I was interviewed on Facebook Live a couple of days ago, about Seasons of Shedding and Regrowth. The day of the interview, I was in the process of unpacking a load of pain, worry, and doing a great deal self-loathing. So I the show’s host earlier that day, “ Right now may not be the time to speak on this.”
The interview was set several weeks prior, and my fear in that moment, was that my pain and turmoil would make me a fraud. So how would I be able to deliver the correct message when I was as ANGRY as I was? The thing about time though, is everything that we do, every purpose we serve, and every pain we feel is supposed to be experienced at the exact time that we are going through it. I do not believe in coincidence or mistakes. So I had no idea when I accepted the interview that I’d be feeling the way that I did, but the creator did. I understood that, and proceeded.
There were some things that I wasn’t able to articulate properly at the time, because I was so busy being plain clothes mystique covering my blue (marvel reference), that I left some things out. Here we are now, with the proper clarity to elaborate.
Shedding is scary, and very important. Every night when you sleep, dead skin cells fall off in your sheets, hair follicles secretly omit themselves out of your combs when styling your hair; and seasons change regardless to if we long for warmer days or not. These are natural occurrences that we do not control but have trained ourselves to not dwell on, because the immediate effects are minimal. However, when it comes to personal relationships and our careers, shedding is a far more dramatic occurrence.
The point is still the same, old skin cells die to make new ones, hair falls out, to make room for new hair. There are people in my life whom I had no doubt would be in my life forever. Believing that they’d never hurt me, because I knew exactly who they were, and they knew exactly who I was. Guess what, I was wrong. Part of the reason why I didn’t find myself fit to “advise” was because for a brief moment I started to question who exactly I had become. Some of the people, who I believed would be here forever, were showing me exactly why they wouldn’t make it to the next quarter of my life. Quite honestly, that hurt. I don’t like to loose people. I’m an entourage type of person. The more people around, the more love to feel. But the thing with mobs is, they always disband. I’m aware of this but I always believed that my mob, was different.Then the truth came.
So, I must be responsible for this right? I am the type to internalize everything, to sit back and quickly analyze every wrong turn I could have possibly made. It got me to the point where I felt like, I must have missed something. I don’t internalize because I lack self esteem or good feelings towards myself. I internalize because I’m so arrogant that I believe that if I can’t solve a problem, than I must BE the problem. I turned left when I should have turned right, I didn’t provide the proper direction, I got me/us here. What a terribly lonely existence right?
So in my interview, when Cabryl Chats asked me “How do you cope with transition?” I looked dead into the camera and I said. “ You’re going to mess up, and that’s okay” I said some other deep shit about caterpillars and how after a complete life cycle they go from egg to larva to chrysalis to butterfly but at the end, the beauty within all those cyclical changes is a butterfly. Because that’s me, I say deep shit. Things people expect me to say. What I should have said was. “You know what, I really don’t know. What I’m doing to get through my pain is talk to you on this Facebook live video, I made sure that my eyebrows weren’t crooked and my kids were quiet. I wept silently in my pillow the night before and went to work like my week wasn’t hard. I put concealer under my eyes, so it would look like I slept well and had a tear free night. If you want to know how to survive within in a struggle, don’t ask me because quite honestly I am faking the shit.” I have no idea how to get through this pain that GOD obviously wanted me to go through. Even that wouldn’t have been completely true.
I’m still the hopeful little girl who used to sing at the bus stop. I am the woman that within her hardest days notices a beautiful stranger crying her eyes out in public and stops to hug her. I am the mommy who makes sure that her babies have a dance party at least twice a week, so they can live as free as they possibly can. That is what’s sustaining me. The redemption of knowing that if I make it to tomorrow. I have another chance.
So I would have told her, hard days can be really hard sometimes, but good days, are perfect. Because you don’t expect those either. Sometimes you just have to get out of your own shit, and LIVE. Negative things are going to happen, you are going to fall, you’re even going to hurt other people. Accept those pitfalls but don’t live in them. You have every right to cry, you have every right to feel defeated, but those feelings should be fleeting. Find joy in the possibility of tomorrow. It’s going to be an amazing day.
Amazing story, thank you for sharing this!
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