I think it’s funny how often we perceive someone else to be ahead of us on the journey... This caught my attention in a conversation with a friend I used to have years ago and came back to mind when I was reflecting on how that relationship has changed me in its slow ending…

It’s a trick of the mind, I think. Like when you’re falling asleep and all the sudden you startle as if you are somehow really falling. Or how you can close your physical eyes and pull something to your mind’s eye to examine closely even though it’s nowhere near you.

For most of my years knowing this person, it felt like they were out there ahead of me somewhere… and I just wished that someday I could be up there and helping people, too.

As I did my healing work, reality seemed to shift a bit… and for a while I looked around and wasn’t sure where they were. If I closed my eyes, I could pull them to mind, but I wasn’t sure where they were or if we were even in the same space anymore.

As I finished up some work tasks after being with that person one of the last times our relationship felt real, it dawned on me that part of the defiance of imposter syndrome has been the willingness to wake up and open my eyes. I lived so many years afraid to catch see myself in the mirror that I just dropped my head and hoped that I bumped into people gently. I couldn’t risk looking up, and it was exhausting…

To see the world around me, I had to approach it with the knowledge that I would sometimes also have to see myself… whether in the mirror as I push myself to be better or in the reflection of people I encounter. But it meant risking the pain of self-reflection and engagement.

When I look around now, fully awake and willing to engage with my actual world instead of imagining things as I wish them to be, people such as who I thought this individual to be are there… not far away, close enough to reach out to.

Because people like them are just people, too. I just couldn’t see clearly because I only had my mind’s eye... and its skewed perspective.

What people who have done their own healing work do is amazing. It matters. It helps make the world a better place. The jobs they do are hard and heavy, and their personal efforts are evident as they execute the support they offer others with a grace for which many others have not yet found the capacity.

But what they do, what you do, what I do, is not who we are. And I’m so thankful that we are all human. Not because that makes us weak, or common, or the same… but because it makes you you. It makes me me. It makes us us. And it makes the world go round.

I’m not out here doing anything that I could do on my own. I’m not in it alone… and no one has to be.

Keep pushing, friends. None of us are way off in the distance moving on without you…

Rest if you need to.
Blink until your eyes adjust.

But then wake up,

open your eyes,

and take hold of the hands that are all right here when you’re ready.

We can be in this together.

I love you!
💜💜💜