“I told my therapist I feel safest when I do everything alone.  She didn’t even ask why.  She just said that’s not independence, that’s grief.  And I swear I felt something in me break open.  Because it is grief, isn’t it?  Grief for every time you asked for help and no one showed up.  Grief for being the child who had to hold it all together while everyone else fell apart.  Greif for realizing way too young that no one was ever really coming to save you.  You didn’t choose to be strong.  You had to be.  Because breaking wasn’t safe.  Crying didn’t change anything.  And needing people only led to disappointment, guilt, or punishment.  So you are up over-prepared.  You move through life with backup plans for your backup plans.  You double-check doors, messages, emotions, everything.  You carry the weight of, “I’ll handle it,” even when you’re breaking inside.  People call you independent but they don’t’ see the version of you who secretly wants to collapse in someone’s arms and actually be caught this time.” Quote via Soul Ink.

We all have wounds we need to heal and if the goal is to heal forward this year, then we must address all of the wounds.  Including those who have given us seemingly effective/healthy coping skills like the ability to get it all done no matter what’s happening around us.  We may not find that person who we can collapse into but we can view that independence differently.  It’s something that made us reliable and able to figure things out and those are real strengths.  We can also learn that there are people we can rely on and we can learn to give little pieces of our responsibility to them to figure out and we can simply ask for help.  Coping with grief and addressing where it comes from, what caused the grief in the first place takes more work but that, too, is something that can be healed.  There comes a point where we have to accept that no matter what we do there is no going back. We can only go forward.

Knowing both sides of the coin (the fact that we aren’t just hyper independent and what caused us to become that way) is a key step in owning our story and learning to write a new one that encompasses all we truly are. In the coming year, I hope people are able to simultaneously find their strength and their softness.  I hope we are all able to find a way to relinquish some control and open ourselves up to trust and I hope that we maintain the boundaries with those who need it.  In some regards it’s a matter of getting really comfortable with our emotions while not letting them dictate what happens, especially based off past events—like we know x made us really sad so when we encounter x, we still feel sad so moving forward when we encounter x, we realize we don’t have to be sad, we don’t have to engage at all.  That’s a new way of handling things and it will make us abundantly clear as to who is responsible for what because when the thing/person can no longer elicit a reaction from us, we have taken back our power.  I hope we cope with the grief and are able to let it lie and move forward into all the magical, wonderful things in store for us.