We are beautiful not broken. The women who destroy their perfect lives.
“In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn. Sisterhood can rise again and again through the strength of shared pain and joy.” -Octavia Butler
This is a piece from The Healing Journal, where I share my most intimate pieces with our paid subscribers. I appreciate you for reading and supporting my work as a writer. Each of my writings requires much time and thought, and it feels so validating when you subscribe.
It has been a challenging year—a year of loving, losing, and learning, which has resulted in me finally living—or, better yet, finally feeling alive.
This concept of being alive scared me, though. For over a decade, I had been accustomed to living dead—dead to my wants, needs, and purpose. A slave to the standard of life that had been fashioned for me, ever since I was born a girl child of Yoruba descent in America.
I was trained, guided, and later consumed by being the woman everyone told me to be. This was the easier path. The path that so many before me had taken. Legacies of women who had been forced to stunt their visions, dim their light, marry for tradition, replace their goals with children, and exhaust themselves until they were erased.
I followed suit. I transformed into a woman who lived in the shadows of her dreams—quiet and dutiful—committed to constructing a perfect life. I maintained the tradition of serving everyone but myself. In doing so, I became a woman who upheld my oppression. And thus, everything was how it should be.
I tried as hard as I could to be happy. If so many others could do it, why not me? Unfortunately, something had to break. I decided it wouldn’t be me, so I destroyed my life.
I didn’t do it all at once. First, the good-paying job, then the reputation, then the marriage and finally, the predictability of my life- all gone forever. If I’m honest with myself, which I finally was this year, I wanted none of it anyway.
Instead, I am living in color. I’m slowly finding there are others like me- a rare group of women living with emotions so raw, so vivid, and so extreme that gray areas cannot exist. There is no way for me to sit on the fence and give a bit but not too much.
No matter how much I try to resist or deny it, I was born too much.
We are the women whose desires are overwhelming, grandiose, and likely impossible, but we want them anyway. Like an ill-shapen dress, we have never been comfortable with living a normal, uncomplicated life.
I have spent years shapeshifting, only to find myself most at peace in the form I took as a young girl.
Back then, I kept to myself because I could never learn to modify my inclination to give, to love, and to offer so much of myself with no pretense. However, the learning at this big age, is that I never focused on what I needed.
I destroyed that limitation, too. I now demand to be poured into in the same way because otherwise, I cannot function. I don’t long to match the” just enough” energy that permeates so many connections of this world.
I'm learning to be awakened, enlightened and revived by those who find no problem in being transparent, honest and kind. I no longer find those who choose to be rigid, distant or egocentric as the books I must read.
I am no longer compelled to discover these people. I realized that every time I pushed myself to uncover them, I had to recover from them. I must never let the pain of those wounds, now fully-healed scars, leave my memory.
I will always love those I had to lose, not for the parts of my life they took, but for the lessons they gave…