The Mirrors In Your Life
Day #7 of Fear, Trust and Learning to Tell a More Hopeful Story
What if the things happening in your life are mirrors that show what you need to notice?
What if the people in your life, particularly those you are in conflict with, as well as those you feel most yourself with, are also mirrors that reveal to you something about yourself you need to see?
We all have blind spots. What if the mirrors in our lives are gifts of insight to show us the parts of ourselves we cannot recognize directly?.
I have a friend who, like me, hoards papers: research, and travel brochures and souvenirs from her various travels around the world. She believes she needs to sort out her past in order to move forward in her life.
Last spring, an angry and abusive alcoholic “friend” of hers drank herself to death. Worried that her friend’s life’s work would end up in the landfill, she decided to take all of her possessions home, to sort through them, in addition to her own things.
Soon after she took this woman’s things home, her phone was hacked, her house broken into, and she began to feel increasingly vulnerable and scared. She believed she was doing a good deed in rescuing the things of her abusive, angry alcoholic “friend” but what she invited into her own home was more than she could handle. This is a form too of mirroring: sometimes instead of dealing with our own stuff, we take other people’s stuff because somehow that feels more manageable.
So what is the message in the mirror? What is my friend’s situation showing me about my own life at present?
At times I too have attempted to sort out and rescue other people when my own life is in disarray. This misplaced martyrdom did not serve others or me in the end
I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to planning and organizing writing that no one has ever seen, and may never see — trying to preserve a sense that my life has value to stave off the fear that what I do and what I have created is invisible and irrelevant. I keep thinking if I can just sort it out, my choices, my life will make sense and I will have a clear path forward.
But that clear path that I keep hoping for has yet to present itself to me, and I’ve been looking for it for a long time.
John Lennon said life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.
The scary thing is, I’ve been spend most of my life making plans for a life I haven’t dared to even try to live.
Between sorting out her own papers and the papers of her friends, I can see she is getting buried and also burying herself in traumas and memories of the past. She is holding on to a heavy anchor that not only keeps her from moving forward in her life, and is also threatening to drag her under. Her mental health, like all of ours twenty months into a pandemic is fragile.
So far she has gone back to doing and living more or less as she has before, even though her situation is getting worse. To someone outside its easy to see. Inside, it looks like another day. To me, it’s clear she needs to do something radically different, because what she is doing and continuing to do is slowly doing her in.
The mirror she has shown me is clear: What I’m doing in keeping me in the same place: Stuck. Perhaps retelling myself the same old stories and planning for a life I can’t quite imagine living is slowly doing me in too.
I need to do something different with my life, even if I don’t quite know what that is.
