Start With These Questions
In the spring of 2017, I looked in the mirror one morning and realized that the woman staring back at me was thisclose to falling apart.
I had a well-paying job, a super cute apartment with an equally-cute cat, an awesome circle of friends, and had finally been able to put down the wine five months earlier. The only thing missing was a life partner, and I was doing my best to trust that they would come along in exactly the right time. I was supposed to be happy.
But even though everything looked good on paper, something was off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I dabbed on some M.A.C. lip gloss, stopped at Starbucks for a venti mocha misto on the way to work, and went on operating as though everything was fine.
Of course, it wasn’t. And pretending like it was would very quickly catch up to me. But that morning? I only had an inkling.
It took time and distance for me to recognize that I had been in the midst of a reckoning. It was exactly as Brené Brown explains it in The Gifts of Imperfection:
It’s an unraveling — a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re “supposed” to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.
Brown goes on to explain that the unraveling can happen at midlife, but it can also happen at other significant points in our lives like marriage, divorce, becoming a parent, moving, recovery, working in a soul-sucking job, or experiencing loss or trauma.
And oh boy, was I in it.
It took a lot of time and work (and some more time after that) to feel as though I had gotten to the other side. I did a lot of soul searching to get there. I dove into books, filled up journals, cried and laughed and sometimes screamed, meditated a ton, prayed even more, and worked with a couple of professionals (including a therapist and a coach). I asked and was asked a LOT of questions.
If I had to distill all those questions down into the three most essential that helped me figure out how to embrace who I was and let go of who I thought I was supposed to be, it would be these:
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
Where am I going?
Simple. Not so easy to answer.
It took excavation and exploration to get at the answers. Some of the work was painful. A lot of it felt lonely. But eventually, especially as I started figuring out where I was going, it was also a little exciting.
If you are in an unraveling of your own, I’d invite you to sit with these questions. Write about them. Create art about them. Talk about them with people who care about you. Excavate and explore until you have your answers. Then keep going from there.
Curious about what it might be like to work through these questions with some support?