Soulbriety is for anyone in pain. Pain that may burn a hole deep inside your body that you think you will sink into and disappear, and never find your way out and worse of all, no one will know you are gone.
I know this kind of pain.
This is the kind of pain that makes you feel broken, less than, and invisible. Pain you can’t escape, pain that makes you hate yourself because you are somehow not as strong as everyone else, which in turn causes more pain. You may be frozen in fear that you have fallen apart and it seems impossible that you will ever be able to repair your life. You may feel that you either have to truly disappear into a still darker place, or keep trying to mask your pain with work or substances or people-pleasing.
I wanted to give you a third choice, because there isn’t always someone around to help you at that breaking point. (For some of us, it seems to hit around 3 am.) Here’s what you need to tell yourself at those times, whether you can believe it or not: You are enough. You are not broken. You exist. People see you. I see you. The pain will not always feel this way.
If we didn’t fail at times, suffer, or feel pain, we wouldn’t be alive. And part of living is sometimes feeling really dark. But these times of despair can be a time of opportunity—a place to rebuild, as it were. A place to grow down, a time to learn, a way to transform. To reform, to put the pieces together in a new way, a better way, and to get help doing it.
If you imagine you’re at the bottom of Mount Everest and are told the only way to feel better is to climb the mountain to the top alone, in the dark, without a map or tools or confidence that it will in fact be better at the top, then I am telling you this.
Go around to the other side—where others of us are. We are climbing too, but we have lights, tools, and food. We laugh and cry and carry each other when it gets impossible to take another step. And we can see the faces of those who made it to the top climbing back down, hear how amazing the trip was, how you will meet parts of yourself you never knew existed. They’re ready to start another adventure, another journey, and learn even more. The top wasn’t the final destination—the journey is what’s important.
As long as we are alive we will feel pain and experience joy. Some of us may have much more of one than the other, and no one’s soul journey should be judged. You can truly witness only one soul journey and that is your own. It is the experience of your own adventure that will lead to an awareness of underlying addictions and traumas. Through your own healing, excavation, and inner world work you will learn to understand more and have more compassion not just for yourself, but for others.
It is not what happens to us that makes you who you are, but how you create meaning, purpose, and a mature intuition from those experiences.
