My Story

A decade ago my life fell apart. Twice. First when I discovered my partner, the man I planned to marry, had cheated and lied. Repeatedly. I had been blind to the pattern. This revelation unraveled my reality. Everything I thought I knew about the past six years of my life, and the future I had planned, collapsed. Confusing memories of the last two, painful, years of the relationship became clear with the newfound knowledge that the person I loved was a compulsive liar and very likely (according to a psychologist I consulted) a sadistic sociopath. The change was too much, too fast. 

I refused to submit. With my life dissolving around me, I clung to my old identity. I frantically assembled a sense of normalcy: new man, new job, new apartment. I clutched blame and rage to my chest like a life raft while swallowing my grief. In public and with my family I pretended that everything was fine. “It’s fine. Everything. Is. Fine”. 

Until it wasn’t. 

As I refused to fully experience and learn from the first disaster, my life fell apart a second time. The day before I was meant to move in to my new flat, my body forced me to stop and rethink my identity, my values and my direction.

Suddenly, the walls of my office bent and spun, throwing me literally off balance as I succumbed to a bout of vertigo that would last for months. I was bedridden. Stuck in my parents house at 30. Stripped of every title (no one’s fiancé, no job, no future). The utter despair at this uninvited ego-death triggered unusual coping behaviours. From the confines of my bed I tried anything I could think of to prove my worth. To be valuable to others. To be someone. I fought with reality, terrified that without my various roles and functions I would disappear. As I lay, disabled by my illness, often paralyzed with pain or defeated by despair, I finally gave in to uncertainty. This is all there is. This day. This ability. This meal. This conversation. This thought. This breath. 

The shift was glacially slow - it continues today - but it started here. By slowing down and achieving less, I learned gratitude and presence. My hopes changed with my new, much reduced, ability to rely on my body. I struggled with internalized ableism and gradually released it. I learned that my place in this world doesn’t need to be proved. My inherent value is and always has been a non-negotiable and universal truth. The same is true for you. Each of us being here, in this time and place, is an unearned miracle. 

Looking back on this time, I can see that the tragedies that happened to me also happened for me. The struggles I describe here guided me into a lifelong journey of healing and helping. I started my own healing and I decided to become a therapist. 

 I will always remember crying tears of hope and joy as I read the course descriptions on my graduate program. “This!!” Screamed my newfound intuition, “This is why you are here! This is the what we are meant to do!” The old me had mused out loud about studying psychology, but my ex said it was stupid and I was too exhausted by him to disagree. I could never have reached my full potential in that relationship. I couldn’t even know my own heart.  

Today, with my defences cracked open by catastrophe, I can feel my intuition and see my soul’s plan for a very different future - a future that my former self could never have envisioned. 

Pain, my loves, is the doorway. Transformation is always available - but not inevitable. We must be willing to feel the fear and walk the path anyway. It helps not to walk it alone.