return

summer 2024

On Being a Lover Girl,

and other enduring things in my nature.

My favourite part of the healing process is the return to self. I write return because it feels like that, like a coming back. A discovery not of something new, but of something old and hidden and buried. And when you can begin to love these newly uncovered parts of yourself, you begin to reclaim your power.

At heart, I’ve always been a sensitive bean. A little lover girl wanting to take care of things. But as fate would have it, sometimes cruelly so, I was born from a diagnosed narcissist (…the very real personality disorder kind) and being a soft empathetic child actually led to a sort of downfall. I was the perfect target. I empathized with my abuser, I made myself small out of a desire for peace (and out of survival and fear) and truly nothing felt as important as healing this caregiver of mine who was so clearly in pain. Because that was very clear to me. Even as a young child, in tears and in hiding, I would talk out loud to myself- something I still do to this day that brings me a familiar level of comfort- and I would speak about seeing her pain. I would wish it away so that the brief moments that were loving and warm would be the ones that stayed. Her pain made her unfathomably cruel and I thought if I could heal the pain, I could heal the hurt. I’ve since read that finding such compassion for those that hurt you is a step in the healing process that can take years and years to arrive at. But that part came easy. I was at the centre of abuse with my big beating feeling heart.

But of course I learned the tough lesson that we can’t heal other people, especially those who refuse to acknowledge their pain and their impact, and I have not spoken to my mother since I was 18 years old.  She might have been absent, but I kept her with me when I repeated our dynamic over and over and over again. Throughout my twenties, I would be a lover girl to many people who did not respect, nor value it. Nor could they reciprocate. It was my pattern to be small, to hand over my power and to play Miss Fix-It. Of course, this too was an escape from my own vulnerability, my own healing. I had a sort of rescue fantasy that someone would come along and do it for me. But I learned another tough lesson that only you are responsible for saving yourself.

I am 32 years old now and I’ve always felt a bit of excitement surrounding the age of 36. Something about that turning point where I will have lived more of my life out of abuse, than in it. But I do remind myself that my precious life is happening now and I have loved these past couple of years (particularly this last one) because of this homecoming of self. This is something I am very proud of. This is something I have to remind myself to notice, to look at how far I’ve come. The distance I have travelled simply to arrive back at myself, this time around with love and safety and trust.

All of this time and all of this effort and all of this healing work (it is work, the hardest kind) and I find myself at the start. Soft and loving.

I worried that this propensity towards empathy was born out of trauma. I had 18 years of diligent practice in loving the person who hurt me, and each one passed without a single apology. I thought of my compassion as something to heal from, to let go of in my journey of moving on. I have since realized that it existed within me before, during and after the abuse. And long after the stage of grief, long after the stage of anger (this was a personal favourite), it remains. Turns out, it is a beautifully innate part of who I am, not a response to my circumstance, nor a tactic to survive. I was also fearful of it for a while and how could I not be? This quality of mine was exploited for almost two decades by someone who only used it to avoid her own pain and hurt me in the process. This sweet and loving gift made me weak, but only because I had to place it in the hands of the wrong person, the power-hungry person, the scared person. The person completely burdened by shame. But you see, now I am responsible for the life that I choose because I am not that child anymore. I am responsible for the people and the places with which I share this gift and they will be people and places that celebrate it and understand its value. That choice, that agency is my power. And my strength is never having lost touch with the softness. Cruelty has not and will not harden me, that is simply not in my nature. It is in my nature to love and to have compassion and to heal. It is in my nature to be grateful for life.

“What part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive in the world this year? But most importantly: what have you found to be unkillable?” -Arabelle Sicardi

Over the years I have destroyed many parts of “me” that were not me at all, but the me that was trying to survive. The me that stayed small, the me that put others first, the me that reacted, the me that felt insecure, the me that was defensive, the me that could not make a mistake. The me that slammed doors and cried fat tears at the first sign of conflict. Most recently, the me that felt undeserving. But never the soft me that feels. As it stands, I cannot kill my empathy, nor do I want to anymore. My compassion belongs to me. I am no longer scared of my depths, of this urge I have to help people, this fantasy to love into light. My “love of misfits”, as my sister once called it. I trust myself to find the most beautiful places for this gift of mine to live and to shine fully.

What parts of yourself have you felt burdened by, or perhaps afraid of? How much time and effort and wasted strength have you spent trying to get rid of them, instead of finding a new place for them to exist? People hold so much power in love- how is it that another person can make our greatest gift feel like the greatest weakness? But the problem does not lie in the gift, but in who you choose to share it with. Because if some people are powerful enough to hurt, there are some who are powerful enough to heal. Starting with you. Return there.