Year 5…

5 years ago I was sitting next to my dad about to make one of the hardest decisions of my life. That week changed my life forever.

I didn’t just make a hard decision and lose my dad. I sat in a room thinking I had said all I needed to say. Thinking I had peace with the trajectory of mine and his relationship and all the dynamics that came with growing up without him in the day to day.

Turns out, it wasn’t all that simple. As I lost the man I idolized as a child, I also lost the walls I had built around the things that I always said didn’t bother me…and it turns out, the pain of everything that I had stuffed behind that wall was more then I expected.

It was more then just the trauma of watching him suffer, making the decision for hospice, telling his mom, my precious and incredible grammas) that he had passed…watching him pass…it was the loss of all that could have been and all that could have come.

It was coming home and making phone calls. Stuffing myself into work and just burying all the things I felt and convincing myself that nothing was left unsaid.

It was months of my body responding to the trauma and smiling like I was fine…and then came the day I thought the best way to not have to feel anything was to make it all stop.

I have spent most of my life doing and smiling and wanting peace that I taught myself that I wasn’t important.

My feelings.

My health.

My hopes and dreams.

I thought by putting everyone and everything else first, I was doing the right things. The thing is, putting yourself last is not the right thing. It put years of stuffing my calling to the side for the sake of others. Years of not taking care of my needs, my mental and emotional and physical health…

Doing became my new wall and I believed that it was okay to let myself be what everyone else needed and wanted…to be talked to any type of way. To be shoved aside and accept the bare minimum…to work so hard to make sure generational trauma would not…what a joke.

The lies I allowed myself to believe and accept…the walls I built…became my prison.

The lies I have told myself about everything…the fake smiles…the “I am fine”…have stared me right in the face and the sandy foundation they were all built on is washing away.

I call this year 5 because it was this specific trauma that really pushed me to a place of putting myself completely last. But the truth is, I have been doing it for a lot longer than that.

Now, I sit in a wasteland of a lifetime of truth being laid bare. It isn’t pretty. I have so many regrets and should have moments…it honestly threatens to drown me.

BUT I woke up today and I know I have to reframe my brain, walk in the depths of what I allowed and rise.

Rise out of the wasteland of the lies I told myself, that I allowed myself to believe.

Rise out of the trauma I didn’t cause but allowed myself to sit in.

Rise out of the habit of not walking into the calling I have on my life.

Rise out of accepting the bare minimum.

Everything in me knows this won’t be easy. I already find myself terrified. But if I don’t, my body will continue to sit in the wasteland I out it in…and I will suffer.

I don’t accept that. I can’t anymore.

And as I sob typing this, I wish I could sit with my dad again and really tell him the truth of all the things I need to say. The truth of all the things I really needed and deserved from him. The truth of what his decisions cost me.

It doesn’t change the moments that were good. The memories I hold dear, but it changes the making an excuse that those moments made up for the rest.

So here I go. Sitting in the wasteland. Blinders off. Match lit. Burning it all to the ground step by step. Until all that is left is the truth and who I should have always been.