Compass

We're all born with an untainted compass--a compass that points to our true north, that points to the knowledge that we are precious and loved. But think of a piece of metal that is put over a flame and pounded. It is shaped by every hit. Everything we experience affects our compass and it soon changes. Small, barely traceable hits in succession usually shape our beliefs. The teenage girl who is constantly called a slut, the little boy who hates his own name because of the way his abusive father utters it-- our beliefs are usually shaped by successive blows on our compass-- which deviates from our true north.

But it's not the successive blows that I want to write about today-- God knows that is a topic worthy of discussion--no, I will talk about the hard blows, the paradigm shifting blows, the blows that come all at once and move us, change us, for the worse or for the better.

These blows don't come too often, they come when we're drastically pulled out of our comfort zones, when our cornerstones or the very roots that support us are pulled away and we are left to look at what's left. We are left to bask in the nakedness and emptiness of who we are. And we see exactly what role that particular root played in our life's system. For some, it may be the loss of a spouse, seeing the invisible roles that they played in your life-- the sock they picked up every night, the kiss that kept you going through the endless boring meetings at a job you don't even like but do anyway.  Or it could be going off to college, your entire support system, physically, mentally and emotionally pulled away and you're left with yourself, your plain ol' raw self to deal with.

And at these shifts, the worst sort of compass that fluctuates is your moral compass. You see how segments of your reasoning were purely based on that person or that place, and you rethink why you live the way you do. And you rethink the way you see life, the role that friends and family play, the role they should play.

And that's okay.

It's okay that your head is in a million places and you're not even sure what you believe anymore. The strings that truly hold you together when everything is pulled away need to brought out into the open and untangled. Sometimes, the song you're really singing is different from the one you think you hear. It's only when the notes are explicitly written out can you see what you're really made of. And then and only then can you rewrite the melody. There's no point in thinking you're a nice, little knitted scarf on the inside when honestly you're a mess of tangled wool, thinking its a scarf. And now I am rambling and I hope something came through here. Don't deny yourself the chance to look in the mirror. Because then and only then can you see what you really look like.

Let the blows come.