Woman giving birth: “I feel like I’m going to die”
Midwife: “You are.”
Birthing mother: Look of horror
Midwife: “You will die the woman you are, and be reborn as a mother.”
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We are all guaranteed to move through a bodily death. And in life, most of us anyways, move through more symbolic deaths as well. The kind of deaths that feel like a loss of self in order to move into the true Self version of who we are. Or at least truer self version of who we are. I am not certain, of course, if we die to the false sense of self once and that is it or if it is an evolution of deaths and letting goes, until we come to a bodily death.
I lost my mind back then, in the beginning of my birthing story. Literally. Looking back, I think I lost my mind. My love was so outside of myself for so long. Caring for and nurturing the little humans I was so fortunate to call my own. It was as if my soul journeyed outside of myself for a little while, foraging-seeking-finding the best ways to care for them. I forgot how to live in my own body. Forgot how to hold myself and tend to my own soul.
And thank God I lost myself. Because in the losing, I found my true Self. Now I am not certain if the knowing continues to grow, or if this is me, but I do know that I feel like I have met her, and while it takes courage to step into my knowing, the stepping in feels like life.
Part of this story is of how I lost my faith to find it. To find it even more intimately. Some people refer to this losing or change of faith as a deconstruction. To me it simply felt like pain, confusion and spiritual loss. But if it was a deconstruction, this is the story of the deconstruction of my faith, and how I moved through knowing my Creator more personally. Some people that I wildly respect, adore and have been great teachers for me, taught me that an unraveling of our understanding of the God we think we understand, can be some of the most wildly profound and important times in our faith. The times when we let it be unraveled. And with the unraveling of how we understand God, also comes with it the unraveling of how we understand ourselves. Like any transformation, it can bring with it some pain. There can be pain in the redefining process. The unlearning and the exposing of misguidance or lies.
A lot of this time period felt like a breakdown for me. Maybe that’s because it was paired with a breakdown/through, like Brene Brown says. It literally felt like someone tearing away a layer of my skin. Felt like a very literal unraveling, like a peeling away a layer of my skin and plucking out understanding from my brain. There was loneliness and there was uncertainty and there was anger and my old friend, doubt. All I wanted was for someone to meet me in this anger for a while. Don’t give me hope, I thought. Because right now I am not so sure you can back it up.
I am writing this because my emotional unraveling felt like a death of sorts that wound up bringing life for me. The woman that I once knew has died, and gave birth to a new woman within me. Even moving through writing this made enough space within myself to simply feel the beauty of creation. The beauty and act of writing itself has created space within me for new life. And it is my wild hope that in sharing this, like the stories of others’ that held my hand for parts of my journey, that this might hold your hand for part of yours. Even if only for long enough to catch your breath.
So here’s to creating and life, and to the joy of creating life within ourselves.
May you be blessed with the writing of your story, dear one. Your creative and joyous birthing story.
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“Like every believer I know, my search for life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again. In Greek the word psyche, meaning not only “life” but also the conscious self, the personality, the soul. You do not have to die in order to discover the truth of this teaching, in other words. You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live. As hard as preachers may work to clarify this koan, I do not believe that it can be done. The promise contains truth that can only be experienced, and even when it is I do not know anyone who readily volunteers for loss again. Yet loss is how we come to surrender our lives- if not to God, then at least to the Great Beyond- and even those who profess no faith in anything but the sap that makes the green blade rise may still confess that losing really has helped them find their ways again. My losses have been modest compared to most. I guess you could say that my losses have been chiefly in the area of faith, and specifically in the area of being certain who God is, what God wants of me, and what it means to be a Christian in a world where religion often seems to do more harm than good.” Barbara Brown Taylor Leaving Church