When she speaks of the concept of integration Dr. Brene Brown points us towards the latin word “integrare” – to make whole. The experience of transitions is life at its finest.
Life is seldom to be found on peaks. Its abode is the messy middle.
For the past three weeks I have been out of a job, waiting for a new chapter to start. Home alone, navigating bouts of planning, clenched jaw moments, boredom, looking truth in the face, looking away, carrying out hard conversations in my head or on paper, saying goodbye, saying hello, surfing this messy middle as best as I could.
In the eye of the storm you hold on to what you can. You don’t make decisions or create strategies.
The lesson storms keep teaching me and the one I continuously forget is that the only thing I need to (and can) do in eye of the storm is to hold on. Breathe, connect to reality in any way that I can (as tornados uproot everything I thought was firmly grounded in my existence) and I wait it out. If I can, I remember impermanence: this too shall pass.
I dare you. Look into people’s eyes, not their social media pages.
One of the most dangerous traps that we all fall into (but that is poison to people suffering from mental illnesses) is comparing our insides with other people’s outsides. Especially to the snippets we see of other people on social media.
Three things I wish I was told had I had a graduation ceremony
I had no graduations. The high school I attended was too new, the scent of communism was still in the air and people still hated pomp and circumstance. When I graduated from college … well, the best I can come up with is that nobody really gave it a thought. So this morning I woke up imagining my ideal graduation.
Out with lanterns, looking for myself. Day 1 of sobriety. (A joint message from a few of my selves)
Today is my first day of sobriety. I am Catalina and I am a what-if-aholic. Day 1 of recovery. What IS. Not what IF.
Connect 