Joining the Conversation

Last week when Golda and I were wrapping up her profile, she mentioned to me, “Why don’t you do a profile on yourself?” At the time I casually responded, “Well I wrote a blog when things were pretty hard for me, and I think I’ve said all I need to say about those issues.” I guess I felt like maybe I didn’t want to talk about the fact that I had been sick with a chronic illness for 5 years, or I was past it. I’m long into the healing stage of my life and talking about it feels redundant. I certainly didn't want to talk about the pieces of me that are still struggling to get better. I’m sick of talking about being sick.

But then other people reached out, suggesting that I should continue to talk. The truth is, I haven't written anything about healing. Not how it happened, or why or what it’s like to move forward with my life. For so long I was living like a car with it’s engine turned on, idling behind a garage door. Vibrating and humming with energy, but stuck. As soon as the garage door opened and treatments started to work, I felt like I was free. I just wanted to drive away and never look back. I didn’t want to write about it. I just wanted to live it.

Now that I’ve slowed down enough to think about it, I realize that it’s unfair for me to ask all these amazing women to open their lives and be real, authentic and honest in their self reflection, if I don’t do the same. So here I am, ready to participate in the conversation that we are starting together with The Layers Project.

The idea is, to every so often pop in on this blog and share with all of you what I am wrestling with or enjoying in my life. This year is going to be a big one for me, because there is a lot of change coming my way. Good change, hard change, but certainly many opportunities for growth.

I started The Layers Project because when I opened up and stopped hiding what was hurting me, the deluge of love and support that came with it lifted a lot of that pain off my shoulders. It felt so good to be real. It gave me the space to accept my hardships and learn from them. I could let them mold me and mature me. The hardest thing to do was to engage with physical and emotional pain with love, as a test from my creator, and utilize it to propel my life forward.

Now here we are, a year and half out, and life looks so different. I owe much of it to setting myself free from the stigma of sickness, and I realized that this dynamic did not only rest with this one issue and one person. It applied to all the things in life that keep us down, because I discovered that average people can engage with their struggles in extraordinary ways. Those experiences can open our eyes and minds to redefining and re-framing our worlds. By reaching out to each other, we can create a more loving and gentle existence, buoyed by the support of others.

I've got a lot more to say. Life in no way is simple, and frankly I've had to deal with many new hardships lately. I work hard to continue to push through it all, and stopping to think about it, I realize I was wrong. My story didn't end with that one chapter, and I am not finished telling it.