I blink at her with my wide, exhausted eyes.
“You’re not broken, you are whole. Healing and hope are for you; a full and joyful life is for you.”
We return to so many moments, so many traumas and hurts I’ve tried to erase. We handle each one with tenderness, covering it in love and mercy, leaving the most sacred scars. We unravel my traumatic stories and write new ones; we retell them with kindness and grace.
Before she leaves, we travel one last time. We go back to the big blue house. My marriage is ending. Jack is sitting across from me on the couch, eyes dry and distant. She sits next to him. His face warms when he feels her there and he smiles. She begins to speak to him for me.
“Jack, I wanted a baby more than I wanted you. I’m so sorry. You are a good man. You will be a husband and a father and you are worthy of the truest, most abundant, profound love. Don’t carry this ending as shame; let it instead be a peace that lifts you.”
They walk to the front door and stand in an embrace for a long time, staring and smiling and holding lovingly on to each other. She squeezes him tight and releases him. He walks outside.
I watch the door shut slowly behind him and walk into her open arms. We sway together under the sky-high ceilings.
“I know it hurts, but this pain will be what releases you, what cracks you open and makes space for joy and healing and purpose. You’re going to help people, my sweet girl. Remember, you are love.”
Her warm skin brushes up to mine as she cradles my face in her hands and looks at me with the most tender, compassionate eyes. We say it together as an affirmation:
“I am not broken, I am whole, I am loved, I am love.”
Then she leaves me, but I don’t feel alone at all.
A future I’ve been afraid to imagine unfolds in the strange, dreamy space. The ability to heal and comfort and love myself becomes clear, and I can see the joyful life it will bring:
I’m going to heal.
I will have a partner one day.
I’m worthy.
I can feel the Divine with me. It doesn’t feel like Mrs. God anymore, just “the Divine,” an energy, eternal, radical love. My soul feels closer to me than my pain does, and when I wake up, it still feels close. I don’t have to look for glimpses of myself anymore. My highest self shows up for me. For the first time, I see the love and divinity that exist and have always existed inside me.
Michelle is still sitting next to me.
“I’m healing,” I whisper quietly. “I’m healing.”
* * *
Things are different in the months that follow—most of all me. I’m becoming more connected with my higher self. I’m becoming more loving toward myself. I don’t fight with my body as much. I’m realizing how limiting the voices in my head often were. I’m learning to be more tender, gentler with myself. My pain is still insurmountable some days, but my soul is now close enough to answer back when my body speaks to me.
I need you, it says.
I’m here, I reply. I love you. You’re so beautiful, you’re whole.
I look into the mirror and let my eyes visit my scars like they’re landmarks. I can see more beauty on my own naked skin than I ever have in any pink sunset and I speak it myself. I remember the affirmations:
“I am not broken, I am whole, I am loved, I am love.”
When I feel vulnerable and the stories of pain and envy come back, I don’t shame myself. I have shadows and I welcome them in, I try to treat them with grace and tenderness. They are a part of me—without them I wouldn’t be whole.
When fear shows up, I say, “Hello, fear, thank you for coming here and trying to protect me. I’m going to buckle you in for the ride, but love is driving this bus.”
When envy shows up, I remind myself, “Sweet Ruthie, I know that you sometimes worry that you are being forgotten. You think there’s not enough love, money, and jobs in the world for all of us, but there is. It is abundant and it is everywhere. Remember, love is what’s driving this bus.”
In this season, I start to feel true love for myself, but I’m still learning how it is that I need to be loved. I still have more work to do. I begin to welcome my shadows instead of trying to push them away because of my shame, but I know that I need to explore them deeper.
* * *
Nicole Sachs is a fiery little woman from Delaware. I spot her as soon as she walks through the door of the restaurant. She’s delicate-looking, like a china doll, but she has the energy of a lioness and I can feel her in front of me before she even makes it past the hostess stand. She spoke on a friend’s podcast and I felt an immediate closeness when I heard her voice. Nicole is a therapist, a mother, and a writer. She suffered from a chronic, incurable physical ailment and she healed. I asked my friends if they could put us in touch and I called her right away.
We slide into a curvy vinyl booth next to a roaring fireplace that’s totally gratuitous in Los Angeles. Even in February, it’s seventy-five degrees outside.
“I really do believe that I can help you.” Her empathetic, piercing eyes are glued to mine. Nicole believes that in many cases, chronic pain is the result of burying chronic emotional pain and she’s developed a practice that helps people re-embody, repair the fractured mind-body connection that can occur when we bury our traumas.
“I’m ready,” I tell her.
Nicole doesn’t waste any time. She speaks quickly and drinks her lemon water quickly and teaches me quickly, but with love. I’ve never been a good student, but I try to be. She tells me that human beings have primitive wiring, that all of us fancy people wandering the world with our noses in our phones are still built like Neanderthals. We have one job here on earth: to survive. The problem is that survival can take a toll on life.
Nicole says that often in order for us to survive, our brains are wired to choose between what hurts and what hurts more in a moment of peril.
“Sometimes,” she says, “during trauma, we disconnect from an experience emotionally to survive it physically.”
“Disembodiment,” I say. I feel the distance between my mind and my body—I’ve felt it for a long time. I think about smiling big at my daddy’s funeral. I think about the accident.
She looks across the table at me and nods, glad that I’m keeping up, and adds, “But your body hangs on to all of it. And it hurts.”
I watch her eyes get big and excited now. She tells me that my body has been asking me to pay attention, using physical pain as a kind of alarm bell. If I’m able to release my emotional pain, she thinks I might be able to release my physical pain as well.
I let it sink in and think about what my body has been saying to me:
I’m tired.
I need you.
I’m hurting.
But I didn’t listen. I’ve been looking outside myself for direction instead of inward, putting all my hope in surgeries and medicines, in other people, but never in myself.
Nicole gets up from the booth. Before she leaves she talks to me about JournalSpeak, the practice she designed to help people let go of deep, repressed trauma. She teaches me the first step: making lists. I still love making lists.
I make lists so that I can remember. But the things I need to remember may be the ones I wish I could forget the most.