How Can You Smile After What You Have Been Through?




This is a question people sometimes ask me when they hear my story, and it is an important one. I hope to give it justice with the answer I write here. Before I answer though I need to put out a disclaimer: although I smile and laugh and always have in spite of what I have been through, I have also cried. LOTS. I have been depressed, and I have been suicidal, and I do not want to discount how hard those places are to be in. If anyone reading this is in those places right now, please know my heart goes out to you with the maximum amount of love.

So how do I smile, how do I laugh? Because smiling and laughing are symptoms of the only true healing medicine in the world: love. And no matter how much evil I have experienced, and seen, I have always known that love wins, that love is bigger, that love can always be found, even in the darkest place. Every time you choose to live, you are choosing love, and when you choose love the universe will respond with more love. At first it was hard to take on love. I knew deep within my soul that it was the only thing that would heal me, that would sustain me, that would enable to keep going. However I didn’t trust it. Everything I had been told as a kid about what love looked like was a lie. I had faulty mirrors. I thought love meant putting others before you, I thought it meant letting people hurt you, I thought love meant being silent, not having a voice, not being allowed to protect yourself. I thought that was the loving thing to do because I was putting someone else’s needs ahead of mine. I was wrong. Thankfully my soul never forgot the truth. You see truth is always deep inside us. Even when we think the wrong things, or have been told the wrong things, somewhere deep internally within us, knows what way up is. Hence why some people call it an internal compass.

Anyway, back to love. Love has always been around me. Love is how despite the number of times my life has nearly been taken from me, it hasn’t. At some point I realised I was a sponge, and it was my job to squeeze myself out, to release all the negativity I had been through, to not hold onto it, and drop by drop to soak up all the goodness around me. Sometimes it would just be a drop here and a drop there, but over time I realised that instead of filling my sponge from tiny puddles I could take my sponge to the ocean where there is an endless supply of water.

Goodness is everywhere and it is the only thing that matters. We do not need to try and stop thinking negative thoughts, we need to look for positive thoughts. Negativity is just an illusion. If you focus your attention on something else, it dissipates into thin air and disappears.


Of course this doesn’t happen overnight. It is a slow process. And one that you have to keep coming back to and repeating certain steps over and over. But over time that sponge of mine has filling up with more and more goodness, more moments that take my breath away and moments when I feel the presence of God all around me, and moments when I feel that I am living out my divine purpose moment by moment, which is the greatest feeling ever. So my answer is very simple and yet very complex to put into action at the same time. My answer to the question I am asked is that love is the only thing that is real and dependable and to be trusted on, and once you know this you can’t help but smile. The stuff I have been through doesn’t matter in the long run. It doesn’t define me. Of course it is a part of me and always will be. In fact it is a piece of me that I hold close because it reminds me to have compassion for myself and others. It reminds me of the brokenness of humanity and yet how beautiful that is, because moment by moment we get a choice to rewrite our history, to have a do-over. There is nothing that can’t be forgiven. So my very experience points me back to love. 

Love is all there is.

P.S. If you're new to the blog, and want to check out more of my story, check out here and here

Photo credit: I Miss Laughter Most of All by 'swanksalot' on Flickr (used under Creative Commons licence).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts (Stalk the archives!)

On Life and Love (A Poem)

Image
  On life and love The loss of a relationship Is not grief or sorrow As some might imagine But rather the amplification of joy - The sudden and overwhelming Flavours of an intense bond Recollected in fondness Which having been steeped in hot water, like tea Provide a blast of succulent sweetness That is nectar to the soul (It was always there You just never experienced it so fully and Completely before) For the loss is not an ending It is a transfer of energy An offering of gratitude for all The shared memories And a passing on of the baton To someone new who is able To take your beloved to new heights And different peaks That are necessary for the evolution Of their soul And so, we push past our reluctance Prise open our clenched fist And let the ladybird of that friendship Fly free to the horizon, where The dawning light Of a new day greets us Welcoming us back to ourselves Inside our own skin again - I
Read more

The Power of Showing Up: How Your Presence Matters to Others

Image
So I have a confession to make: I am something of a lone ranger. Always have been, probably always will be. I grew up effectively as an only child, as my older brother was placed in permanent foster care from the time he was born. My home environment was very abusive and dysfunctional and how I dealt with this was by retreating into my own internal space, the bubble of my soul where my organic self could find freedom, calm and protection. To make matters worse, I am an off-the-charts introvert, despite having a big heart and loving the people around me. There are obviously many benefits to being this way. (Check out Susan Cain's talk 'The Power of Introverts' if you need a reminder of what some of these are). However there are some obvious downfalls too. I can be too serious, too self-absorbed, and I can forget the power and gift my presence can be in the lives of others around me. Check out the following case in point: My friend's birthday party So a friend of
Read more

The Joy of Doing Things BADLY (and What Gets in the Way)

Image
Last night at our flat we were bored and we got a little crazy. We pulled back the furniture, plugged in the Xbox Kinnect and played some crazy sports-based games as a form of flat bonding. And it was great! So much fun! Yet, dare I say it, it is the kind of thing I normally avoid. Just like dance, just like writing fiction. It feels too risky, it feels too much like hard work, and way out of my comfort zone. Part of the problem is I like doing things well. And these things do not come naturally to me. So more often than out I choose not to partake. Even last night my flatmate had to coerce and drag me to give it a go. I was content to watch, and cheerlead and laugh on the sidelines, but do it myself? Oh no! However eventually I gave it a go, and I had so much fun. Of course at the beginning I felt so awkward, but slowly that awkwardness was overtaken with a sense of freedom and wild abandon, things my carefully controlled and structured self rarely feel. In that moment the free
Read more