The Most Dangerous Gift
You know what’s a slippery slope?
LIFE.
I’ve developed the nose for a good cosmic joke. The best one I keep running into face first is one of the most sublime paradoxes afoot me thinks. It’s true that I am a highly sensi Pisces OR SO I HAVE BEEN TOLD, but needless to say: this doozy is undoing me.
The reality I’m coming to grips with is that my pain and my gifts are intricately connected.
In the words of my favorite angry woman from the 90s: Isn’t it ironic that I, someone who has made a career out of teaching people to navigate chaos, harbor a punishing perfectionist?
When I find myself deep in a wicked knot I can trust that the universe will always provide me opportunities to work my shit out. I am learning to love this truth, even if the moments offered are those I wish most to avoid. This is why intimate relationships are such crucibles for one’s evolution:
You can’t run from your own reflection.
The problem is, I can’t hide my mess when there’s someone there to witness it. And what a dangerous gift this is.
For so long, I thought that the only way I could be worthy of love was to be perfect. Chalk it up to the ol’ parental wound remixed with some epic childhood rejection, and you have the formula for a textbook avoidant attachment system. Isolating my mess became a defense mechanism; a strategy that promised protection but only ended up giving me a complex.
I came to planet Earth and all I got was the opportunity to clean up my own bullshit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which is all to say: this weekend I had some feels. I didn’t know how to deal with them and not being able to win at my own process had me feeling frustrated and uncomfortable AF. But there I was, at dinner with my lover, and my spice levels were off the charts. Even as I attempted to titrate my tension, I couldn’t find a way to be in my rawness without wanting to mediate it somehow. To make my discomfort somehow more perfect, better, “acceptable.”
At one point my lover turned to me and said with a genuine smile: “If you want to be a cranky, wild bat, please go ahead. I love that part of you too.”
It was a deeply healing comment that took me by surprise. I FELT SO SEEN AS A CRANKY BAT! Weirdly, strangely — a tiny part of me perked up and said FINALLY. Someone who GETS ME. And in that moment, a voice I had silenced and suppressed got to be freed.
You see, being exposed in my imperfections is both my deepest fear and the healing I seek.
If my experiences have shown me anything, it is that life is designed to break you open. Resisting only increases the suffering. If you haven’t caught it by now, this is the punchline: what you resist is your healing. Until you stop resisting, you have not healed it. Perhaps it is the bat speaking, but it’s probably in your best interests to splatter your guts so you can get on with it. Or, as a dear friend put it so eloquently: sometimes you just need to let your heart fall out of your butt.
The unexpected blessing of such moments is that you get to see who meets you there: in the rubble. These people are treasures, and if you have them, hug them. (Safely, duh.) Write them a love letter.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but I know I sure did:
There are those who will walk with you when you are in your most devastated state. There are those who will love you when you don’t know how to do it. There are those who will welcome you home after you’ve crawled your way through the dark night of your own soul. There are those who will love the fuck out of your cranky ass.
If I have anything to share back from my own HOTT mess, it is this:
Let them in.
I have a lot to learn about radical acceptance and what it means to be seen in my everything. But this weekend was the best kind of undoing, for I can now see beyond those earlier stories about who I thought I needed to be.
If there is a bat teaching to take away perhaps it is to be the wild guardian of your sacred territories. To love your little gremlins back into wholeness. There is food to be found in the shadows. Reverse your perspective. The bat is the only mammal that flies, and if that is any proof then maybe you, too, can wing through the darkness undisturbed, more alive.
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
