to spread our pain out. So following the path helps us become more compassionate in this world of suffering, both for ourselves and ultimately, for others. We learn to tend wounds. Self-compassion is the most powerful tool I've learned for that tending.

My most recent doorway into greed, hate, and delusion was money. What's been at issue this month? Money. I'm broke. It's making me scared and angry. What is my relationship to money? Reflecting on this prompted pages and pages of journal entries on how money is masculine to me. I talk about money the same way I talk about dating. For example, "I'm too old" -- to get hired or get a date. "No one will want me at this age." What a great realization -- that money might be tapping my abandonment/Dad wound. That I have somehow linked money with love, support, and attention, and abandonment and unworthiness. The story I've been telling myself is one of fundamental lack, scarcity, mind of poverty. These are survival mode beliefs: resources, like love, attention, and support are scarce and therefore must go to those most deserving. I'm not on that list; love abandoned me. In order to get love or attention, I had to earn it, pay a price. Love and support had a cost. I either had to achieve or I had to offer my body sexually to get any love. Brain and body were my currencies. And now that I'm aging, both are failing me. Under that belief system, I'm stuck. I see the lack and get stuck. Money and love are intertwined, limited resources, and they've both abandoned me.

The scarcity of survival mode teaches us to compare. I am always comparing myself to others. BTG asked me to pay attention to that -- when do I compare and why? I found that I have two main buckets of comparing. First, I compare to assess where I am in the hierarchy of who I'm with. At my new job, I assessed everyone, compared their strengths to mine, and established my place. It was a confusing assessment, because I am in an entry-level job, but I've been working for over 30 years. So some conflicts arose simply because of that weird combo. When I went to that retreat in Sedona, I noticed that I clocked every man that was there. Were they going to be threatening to me? This kind of comparing is all about safety, survival instinct. Remnants of my childhood belief that I am on my own to protect myself, because I am fundamentally unworthy of love and support, prompt this kind of comparing: hypervigilance. A very old story. I find it fascinating that I never did this with the Sisterhood. They were so welcoming and fun and safe from the very beginning that there was no need to compare. So these beautiful qualities of generosity, love, and wisdom can instantly foster better quality of life. They work beneath our stories to disarm them.

The other bucket of comparing has to do with gathering information. I compare to see what's wrong with me, what I'm lacking, how I might improve. From my mom issues, I got constant criticism, so was told something was wrong with me in a thousand different ways. From my dad issues, I got abandoned, so I was shown that I was worthless. There is a deep wound of feeling not good enough, something deeply wrong with me, that continues to unravel. Dad saw that I was getting criticized mercilessly -- he knew it was happening; he was getting it, too. And he walked away. That walled fortress I wrote about before? That was Dad in my imagination. No way in. I was cowering at the foot of the wall, bracing myself. The painful processing included the realization that he didn't have to stand up to my mom. He could have just said something to me -- something kind to me -- told me it was okay, that I was okay. But he didn't. He could have helped and he didn't. He walked away, walled up, saved himself. There is a great deal of bitterness there. Betrayal. He saw my suffering and didn't help. Rage. Powerlessness. Shame. The shame of being unworthy of help.

Comparing is one way to see that central core wound and the shame that lies underneath it. I compared myself to the retreat leader. I thought, "I'm as good as they are. Probably better. I'd be amazing at that if someone would just give me a chance, if someone would just help me." It sounds like bitterness, envy, and resentment -- especially around getting help. When men are involved in the comparison, it sounds like rage. I feel powerless when it comes to getting help for things -- mentoring on this Buddhist journey, getting a new job that pays me well, generally getting support in my community. I'm reenacting that wound. "No one is coming for me" or "I'm on my own here" or "I'm never getting out of this" are beliefs based on that wound. The Sisterhood has been a miraculous counterpoint to this belief system. They are constantly helping me, helping each other. The generosity is automatic.

When I can see these things, I can let go a little, begin rewriting the narrative. Brensilver on the trauma/self thing again, "I think health almost always looks like more suppleness with respect to self-view. And the suppleness comes with a sense of just basic okayness, a kind of refuge in 'okay, I'm human who longs to be happy, can't always do it all the time.' A kind of taking refuge in something beneath all questions of worthiness and unworthiness, and that feels like letting go a little." The participant who asked the question replied with something so profound. She said, "It sounds like sort of emptiness and fullness are the same thing in this matrix of meaning." Yes. Exactly. The fullness of emptiness. Generosity, love, wisdom: all qualities of fullness that work on the self below the level of self.

