My Burden. My Gift.

Today will be a bit different.

There are stories I carry that not only haunt my nightmares, they pepper my days with a brokenness and hurt I like to convince myself no one else will ever understand.  But I don't recognize them as stories.  I carry them like a well worn satchel, always at my side, pulling, almost clawing with it's heavy burden and relentless malice. 

Maybe I am a loser... Fat... Dumb... Hopeless...  Maybe I'll always be lonely...  Afraid... Shy...  A failure.  It's almost as if I'm not even capable of a positive thought.  One which will finally lead me to the peace I endlessly seek.  The peace which seems to elude me.  Always.  

"Why do these things happen to me," I ask?  Constantly and chaotically.  Why does this cancer of my being eat at me and seem to endlessly remind me how inadequate I am?

I don't want to listen anymore.  "You're wrong," I shout internally and it echos as if bouncing off the walls of an empty cistern long forgotten and dry for millennia.  I'm relentless with myself.  The negativity I have toward my character, my body, and my behavior doesn't give me a moments rest from the hatred constantly directed inward. 

Suddenly, for just a moment, I breathe.  I feel the air fill up my lungs, expand my diaphragm, and I imagine the breath filling my body with life.  LIFE.  My life.  One gifted to me by a noble and infinite creator who knows much better than I what He's doing.  I remember that I'm here for a reason.  I'm not my faults or falls.  I'm not my resentment or my pain.  I'm not even my body.  I am me.  The only me in existence.   I'm a finite being with a unique set of skills, talents, gifts, and blessings.  Me.

I've spent so many years behinds a curtain of lies, I haven't given myself the chance to see who I am beyond the curtain.  It's frightening on the other side.  I am scared to look beyond the tapestry of my stories and explore who I can be beyond the darkness of my self inflicted prison.

My heart is so much bigger than my story.  As it floats through this simple life set before me, I hope to let my heart swell with truth rather than lies.  To spend more time dwelling on the beauty of all that makes up my being rather than the sorrows of regret and self pity. What's happened has happened and I can't change it.  But I can grow from it.

I've hidden my heart in shadows for way too long.  There's an ease with which I lean toward self assault.  In sharing my scars and using them to move myself forward, I am bold.  I feel emboldened.  I recognize the gifts I've received from the time my heart spent adrift and I use them to make me stronger.

Today, I am me. I am enough.