I am out with lanterns looking for myself --Emily Dickinson

Sometime in the last week or so, my internet wanderings brought me into the path of this quote by Emily Dickinson: "I am out with lanterns looking for myself." Even though the quote comes from a letter she wrote to a friend lamenting the tiresome and discombobulating process of moving into a new house, it has been haunting my thoughts ever since I came across it. I find it captures a feeling that has rattled around inside me periodically throughout my life but that I have never really been able to explain so clearly. 

(Can we all just pause for a moment and appreciate the beauty of this poet's writing even about a relatively mundane situation? Wow!)

For most of the years I've been living, I have been trying to discover my passion and purpose in life, to figure out who I really am and what's truly important to me. It always feels like an urgent mission, one that can't wait until morning, which is why the lanterns are needed. But it is so dark all around, and the lantern flickers and casts its own confusing shadows and doesn't actually shed much light on anything, and what I am looking for seems to remain elusive. Who is the person I am truly meant to be? Where can I find her? Will I even know her if I come across her in some wild sweep of the light? I need to find her. I want to know her. The search seems desperate but futile, and I am growing tired of wandering through the darkness with nothing much to show for my efforts. 

It isn't that I haven't found some good things in the searching. But it's like I have found only pieces of a puzzle without knowing what the whole picture is supposed to look like. I don't know how they all fit together or even where to start to arrange them into something cohesive and lovely. 

For around two decades I have found my passion and purpose primarily in motherhood, which does indeed feel like a worthy pursuit, even though there has often been internal and external pressure to be more than "just a mom." When I was able to ignore the voices telling me the pursuit of motherhood wasn't enough, it became the single most important thing in my life and I really don't have any regrets for letting it consume me. Motherhood has calmed the frantic searching for myself over the years, to a large degree because it has truly felt like what I was meant for. It has been my greatest adventure and teacher and has given me deeper meaning than anything else in my life. I absolutely adore being "mom" to my four kids, and I know I will always carry that precious title. But my babies are growing up and need me less and less, and soon they will all be out of my house and making their own way in the world. It is good and right that it should be this way, but I think contemplating the next phase of my life outside of full-time motherhood is what caused Ms. Dickinson's words to hit me so hard. 

I need to figure out what my passion and purpose look like in the next chapter of my life, so "I am out with lanterns looking for myself," and, frankly, feeling more lost than ever. The ways I have defined myself in the past don't fit anymore, and I find myself in an uncomfortable stage of life where my old self is gone (or almost gone), but my new self isn't born yet. I don't like this place of lost identity. And I don't know how to step into what is next without knowing even the smallest clue of what that is. I know I will get through this as I have all the difficult things life has thrown at me so far, but I hope to find a better search tool than these tricky lanterns. 

I know I am by no means the first mom to experience this challenging transition from full-time mom to empty nester, so if you've been through it and actually found yourself--or maybe, rather, your *new* self--please share your secrets with me. If you've been through it (or are going through it) and haven't yet found yourself, please know you are not alone. I'm out here with lanterns searching for myself, too, and am happy to share with you whatever light I do have. 

Sitting with Vulnerability Unapologetically

I have noticed that I have been trying to run from vulnerability lately. In truth, I have been attempting to run from it all my life. It feels very uncomfortable and risky, and, frankly, I don't like the way it seems to manifest as a perceived loss of control. But in the last few years, I have done a lot of work with myself to figure out how to sit with my feelings and really feel them and how to find strength in my vulnerability and to accept and love myself as I am, so I've been surprised at how my old habits have been creeping back in and how unsettled I've been feeling in vulnerable moments recently. I feel myself wanting to run and hide from my own humanity, and I have finally started to ask myself why that should be the case. I don't have all the answers, but I am starting to piece together a few potential ideas. 

First of all, for many months there has been a situation in my life that has broken my heart in new and more painful ways than anything I've experienced previously, and those feelings have honestly just felt too difficult to sit with and too heavy to hold, so I have not allowed myself to do it to any real healing degree. And, I have felt like if I let any vulnerability in, even unrelated to that circumstance, the dam will break and I will be flooded and might actually drown. Instead, I have been keeping myself extremely busy and have basically been dissociating through my life, just trying to survive each day. This is a reasonable short-term coping strategy, but it is not a healthy way to live a life, and I feel it taking a toll on me. Anything that isn't fully faced and dealt with will just continue to be a problem, growing more toxic the longer it lingers. My increased agitation to my vulnerability is a cue that I need to go ahead and face it, which means I have to feel it, which seems like opening myself up to pain. Thus, the desire to run and hide. But, like a child who fears the monster under the bed, my fear of it will only continue to grow until I stop and shed some light on it. 

As I begin to sit with it, though, I'm realizing there is another thread running underneath. We humans are taught in a million ways to fear and try to flee our own humanity. We have learned to equate vulnerability with weakness and to therefore distrust anything that makes us feel vulnerable. In general, there seems to have been a trend of boys being taught not to allow themselves to feel feelings at all and certainly not to express them and for girls to be taught that they can feel them (at least some of them) but they must apologize for feeling and expressing them. We can even be discouraged from feeling good, happy feelings because they are just "too much" for the people around us. 

I spend a lot of time with teenagers, and I can tell you these patterns to deny or apologize for our humanity are fully developed by the time humans reach that stage of life. From very early ages and especially in the pre-teen and teen years, we learn even to be ashamed of and apologize for the physical attributes of our bodies that we have no control over, like our height or our melanin levels, constantly reminding ourselves and being reminded by others that we are not good enough the way we are. And I can confirm from experience and from interacting with many people that the patterns to deny and apologize for physical and emotional attributes generally carry right on over into adulthood. Perceived flaws of any kind are highly discouraged. 

It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, because way back in human history the vulnerable ones were the first to die. But the vulnerability I'm avoiding now isn't a matter of life and death, and I have to remind my brain of that fact frequently. I want to run and hide from it because it feels dangerous. And I want to apologize for things that warrant no apology because sometimes my humanity is inconvenient and uncomfortable to myself and to those around me. However, as I'm starting to dig in more to this desire to run from vulnerability, I am realizing that every time I hide and every time I apologize, I keep my brain thinking that vulnerability is bad and that my humanity is somehow wrong, and then I close myself off to a well-rounded and truly healthy human experience. I love all of Brené Brown's work, and I appreciate that she reminds us over and over that "vulnerability is not weakness" but rather an act of bravery and an instrument of change.

I'm not in any way advocating out-of-control behaviors (behaviors and feelings are different things anyway), but I am not going to keep apologizing for being human--neither for my body nor for my emotions. My body does so much for me every single day, and I need to treat it with respect and gratitude. I can take care of it in ways that support its health and well-being, but I do not need to act as if it is a burden to me (or to others), particularly the parts/attributes I was literally born with that can't be changed. Additionally, a whole range of emotions have been given to me to guide me and to help me regulate. They also need to be greeted with curiosity and gratitude. 

When we can sit with our humanity/vulnerability, as a companion rather than enemy, we can make the most of our human experience and grow into true maturity. This is difficult but important. And, as I'm learning, it's ongoing work that must be practiced regularly. I accept the challenge, and I will not apologize to myself or to others for feeling the way I feel or for existing inside a unique human body. I will instead invite vulnerability for a visit and sit with her long enough to see what she can teach me.