Turning to better stories, I begin to reframe this money/abandonment/worthiness pairing. In her book, The Life That's Waiting, Brianna Wiest writes of comparing, “True joy is not a mental equation that we arrive at. Things are not beautiful because of their proximity to others. We do not love someone because we have loved another less, we do not marvel at the mountains because we have looked at the hillside and thought, not enough. Each of these things stands full within its own essence, and our job is to determine whether we are the ones with the hearts to appreciate them, with the eyes to see them in their entirety. Not everyone will look up at what’s magnificent and believe that it is so, but that does not render what they are looking at less extraordinary. It means it is not for them. It is not their inspiration, nor their source. It is not their person to love or path to walk on.”

I'm reminded of the Brene Brown quote from her book, Rising Strong, "Just because someone isn't willing or able to love us, it doesn't mean that we are unlovable." I misunderstood my childhood, learned deficiency was about me, internalizing this feeling of worthlessness, when it was really about the system I was brought up in. There was a price to pay for love and care, so I don't trust it. I am the giver, taking care of everyone else. It is safer there; I control the giving. Receiving things cost me. Most of the time, I didn't receive what I needed emotionally. My fundamental misperception is love, attention, and support are not freely given. At least not freely given to me, a fundamentally flawed being.

It is so hard to be seen and to receive. Because of these deluded beliefs, I limit my ability to receive love in relationships. Just like Gautama, I have taken the path of denial. I need to switch to acceptance. There is no well worn path for generosity within me. It is now my practice to allow this. Everything in the world flows — the sun rises and sets, waves crest and break, breath inhales and exhales. In relationship, we give and receive. BTG said, “Relationships grow from exchange, constant exchange.” I went to see a surf movie and a band last night. It was all about that exchange. The music flowed right through me, the images in the film so piercingly beautiful. I walked away thinking, "Storytellers and musicians need audiences to witness their work. And I love to hear and see it." One member of the band was talking about lost waves -- the waves never surfed as well as the sound waves of stories never told and heard. The worst thing in surfing is to allow a wave to go unsurfed. Never waste a wave. Exchange. Constant exchange. Join the flow.

Being a part of the world means to enter this flow. Super hard for me. The thing I am learning is the infinite abundance of love and support. I have been living from a place of lack. Living from a place of abundance, of enough, is a new world. The love the Sisterhood gives is as automatic and generous. Part of being a breath-based human is the inhale. Accept the generosity given. So this is my work now. My clinging is to lack and deficiency, so I will practice accepting generosity. These patterns of thought work more like muscle memory -- it's a slow process of unlearning that needs to be undone while creating a new habit. Unlearning— both Yoda and the Buddha agree, "You must unlearn what you have learned."

Wiest continues, “Comparing is the way that we source a sense of self when we otherwise lack it. It is an inauthentic way to fuel ourselves emotionally. When we have no real gauge on how fulfilled we are, how content, we rely on how we are doing in relation to others to give it to us. This, of course, is really just another way of superimposing someone else’s mind over our own. It’s a way of seeing life through another person’s eyes rather than feeling it through our own hearts. Because in the imaginary comparison game, there’s always a judge, and it’s never us. We are always at the whim and the mercy of how we project that we are perceived. When we are not firm within the real, grounded, lived experience we are having, we conflate that perception for our reality. The happier you are with your own life, the less you need other people to be.”

Comparing means the judge is present -- the judge is my inner critic. My internalized critic from my childhood. "Someone else's mind" -- I'm reminded again that I now have custody of my eyes and I can see differently. The definition of shame from the Mindful Self-Compassion program is how we imagine how another person is imagining us, and we imagine that they find us lacking. Comparison and shame are intertwined; comparison is an expression of shame. So if I'm comparing, that means I'm feeling ashamed of something. And that shame was taught to me at a young age. I can unlearn that lesson. BTG said that I can look at comparing as a desire to expand, to encompass more, the joy of learning. Not coming from a place of lack, but from a simple curiosity and a desire to grow.

Wiest goes on, “To heal from comparison seems, at the beginning, like you must find a way to supersede what’s threatened you, to come out on top again. In reality, it is finally exiting the pageant you didn’t realize you entered; understanding that you are not a commodity, you are a living, breathing, feeling organism, with intentions and hopes and dreams and a future." Exit the pageant. No more practicing for prizes. I don't reify my self, become rigid, but loosen up.

This is the process of unraveling, unlearning. This is what healing looks like. Identifying the wound, processing it, tending to it, feeling, allowing, hearing the story and then rewriting the story. This is a continuous practice. There is no end goal, no moment when I will be "healed," receive the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and move on to perfect happiness. This is a daily practice of becoming aware, and as Pema Chodron writes, "We're just being with our experience, whatever it is." Not fixing. Just acceptance and tenderness. Compassion. Join the flow.

