Reinvention

I have been broken many times in my life. I have felt the heavy breath of death, the consistent ache of loneliness and the echo of insignificance. I assure you, nothing in life hits you harder than vulnerability. When the physical beauty of you is gone and the body you once thought was strong and invincible fails in front of you, you get to see your soul. It’s within that state, you determine if your life really mattered. You find out what kind of person you are and what kind of person you should have been. This when your healing starts. 

Pushing past the barriers of our perceptions to allow hope to grow and carry us past the tidal waves of intense emotion, pain, and helplessness is being able to reach peace. Peace is what we need to face what’s in front of us. Life can make you powerless. It causes people to lie about their life choices and make their lives seem glamourous. For others, it can make them overcompensate their tragedies in hopes that people will have something good to remember them by.

I have found through the episodic events in my life that when the time came to die, it wasn’t death I was afraid of, it was insignificance. On my death bed I knew it didn’t matter how many reports I had completed or how much overtime I had worked. I was focused on just one question, ‘did my life matter?’ I had come to believe it did not. I had been working my whole life to survive and never had the chance to thrive. It was incredibly saddening to come to that realization and I did what I could to shake the feeling as I recovered. None the less, the first step for my reinvention was to take a long hard look at my life.

Reinvention is not compensation. If you think it is, you’re doing it wrong. If you can make peace with your past, see your flaws and pin the emptiness that lives inside you, then you’re ready to grow. You must understand that your life is your life. Personally, I wanted to know I could bring peace to my past and become the version of myself I always aspired to. I believe, to be able to get to that point I had to understand my core. What was my character? Was I someone worth remembering? Was I really capable of being more because of the kind of person I was? I’m glad I took time to examine that. It helped me understand my morale compass and set the tone for me to step outside of my comfort zone. All the years I had spent hurt, numb and hardened eclipsed all the good parts of me. I knew I didn’t have the love I needed from others, but at that time, I also knew I didn’t love myself.

While I am not better for having experienced my trauma, I am proud of my level of resilience. I was able to see who I was at my best and worst. I also saw that my reinvention wasn’t to try to escape from my true self, rather, it was to rediscover it and then push myself to achieve new things. Every day, we are in motion in our lives. When we look in the mirror we have to determine if our actions cause that motion to move us forwards or backwards. I hope this post makes you consider your own life, and how you’re living it. That you take time to determine what kind of character you have and how you act not when you’re happy and things are going well, but when you’re broken, angry, or victimized. Do you think every misfortune is your fault? Can you understand that you’re not that powerful if you think the answer is ‘yes?’ When you look at the ugliness in you then you can answer ‘what kind of person are you?’ If you choose to look at yourself today, you should also know it’s not your job to heal you. That’s a doctor’s job. Your job, is to make yourself brave. That’s the first step in becoming indomitable.