There are many times in our lives where we are on that roller coaster ride of “I have my shit together” then “I’m lost like a ball in the high weeds,” or “I am so happy nothing can bring me down” then “Life sucks, this place sucks, I suck.”. That ride keeps going until your stomach and your mind get so spun up in knots, there is nothing left but a tangled up mess that no one has the patience to sit and unwind. When you reach the top of that steep hill and the ride hangs out there for what feels like eternity, if you open your eyes and take a look instead of flinching away from the truth, you will be humbled.
The ride starts heading down the hill without warning at full velocity, but your eyes are closed, so you can’t even see where the hell you are going, you just know eventually it will even out again and things will be better, even if it’s temporary. But what none of us realize, or at least, what I did not realize, is if you would just open your eyes, you would see: you are the one who stepped on that ride, you control the speed, the sharp turns, the tall hills, and the safety bar. You are the operator and the participant.
When the last true, tangible thing falls away and you are sitting there wondering, “Why me, God? What did I do to deserve this?” The answer is simple. No one did anything to you, no one made you feel a particular way. No one except you. You are the one in control of your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, your words, and the world around you. You took the oxygen out of the fire and kept it from burning. You placed your true self behind lock and key out of fear of pain and judgement. You put on those rose colored glasses meant to shield you from the truth that you are the only problem you have and that in itself is no problem at all, only a solution.
Today is the day my eyes opened at the top of the hill. I looked down and I observed that all of the pain, suffering, and fear was simply a physical manifestation of lack of self awareness, presence, and not letting go of control. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Once you realize that you created that, you can either sink deeper at the bottom in hopes of creeping back up the hill to the other side OR you can transmute the negativity into a beautiful blooming image of peace, serenity, and happiness.
We are stuck in a loop because we look forward to what is on the other side of the darkness instead of taking that shining bright light by the hair of the head and making it ours, no matter what. Staying in denial about the state of the world and the state of your own heart and mind is a trap you are building for yourself. A very wise (and strikingly gorgeous) man once told me something like this, “Life is like a spring wound tight. If you unwind that spring, little by little, and just imagine your past differently, so hard that you believe it, then wind it back up, anything that happened in your past you do not prefer never happened at all.” That theory allows you to change your present timeline and your future, but you have to discover grace and patience with yourself. You have to know yourself deeply. You have to trust your intuition. You have to use your voice. You have to have love for yourself, because if you don’t, what good are you to anyone else?
Loving yourself isn’t bubble baths and affirmations taped to a mirror. It’s not pretending everything is fine or spiritualizing your way out of responsibility. Loving yourself is being willing to sit in the darkness long enough to see your own patterns without flinching, calling yourself out when you’re full of shit, and choosing truth over comfort, even when truth burns.
Grace doesn’t mean excusing your behavior. It means understanding why you became who you had to be to survive and then deciding you don’t need those defenses anymore. Patience doesn’t mean waiting for life to fix itself. It means allowing yourself to be human while you learn how to stand fully inside your own skin.
This is where you might feel the urge to turn back because the path is TOO clear. Once you REALLY see yourself, you lose the luxury of blame, the stories, and the excuses. And that feels like death.
But it isn’t. It’s the moment life becomes more than a ride you aren’t allowed to get off of.
You realize the fear was never the drop, it was the refusal to look, the clenching the bar and calling it control, mistaking numbness for peace and chaos for depth, and believing you were powerless because power scared the hell out of you.
Opening your eyes doesn’t stop the ride. It changes your relationship to it.
You stop waiting for the world to stabilize before you do. You stop asking God, life, fate, or anyone else to save you from what you’re meant to learn. You stop outsourcing your sense of self to circumstances that were never meant to hold it.
When you stop running, the ride stops being punishment and starts being feedback. You don’t rise above life, you stand in it.
And from there, stripped of excuses and illusions, you realize the truth isn’t poetic, spiritual, or difficult at all: nothing was done to you. You were doing it. And that means you can stop.
And in case you forgot, I love you,
Jenni
