Te Ka
There’s this part in Moana where she is walking toward the lava monster and I froze a frame of all this ash and embers coming off the monster and Moana was determined and unafraid.
She sings, “This is not who you are” and I pause netflix and cry for about 5 minutes.
More often than not I would have said I was the lava monster. I am a hot mess. Things are flying off me, from me, and at the people around me.
I rock the lava monster look on a regular basis. My hair may as well be on fire for all it’s doing for me, my face includes a hodgepodge of pain and occasional makeup, leggings are glued to my lower half, bralettes hold back the fire from reaching my shoulders, and my hands are almost literal balls of magma.
It’s a hot look.
And in the middle of an all out meltdown, God comes to me and tells me that He knows who I am. I am not my pain. I am not my limitations. I am not my blood work. I am not my fears, doubts, anxieties, weaknesses, or my shame.
This is not who you are. I know who you are.
You are the strength that has overcome, the humor that has laughed when you could have cried, the eyes that have held back the floodwaters, the arms that have clutched your body trying to keep your heart from ripping apart, the slow breath in that promises a slow breath out, and standing your ground against the howling winds and pouring rain of life.
That is who you are.
As much as you have endured and survived, seen and heard, and felt, and as much as you have tried to avoid the pain, you inadvertently ignored your own strength.
You may have grown up thinking you were not a strong person, but after facing the pain, grief, loss, and existential crises that you have, you have to admit how crazy strong you really are.
Then I realize I was never the lava monster. I was always Moana, standing up against the fire and embers flying into my face, standing against the power of nature and knowing that I’m capable of more than insatiable pain, and knowing who I am in the face of it all.
A weak person would not have come out the other side of all this pain a more compassionate, gracious, kind, loving, valiant warrior.
A weak person didn’t come out the other side. You did.
But that isn’t the end of this.
It’s really easy to make life about the pain because there is so much of it. Life is thick with pain, so I get how it becomes the focus. Bad things happen, people do shitty things, maybe become shitty people, and hopefully the world and the people are healed of the shitty things.
But that’s not always how I’ve felt. So if you’re not there, it’s okay, I get it.
Things happen in life that cause a lot of pain and that pain reverberates through our life and it takes time to heal. That’s normal. Sometimes when I’ve been healing from especially painful things, I’ll catch myself healing and I’m not ready for it, so I dredge up all the pain and hurt that I’ve worked through and pile it on top the self-awareness and personal peace and end up hurt, angry, and confused.
It can be scarier to forgive than it was to be in pain, mostly because pain is something you know. Forgiveness is something entirely new that is a little scary because the five year old in you wants the person who hurt you, to hurt 100 times more and this forgiveness/peace-thing feels weird. This feels a lot like grace, which is nothing like humanity.
A friend of mine explained forgiveness in a way that made it seem less like I was condoning actions and more like I was allowing everyone to move forward. I don’t remember exactly what he said as it was a little over a week ago, but it was similar to the following; Forgiveness isn’t saying that what they did was okay, it’s saying that you don’t wish bad things for them, and that you hope they learn from this in a positive way and move forward.
In moving forward I’ve found a lovely yogi community that meets in St. Petersburg and they get together and do awesome acro-yoga and love when “someone” takes their picture. :)
So a couple weeks ago I found out about this through one of the yogis who does this and he told me to come. It was an awesome night, through which I have met new friends, am growing community, am going to a new bible study, and am starting to feel some baby roots growing. These past 18 months have been the hardest of my life and God sent me in the direction of a bunch of joyful, kind, badass yogis. After photographing them for a few hours we went out to dinner and hung out and then on the way home I talked to God and just cried and laughed and thanked Him.
Every time I think I’ve come to the end, God makes it into another beginning.
Sincerely Yours,
The Undefeated
