When I used to think about untying my lines, I was full of a sense of freedom and adventure. I felt nothing but potential and the thrill of my own capabilities. It felt like I was ready to tackle any challenge and there were no limits to where life would take me. The secret was to unleash myself from the shackles of my little world and soar, unbridled to become my relentless self.
I sat on a mat in Sedona and pulled the “Inner Trust” oracle card. It seemed so simple – all I had to do was trust the universe and do the next right thing. As I placed one step in front of the other, it would all be as it should be.
I don’t feel that way anymore. Maybe philosophically I believe it, but I don’t feel it – at least not right now. Instead, I feel like I’ve made a year’s worth of really bad decisions. I would love to give you a laundry list of my transgressions, but then it would just seem like I’m having a pity party. I don’t want to keep waking up at night drowning in a pond of self-loathing. But maybe I do. Maybe part of me knows how to be miserable, and I’m comfortable there.
I’ve always had someone to blame in my short unimportant life. When my adolescence blew up, I blamed my parents and church. I had a string of bad boyfriends, and they were certainly easy to blame for all of my problems. I ended up in a toxic marriage and that was excellent fodder for my insatiable need for blaming. When I left this bad marriage, I ended up face to face with God Himself, my indignant finger pointed straight at him. I’ve now run out of external parties to blame. I’ve focused this year on healing and letting myself grieve. I grieved it all out.
And now I’m left with myself. My brain patterns are wired for blaming, and with no one left to blame, I’m getting the full onslaught of my being’s ability to blame and hate. I can no longer connect to my potential or my desire to soar, because I’m now shackled by my negative beliefs about myself.
To be honest, I don’t know how to get out of this cycle. I go to retreats, I meditate, I pray, I feel better for a few days. And then the car gets stolen and I fill out the insurance paperwork incorrectly and I’m in the self-loathing pond again. Then I scrape my way out of it and realize that everything is as it should be. And then I can’t figure out how to do the marketing for my business and feel lost and stupid. And there I am, swimming through the mud again.
I can apply logic. It doesn’t make sense to blame myself for everything that’s wrong. Nothing is even really that wrong. I don’t have the skillset to run a business and that’s ok. I don’t have the financial stability to push through the pain and uncertainty of it all. And that’s reasonable.
There just seems to be a deep and dark underbelly to untying your lines – intense fear, a strong sense of scarcity, loneliness, and uncertainty about how to navigate. I suppose there are storms at sea after you have untied your lines and are far from shore. It’s easy to get lost and feel like it was dumb to leave land to begin with. I suppose the storm also passes and the calm returns when the sun is shining, and the course is clear. I know that will happen. I’m just right in the middle of a long, bad storm right now.