Becoming more of myself

Perhaps it’s the media I elect to tune into, the books I am drawn to reading, or the podcasts I am listening to, the theme of ‘healing’ is recurrent – healing on the physical, emotional, soul and even planetary level. For a brief moment, I felt irritated by the word. I found it annoying because to require healing meant that something is broken, impaired, in dysfunction. I don’t feel, broken, impaired or defunct. Why is everything telling me I am. Why does everyone need to be healed!?!

In the same swiftness the irritation was felt, it fizzled out. Perhaps I should be grateful, I don’t feel broken. In my good fortune, how self-fish of me to beleaguer what others need.

Once my mind was able to give up my position on healing, I had what one would call a ‘critical moment’, a penetrating insightful moment on my life.

In 32 years, I have never truly embraced being a woman. I envied the speed and obvious strength of boys growing up. I preferred the company of young men over young women in my teens, I gravitated towards their crass humour, the simplicity and brunt of their friendship. In university, I love the way we shared adventures, laughter and focused clarity of goals. A little emotion is already a lot of depth in these relationships.

Women friends on the other hand cried, needed stories, needed shoulders, needed confirmations of their evolving self, were soft, were clingy, were powdered divas whose emotions rode high and low like tides to phrases of the moon. I loved them, but I found it a challenge to truly embrace their waning and waxing reproaches and love affair with the world. Most times I am in awe of them, their beauty routines, their vanities, their sweetness. And I found myself a part of yet apart from true belonging in this feminine world.

I relished in not being a girly, romantic girl. I was a strong girl, a smart girl, an efficient woman, a thinker, a do-er.

Today I realized I never truly allowed myself to unfold fully as a woman, never ventured to a space of womanhood unbeknownst to the confines of past prejudices and preferences.

32 years late and tomorrow is a new day. The amazing gift of life is that each moment holds the seed to be different from the moment before.

I saw today the synchronistic unfolding of life in my future as an entrepreneur in creating businesses that are all about serving the evolving, unfolding women in my community, city and ultimately the world. And while I embark on my new adventures, I will be starting a family, stepping into the new role being a mother. In doing so, I can see myself ‘healing’ through living, those unexpressed parts of my soul as a woman.

As I learn to embrace the varying faces of woman, I will essentially re-incarnate daily to becoming more of myself.

Here’s a poem that celebrates just this revelation. And it is of course divinely guided that I came across its magical eloquence today.

Love After Love
By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.