Tag: Self esteem

Categories
Life

Self Forgiveness

They abused their horses; yelled at them, hit them, spat daggers of anger at them, daily.

I was the thirteen year old victim of school bullying at the time, so I smiled when the abusers smiled and I laughed when they laughed (thankfully they weren’t horrible enough to laugh about the abuse.) I suppose a part of me must have thought: well, if they do this to horses, what might they do to me. I’d best tread carefully.

And so I did.

I was a mess of crumbling empathy, inside. Those poor horses. They must have been so frightened and so, so confused.

The two women, a Mother and her teenage Daughter, seemed otherwise nice. They had genuine love for their horses, I could tell by the way they spoke their names and stroked their strong, wide shoulders at the gate, as we talked.

Still. They really were rather horrible, to my thirteen year old eyes. That would never be me.

The day my horse bucked me off in the paddock was an ordinary day. Nothing unusual had happened to upset me. No dark clouds threatened to ruin the perfect sky, or my day as a little sad girl, joyously bounding around on her beautiful, crystal pony.

I was up on the horse.

And then I was down.

And my beautiful grey girl felt the wrath of a Brooke I had never ever been.

I screamed at her. I used words I didn’t even think I knew. I purposely chose sentences I had heard the ‘horrible ones’ using. And although I would never have hit her, I may as well have, because when the dust had settled…I felt such remorse. How had that venom lived inside of me? Did I really think all those horrible words about my very best friend?

I instantly hit the self preservation button, blamed the ‘horrible ones’ for making me behave in this way. Without them, I would never have done this. I was a beautiful, kind person, and wise beyond my years I had been told. Until now. Kind people absolutely never did ‘bad’ things.

But, you see, they did, apparently.

I did.

Every chemical of panic flooded my nervous system.

‘Horrible me’ had to go under the carpet and she had to stay there, never to be seen again. Only beauty lives here. Only sweet kindness and love.

Today, 26 years later, as I stood in front of the mirror, a flash of feeling came to me, a sludge of shame. And a memory. Of the little girl who had betrayed her own goodness, and tore another beautiful soul down.

Today, I saw the truth of what I had done, and I cried.

My beautiful girl. She had deserved so much more, and I had been capable of giving her everything she had deserved…until the moment I hadn’t.

That was the day I became fully human, imperfect and perfect, all at the same time. I wouldn’t understand this idea until many, many years into the future. Sometimes, I don’t understand it, now.

Self compassion is a beautiful learned skill, and my own has held me well, today. I can hold that silly little girl who really didn’t know any better and I can promise the me I am now that I will better protect my energy in the future.

Too many times I’ve allowed myself to be influenced by others in a way that has been damaging to me, and sometimes to others. I like to think my beautiful pony gave me one of the greatest lessons I’ll ever learn in life, however late I’ve learned it.

It is up to me to protect my boundaries.

It is up to me to choose love, and not the opposite.

And when I slip up and inevitably fail, it’s up to me to love myself enough to find self forgiveness.

Categories
Poetry

Beautiful

Let me tell you

how the small things you do

are beautiful.

Let me show you this mirror,

let you reach for it in wonder.

This shine belongs to you,

do you see?

Do you see?

Yes,

you see.

Categories
Life

Culture

Sometimes I wish I had been born of another culture, a culture of eyes wide open, a culture of hearts wide open.

They say to resist ‘what is’ is to cause your own suffering. Am I suffering? No. But I certainly do ask the question: what if?

Would I be further along in my life journey if, as a child, my sensitivity had been celebrated by my culture, rather than shunned? Would I have saved myself years of healing from the innocent unconsciousness of those around me? Because of a rigid cultural narrative, those who have loved me have accidentally hurt me. I shudder to remember those who have held me in their lives as an insignificant supporting character.

I hope humanity soon understands that the world they see is a choice, rather than a given. I hope the beautiful little soft girls of the world are one day celebrated for the depth and gorgeous attention to detail they bring the world. How shameful that they haven’t been, thus far.

Am I angry that I was brought up starved of female role models? Am I angry that not even my Mother knew how to teach me to truly grow into womanhood? How could she? All she knew was what the western world was. Hardened. Money hungry. Black and white.

There is an aspect of me that is angry. But a bigger part of me understands. There is no one to be angry with. We have all been brought up in boxes. Every single one of us, and when you’re inside of a box (we call them cultures) you truly cannot see there is another way. Another way to see, another way to be. And if you cannot see or be, you cannot teach. You cannot change.

I hope enough eyes are opening, now, to the beauty of individuality.

I hope enough hearts are ready to be free.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Pexels.com

Categories
Poetry

Glimmer

Beautiful are the moments

where I remember

you are you,

and I am me.

Perfectly.

Beautiful are the mornings

the sun shines on cobwebby thoughts

and there I see the glimmer of truth.

How beautiful you are.

How beautiful I am.

How beautiful.

To know that different

is not another word for wrong.

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Categories
Life

Cereal And Life

The oddities of humanity. The neuroses that so often become us that really have nothing to do with who we are, at all, or what’s best for our health, wellbeing and growth.

Take breakfast, for example.

My body doesn’t know that breakfast is a man-made occasion, and yet, still, I choose to feed it specific foods such as toast, cereal, orange juice or coffee at the very time it expects to find them in my life. The morning.

