Today's post is from one of my amazing summer interns, Kimmy Crickette. I like to think of her as my frientern more than my intern, though. She is wise beyond her years and I'm so excited to you to hear her perspective on life. Enjoy!
Like most people, I’ve lived all my life with a story in my mind that ran the show. It weighed me down, terrorized me and froze me. If you find your passion and be perfect and make everyone love you, you can be happy forever. Ah, how simple, of course! I just must not be trying hard enough. How many times have we told ourselves this?
It took crippling bouts of anxiety, depressing and a spectrum of eating disorders to open my eyes. These heartaches and challenges shaped an idea in me, though.
I believe that life makes house calls in our lives, either through grief, pain, discovery, transition, or transformation (whether chosen or not), and that it is up to us to decide whether we will welcome life in as a visitor. After hearing what life has to say, we must then choose whether we will join in on the adventure or instead choose to show life to the door. When we follow life, we will emerge on the other side changed, sometimes subtly, sometimes in enormous ways, but always armed with new information and awareness.
If we instead refuse, we will spend our whole lives bracing against the door, fighting to keep life out. Depression, anger, resentment, or any other host of ailments are often consequences until we finally change our approach...Talking with others has made me realize that anyone who has undergone a life or spiritual transformation knows this to be true. Their pain always proved to be the symptom, the catalyst for some sort of enlightening change.
This process can be anxious, it can be frightening, it can be sad (trust me, I have felt all of these deeply), but it can also be exhilarating. We can fine tune our abilities to distinguish between the call of our intuition and our ego, and act in accordance with our intuition, because it will never guide us astray. Our ego speaks with a rigid, strong voice, while our intuition creeps in softly, and makes us feel open and expansive. It may not lead us in the direction we think we must go or the direction that fits our plan, but ultimately, we will find ourselves in the place we were meant to be.
Opening up to these things has allowed me to break out of the fearful neighborhoods of my mind and uncover big interests and little everyday things that really light my soul on fire–snorkeling, painting, snorting with friends over drinks in a cozy room, vacuuming out my car (hah, no, wishful thinking). When I move into these fearful neighborhoods, I become blocked and feel stuck and empty; even today, that’s one of my warning signals. Expansion and light moves away, and that’s no way to live a vibrant, meaningful life. Learning this truth and tuning in has made me feel even more deeply--both the joys and the pains--but at the end of the day, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
In moments when it feels impossible, someone I look up to once told me to picture myself as a little girl and fight to make each decision one that would best take care of her, and that’s been some darn good advice.
This is not to say that from here on out will be smooth sailing and that I have magically discovered the elixir for perfect happiness because life is constantly fluctuating, and everything has its ebbs and flows. But not even hurricanes and earthquakes will be able to take away these new guiding understandings.
