Day three - Venus rx

The stories we tell ourselves about our value and worth are often regurgitations from what we were told about ourselves when we were little. This is inevitable–of course you listened and integrated the outside perceptions of yourself and to make it slightly more complicated, some of them are true.

I keep hearing the message, “you know who you are,” reminding me again and again that I do know AND it doesn’t erase the layers of identity I’ve cloaked myself in whether or not they are authentic. Everything seems to be up in the air, ready to be plucked and examined. 

What I find impossibly hilarious is that no matter how long you’ve been integrating  healing from past hurts or insecurities, boy do they continue to rear their heads. The difference is in the way you approach them. For me, it’s the tried and true efforting of sitting with my feelings.

My life is going to change soon. I’ve lived in our rental home since I was 26.5 years old (I’m 39), birthed my second child in one of the bedrooms, raised chickens in the backyard and planted many failed gardens (seriously, what even is gardening in Colorado though?). The memories this home holds are vast. I’m digging through the basement of lost belongings, letting them go in hopes they find new life and most importantly, remembering all the joyous triumphs and fails my family has shared here.

With this new change approaching, so many insecurities have been coming back around and desperately trying to make me believe them. I was granted two days and a night alone at home this past weekend. I chose to be by myself instead of choosing from what I thought I should be doing and to sit with whatever arose from the depths. I decided to really go into the insecurity that I have been feeling– about the way I look, the way I act, how I’m failing, why am I like this, ect… and behind it all I’m feeling scared.

I am scared. 

We paint ourselves again and again with descriptors that cage us in or set us free. We hold onto what someone said about us for years, trying to stick the words into our soft spots like joining clay with slip through scoring, allowing them attach to us like they had always been there. Some part of us enjoys the comfort of this shame. Perhaps this is why we continue to tell the same story of who we are again and again, even though it’s possible someone else wrote it. 

Now, as if magically aligned, I think of Inanna as she sheds a part of herself each time she steps deeper into her sister Ereshkigal’s world. I think of what her mantra must be as she prepares to endure the meat hooks, knowing that she is not of the things that adorned her and that she knows the true, tangible substance of her being. I think of how scared she must be and what is holding her through this journey.

This is what is on my mind as I sift through old parts of myself with new eyes.