"What is it about our biggest mistakes that
hurl and swirl us into the oblivion
of regret and reliving?"
In the mirage of a man I lost my life, and in the projection of another I built one. Both came down at a different pace and weight. This is the crux. I now stand in that ugly place of believing in myself and my ability to do the impossible, and I am still not able to leave this room. It's a dangerous space to play a scale of self-loathing and self-acceptance. A torrid cycle of questions with answers that lead to more questions.
What makes a woman....to me? How do I define the divine and imperial beauty which is a blooming feminine person? To struggle NOT to be defined by anyone. It is a messy and staggering fight against the collective idea of what I should be. Who I am, and the woman I aspire to be. My definition is more simple than you would probably expect. A woman I would admire is HONEST in all ways. Not merely the ways that society praise. No. HONEST with herself, her heart and her intentions. The wretched and the gleaming - totally pure.
I have known too many women willing to lie to themselves to prove a narrative, then lose themselves. The bitterness and stifled truth of what has hurt, shaped and built them festooned in a mask that only suffocates. These women are angry, falsely self-assured and righteous without real conviction. They are liars and abusers. Dishonest to their one true self because they reside in a realm of idealism and self-loathing that can only ration it's hunger to continue by self-aggrandizing and breaking others down to try and build themselves up. They do not smile often. They point fingers and deflect. They claim Mother-Mary martyrdom, but they bleed thin blood that only the un-evolved celebrate and admire. Even the slightest "thinker" sees through it.
They hide their instincts and malcontent by surrounding themselves in other hatred-filled circles of scorned and ignorant women singing in unison, hand in hand, all secretly hiding their own monsters. Their very weaknesses are what serve as human mortar disguised as empowerment. This is not a woman I'll ever understand. I simultaneously want to peel their layers, open their eyes, and clear the furious dust-clouds of stink that float around them like The Peanut character "Pig-pen."
I want to unshackle them and say: "You can be the complexity that you fear. In fact, you are that right now. But you are hiding."
Then, in my quiet and temperamental moments, I realize with clarity, that you cannot change anything that believes itself to be the only "right" way. It is like trying to convince a king he is a pauper. The ego is an impossible thing to shrink by the very representation of what it abhors. So I focus my energy, my inner light, back to myself to see what illuminates.
I know what I cannot be. I know that I am honest with myself, and now with more eyes and witnesses than I've ever deemed worthy of my very personal truth, I've stood in judgment. I survived. A woman is kind and has empathetic tendencies that see past the fast wit or quiet introvert. She not only feels what people permeate, but finds their beauty and reflects and radiates it back to them.
This is where her problems begin. It works with both men and women. A mirage of "connections" disguised so well, it feels real to even her. This is fallibility. The loss in loving too big, too much, with no limits. She who has this power also has the curse. The curse of getting lost in loving all the things she sees in a man. Something that perhaps never existed beyond the very speck of possibility, she now finds herself projecting onto him. This repeats itself. She fails. She gets called a liar, a cheat, a whore. Everything crashes down, with facts or without.
The woman I aspire to be cares little what people think they know. She is driven by the strength in her true and unwavering belief in what LOVE is. To her it is a sparkling, red-hot shimmering spherical light of purity. It is to be protected, and given with care. It spills out of her to strangers and the familial and friendly alike. It discriminates more by her mistrust of it's former misuses, than by a list or code of honor for recipients.
The woman I aspire to be is who I was before I lost myself in a lie. I lost her in the seeking of the inner-truth she defined herself. I was in error. This woman I am now stands up accountable. She mothers and nurtures with a calm knowing that doesn't demand respect but beckons it with love and compassion. She sees the best in everyone because she expects the same. She is never, no matter how burnt, bitter or singed by the simple beauty of having loved and lost, hesitant to love again.
I lost her for a beat. In this well-mirrored, spineless and cowardly deception of a man. His pandering human-suit reflected and reformed based on all that others needed of him. He knows not now who he is, or for which he stands. I needed him to be genuinely good and true and deliver me from the mundane and quiet, repetitive life that disallowed my truth. What I didn't know then was that I already existed. SHE existed, and could thrive in whatever she sought to make meaningful. This very point proven in prowess and in the very powerlessness of her biggest strength that she thought was a weakness: Love.
A good woman? The answer is totally subjective and I am many things. I am learning still every day that unfolds before me. The older I get, the more I realize that I don't know. The more mesmerized I am with the human beauty that lies just beneath the surface of the things we say we are, the more transfixed I am with living out that bent and imperfect truth and finding ways to empower my daughters to do the same. No shame, no fear, no noise from the crowd. A heart that sings her song cannot lie. The meat and matter that make this woman are regrettably not recognized by the blind eyes which are sadly fooled by imagery, stories and the confines that are built by limited beliefs.
Her "good" is in the way she reacts. Her "good" is in the ability to keep quiet, those demons that would otherwise launch at the judging and quick-to-punish souls for they are far younger and less aware than she.
Instead she backs away slowly into her own multi-petaled lotus flower to float and absorb more sun, water and truth from the air and essence of existence. She is not meek or hot-tempered. She does not blame others or fear the weakness she witnesses in the cloaks of women posturing for pats on the back.
No, she collects these prismatic reflections of all that WE are, and learns better how to protect the sanctity of being a strong and purposeful woman. She hopes, above all, to aid, in some small way, the other emerging women of truth and self-actualization to give themselves the sincere permission to just be.
My daughters, 6 and 10.
TO BE whatever they are, whomever they want to become, and from whatever mistakes they learned most. She seeks to build and raise them, as the strongest of women and words of women passed, have taught and raised her, high above the smoldering cauldron of closed minds and loud mouths that boil up and test her ability to withstand the false heat.
She is too many things to fall into line. She is curvy in her wildness. She is brave in her vulnerability. All facets of her complex and layered soul, so mysterious even to herself, combining and combusting at the merging of imagination and her soul's desire to exist in honesty.
She is not a phoenix. She is not "good" or "evil", much more simple than big words, she incredibly IS. She always will be, and she is attainable when self-forgiveness blossoms.
She is acceptable when she returns to love, and receives it FROM HERSELF
as easily as she gives it.
She is at the fertile, muddy, fresh-smelling paddock of beginnings. Yet again. For the number of these fields and crossings is limitless to a woman with a well-worn and earned wisdom from those women who lived bigger and braver before her.
Brazen in the journey she is on, she is collectively but very slowly leaving footprints of dirt and earthly mire. With her character burned and built by betrayers of themselves, she will, along with others, erase the age-old rules of what should be.
She is leaning forward, hair blowing in the salty wind, and she will leap soon enough, with a quiet confidence and resolve...she will swan dive, and she will live.
She stands at the precipice of madness and pure beauty. This place, this destination, this world known to few because it is so sacred, whispers. May it sit gently by your heart and light you within as..
A WOMAN, brave and rightfully recognized by HERSELF, leaping into the EUDAEMONIA that she deserves, to LIVE NOW. ANEW.
Watch and learn. Point and diminish. Nothing will stop her.
Nothing can stop YOU.
**This post was originally published on 3.12.15 at a.shimmerinbloom.com