My body, I’m fairly certain, just needs food. To be nourished. It doesn’t care if what I eat in the morning is not, what I might consider, ‘breakfast food’. Only the odd little whisper of my brain cares about that. Should I listen? Or should I challenge what it has to say?

It’s not just cultural expectations around breakfast that rouse me. For too many years, I allowed the cultural narrative of suppressing emotional vulnerability to rule my choices, and, as a consequence, I lost the ability to live with my heart. Goodness gracious me. My precious life moments. Potential soul singing moments, destroyed because I succumbed to a life story that, ultimately, had nothing to do with the truth of who I am.

I have no regrets. Every wrong turn has brought me to this place of strength, wholeness and home, and I am grateful for the rocky roads I’ve travelled thus far. How could I be anything but grateful for the ways it has all helped to shape and expand my perspective?

Life. How it has me in awe.

Over and over, again.

Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Pexels.com
Categories
Life

To Be

I’ve come to realise that creativity is just the art and flow of being yourself. There’s really not a lot more to it than that.

At its core, creativity seems to be made of the absolute depth of who we are. And the depth of who we are is always waiting, somewhere beneath the surface, to be shared in its most resonant form. (I believe this is true for every human being. Not just those who are considered creative types.)

For me, the purest form my creativity takes is music. My voice, in particular, seems an extension of the calming, soothing essence that naturally seems to spill from the deep, internal parts of me…and so my music always does seem to reappear in my life, no matter how far I stray from it.

For a lot of years I judged myself (my voice, my performance capabilities) based on what others were doing with their own musical talents. Somewhere in my teen years I grabbed a hold of the idea that, although my talent was constantly being validated, I didn’t have a voice that could compare to a real singer. According to young human me, real singers had a range that reached far beyond the heights that my limited range could. Real singers were perfect, never to stray a note in pitch at all.

How sweet it is to have found the most beautiful new gift of evolved perspective when it comes to my music: that being…my music is my essence. Unique and beautiful, and only mine, never to be compared to any other. My voice and my music are here to achieve their own purpose. And this purpose has nothing to do with an out of this world range or perfectly crafted technique.

There may be singers who use a wider range of skills to express their musical essence in order to thrill…but to thrill is not what I am here for. I am here to express the depths of my heart. I am here to heal with my voice and perhaps to bring peace, calm and emotion to those who connect with my music, writing and creativity. How beautiful, to finally come to know this of myself.

And so I continue to release my musical essence as it is.

No more excuses.

No more foolish voice within trying to compare my musical self with others.

They are all beautiful fruits to be savoured and cherished in the fruit bowl of musical life. I am a different fruit, who finally understands that apples and oranges never will compare.

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Categories
Poetry

The Eyes Of Others

She is the golden skin

by lamplight.

She is not the beauty

they see

in her face,

her eyes,

her hair.

She is glorious

alone.

Without the eyes of others.

Categories
Poetry

Only And Always

The wind cannot be caught.

It cannot be moulded to perfection,

scraped and gutted

and made to be something other than

what it is.

The wind is only, and always, the wind.

And you

are only

and always

you.

Flow as you will.

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Categories
Life

Soft

It’s funny. To think of the damage caused by cultural norms and stereotypes.

Of course, there are the absolutely beautiful cultural narratives out there. Those that cherish and honour human life by holding it, by respecting it so beautifully that even the hardest of hearts must surely be touched by the story of it all.

I heard a story as beautiful, just the other day. My counsellor told it to me: how, in her culture, when a woman becomes pregnant, she becomes the queen. The whole tribe lavish her with love, care, and most importantly, perhaps…food.

This discussion came about after a lovely tender moment where she looked over at me, my bulging belly sweetly growing a perfect little gift, and offered to bake me something lovely to celebrate the occasion (that’s right, surprise, I’m fourteen weeks pregnant. And how lovely it is, to me. How lovely it is. xx)

But, I digress. Because although there are some absolutely beautiful cultural stories passed on by certain cultures in the world, other cultures do not even realise their own toxicity. (And when I say toxicity, what I mean is…truly, their cultural ideas are heartbreaking and damaging to individuals who do not fit into the selected story being told.)

There are some absolutely wonderful things to be said about the culture I was born into. But one arm of the narrative, an arm that destroyed any hope of me developing healthy self-esteem in my early years, was the idea that vulnerability and softness were somehow character flaws. I was mostly soft.

As it turns out, this soft part of me, this sensitivity, is my super power; a power that helps me soothe, and bring safety to those who need it. A power that helps me tap into the world of everything and nothing, and pull down the words and creativity needed for my writing to touch people in the way that it seems to.

But my culture called me ‘soft’. It told me to ‘harden up’, and it assumed that If I didn’t…then surely I must be broken, at worst. Naive at best. Never have I been these labels.

And if you are a deep and tender heart resonating with these words…never have you been these labels, either.

Always we’ve been perfect.

Just the way we are.

Think of the trillions of flowers, plants and trees out there. Some are soft. Some are hard, shrubs built to last in the wind and rain and hail. None of them judge each other for being ‘wrong’ in anyway. They simply exist.

And so do I.

So do we.

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Categories
Poetry

Sweet Eternity

Oh, the heat

that I see

that I feel

that I know.

I will be the flame

to my own fire.

I will light the path

of burning

sweet

eternity.