This is a long one. I happened across a podcast the other day with Dr. Gabor Mate and he says “If I were to choose to live life over again, I wouldn’t live it in this way.  [The ending of Winnie the Pooh] brought tears to my eyes for years.  Christopher Robin has to go to school and he’s telling his friends, the toy animals that he won’t be able to pay with them as much anymore.  What I wasn’t aware of when I went to medical school and when I was a physician is how driven I was to justify my existence in the world.  I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.  When you’re driven to work too hard you actually ignore what matters and what matters is…taking time and enjoy time with kids and family.  I didn’t do that, and I always thought I had to keep working.  And the book ends with statement, ‘And whatever they do wherever they go, in the enchanted forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together’.  People sacrifice their playfulness, their joyfulness, being driven by unconscious needs to validate their existence.  And where does that come from?  From childhood trauma.  Play is so important.  Joy is so important.  In that sense we can always keep playing in the enchanted forest and that’s just essential, I think.”

Being human is a funny thing.  We are one of the only creatures that is literally trained to ignore its own instincts while simultaneously being impulsive and giving into what we want in the moment.  We have this natural draw toward play and laughter and love and joy, and we systematically dismantle it and then spend our adult lives trying to make up for it (buying or doing things we think we deserve—displays of extravagance, or thinking we only deserve two weeks off of work a year so we have to go big).  We’ve gone from the need to survive, interact, create tribes, create work, finding common ground to proving how individually great we are through material means or how we look, or some form of notoriety, or all of it.  We learn to erase any draw toward individual goals outside of what is societally acceptable, and we learn to blend in.  Don’t get me wrong, I know there are more than a few who follow the beat of their own drum, but they too are part of a system.  Now anything we want to be a part of we need to prove our worth.  We’ve forgotten the joy of being a child and simply knowing our worth—that we don’t have to be any certain way to be loved.  We’ve forgotten the joy of seeing someone do something new and being excited for them and how to celebrate ourselves.  We’ve forgotten the importance of the every day moment.  Knowing that we are meant to play and feel joy because in joy we are able to find our way.

I have to share that when Dr. Mate shared that quote, it gutted me to the point I struggled to breathe.  It went straight to my soul, immediately bringing thoughts of the child in me I’ve neglected since I was a child, my fears of time and loss, regretting any missed moment with my family (everyone), anger and guilt at any frustration I’ve had with my child and my response to make him “grow up because life isn’t like that” (talk about hearing my parents).  And I saw the entire history of my family laid out before me: my father as a child, my mother as a child, remembering snippets of my siblings as children, my grandparents as children, and yes, myself as a child.  In that moment I felt this profound loss, this disbelief and sadness at ignoring that person, seeing how all of those children were ignored and told to grow up.  And the tears came—they’re coming now as I write this.  We are taught to believe play is a selfish thing, that there isn’t time for nonsense.  The reality is how we live is incredibly selfish.  The fact that we deem each other worthy by anything other than who we are, the fact that we feel we have to justify our existence in this world is truly heart breaking.  If we all got to the point where we remembered who we were as children, we might just come to a different conclusion.  Life has serious moments, it has its tragedies, but my God is it beautiful.  It isn’t nearly as serious as we make it.  We became more focused on blaming others and looking at the injustices we face instead of learning to heal and help each other.  We lost sight of anything that matters.  We forgot that there is inherent joy in our existence.

The other reason this piece has stuck with me is because I’ve recently had a big birthday—officially 40—and we weren’t able to celebrate it.  Yes, I received the calls and the texts with good wishes, but we didn’t actually celebrate.  And I thought about it—I can count the number of times I’ve celebrated my 40 years on one hand.  That little child in me has had her heart broken so many times, struggled to find worth for so many years, and really has a hard time believing she is worth anything, especially when she can’t find the people to celebrate her.  That little child has been driven for years to find someone who would tell her she is worthy—and she has tried to make the people who should think she is special treat her that way.  She is alone in the woods because she gave up the bear hoping someone else would walk with her and make her feel special—and she wasn’t allowed to feel special about herself.  For all of her accomplishments, she was never allowed to celebrate them; She wanted to be good at it all so she was seen as worthy and people thought she knew how good she was, but she was never allowed to revel in it or appreciate her success, she had to hide her pride in it.  The very things she was good at, the things that she should have shared remained hidden or diminished.  And now people tell her to find confidence when the last time she tried that, the razor met her skin because in her mind she was always falling short.  She has constantly accepted less than what she deserved, settling for what she could get because she never allowed herself to develop the skills that would carry her.  She has never felt safe in her own ability to thrive because her success was diminished and cut down. That little girl needs to be taken back to the enchanted forest and know she is loved and appreciated as she is. That little girl’s heart is still there and can still be heard–and it is my job to honor that.