After an intense period of time in therapy, I've got a good idea of my wounds and how they operate. This part of the spiritual journey has given me the catalog of my mysterious emotional bruises. Injuries I didn't know I had. Wiest says, “That journey is not an easy one to embark upon. It requires the unearthing of your soul beneath the layers of ego that have hid it so well, kept it safe from being bruised. It requires the ultimate remembrance that such damage is impossible, that spark within you is evergreen. It requires you to be vulnerable, to feel the complete range of your human emotions—not just the good ones but the hard ones, too. Most of all, it requires you to finally accept the ways in which you are not happy with yourself, and to stop using the image of how well you imagine others may see you as doing to act as a coverup for that hollow emptiness lingering just beneath. You have to be brave now.” I have been brave a long time. It might be time for a break. I'm weary. This self has been a destruction and construction site for nearly two years. It might be time to just live a little, move into this new house.

The beautiful part of this process is that now that I have cared for these wounds, they simply don't hurt so bad anymore. My reactions are at a lower intensity or have disappeared entirely. What once pissed me off instantly, like a fire flaring intensely, is now barely a match light. Healing means, in part, putting out the fire caused by these poisons. That's one definition of nirvana: putting out the fire. All of that -- seeing, allowing, caring -- puts out that fire of intense feeling that gives us grief and gets in the way of living a meaningful life. Wiest writes, “So if you find yourself at a place where you feel a constant heaviness produced by the ways in which you imagine you don’t measure up, it’s not time to change what you’re quantifying but to stop measuring altogether.” I can step out of my story and write a new one. I can step out of stories altogether and be here in the moment and pay attention.

Seems like my catalog is nearly complete. I'm beginning to repeat myself. I have talked about the perfectionism and my mom issues; I've talked about the wall. I've talked about problems with men. I've processed a lot in a short amount of time. After every big breakthrough, there settles in a greater calm and buttons become less pushable, less sensitive. The fire is going out. Yet still, after all of this, I noticed that there is this substrate of fear just hanging around. I am just afraid. All the time. For no apparent reason. Fear is just there. I still had to go deeper, follow that feeling a little further to see the story they are based on.

In her book, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chodron writes, “Fear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.” So closer we continue to move. Sitting in meditation is one way I stay put and feel my feelings, let them teach me, and then burn away. I was looking for resolution, to be fixed, when in reality there is only this daily practice of untangling from my stories. Pema wrote that "an intimacy with fear caused [my] dramas to collapse."

Pema writes, “What we’re talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye—not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking. The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we’re going to be continually humbled. There’s not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.”

Maybe the catalog is complete now. I keep hitting the same wound from different doorways. There will always be untangling to do; I will never be fully "healed." Little, daily interactions, like my relationship with money or my constant need to compare are the ways I can look deeply within to see what stories are left within me and need some editing. It's a lifelong, daily practice. The fear is the residue of the old stories. It might just take some time to dissolve -- or maybe it never does? Seeing life as it is is scary.

My practice is a daily effort to see, to feel, to notice what is happening in my head and how it affects my reality. I had to be out of the rough water to feel safe enough to see or feel any of this. An important realization comes from the Mindful Self-Compassion program via BTG. It is that things have to be better now in order for me to see any of this, to be bothered by any of this. Backdraft happens when things are better and we compare the now to the past. So some comparing is inevitable and actually beneficial. "Love reveals everything unlike itself" is the insight that has helped me ride the waves of emotion into the shore of the present.

As to the unhelpful version of comparing, Wiest writes, “Your own experience becomes enough—more than enough. You realize that you were never meant to be playing a game in the first place, and that the premise of the competition in and of itself is flawed and non-existent. The things, the people, and the joys that you are meant for are unique to you. The things, the people, and the joys that are meant for someone else are unique to them. There is no cross-over in fate, in destiny. We are not awarded what’s ours because we have proven ourselves to be more deserving of it than someone else. We only arrive at such a mindset when we are fighting for someone else’s life. When you are ready to lay down your arms, you will realize that it is time to begin fighting for something else. Your own.”

Cataloging my wounds makes them easier to see -- a reference guide to my buttons. Like the console in the movie Inside Out, I know them, know their contours, how they hurt, how they sound, how they affect me, and then when acting from that wound, how I hurt others and further hurt myself. The catalog allows me, more importantly, to have a list of strategies and inspirations to get me out of those wound-driven stories. I have the buttons and the remedies for the buttons when they are pressed. And as I practice the strategies more, attend to the alternative narratives more, the buttons get less sensitive. As I notice, soothe, and love myself and these wounded parts of me -- as they are listened to -- then the buttons get smaller and less sensitive. The healing is working. My bruises are changing colors and fading. Everything is okay. Here on the shore of my own life, I am okay.