Stripped Searched

It’s been nearly a year since the familiar rhythm of writing flowed through me. I felt abandoned, much like countless other losses I have endured.

It’s taken me this long to understand my experience and my journey this past year. A year ago, my health took an unexpected turn. After spending a week in the hospital with a team of 8 physicians, it’s only now that I’m starting to feel like myself again.

The best way to describe the past year is I was stripped of everything to be searched. Stripped of my health including mental, and emotional health, my relationships, friends, job, and finances. My survival mode included hope and the constant thought “When you’re down to nothing, God is up to something.”

The deep pain of abandonment I felt during my 9 month recovery I couldn’t understand. I assumed and expected those I have poured my heart, soul, and energy into would return the same. I now understand that love is not a boomerang and doesn’t always return from the same sources.

Isolation became my involuntary teacher. Isolation is dangerous, but if you believe there is a purpose for it, then you know sometimes it presents itself as an opportunity to search the soul, through being mindful, practicing consciousness, prayer , and seeking a different path.

The path that leads you to know not everyone deserves to hear our story. It takes courage to share our deepest pain and sharing it with the wrong people can only deepen our suffering. We share for compassion, acceptance, and connection not for judgment, shame, sympathy (bless your heart), disappointment, comparing stories, or minimizing the story by saying “You should be thankful it wasn’t worse.” Just because it wasn’t worse doesn’t soften the pain.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”- Maya Angelou

Don’t misunderstand me, I am thankful. I’m thankful to know I am still here because I have a purpose. I’m thankful for the overhaul of relationships, the replacements who became my new community and my support group. I’m thankful for friends who reached out to me and supported me through my recovery. Grateful for newly discovered gifts that became a source of income and has allowed me to live my best life. I’m thankful for redirection that has shown me new paths. Paths I would’ve never seen or chosen without being stripped.

I believed I had lost everything but because we think, feel, and believe we have lost everything and are alone doesn’t make it facts.

It took the process of stripping me of everything I thought I needed to be searched. I searched to find compassion for myself, to face my fears, and to deepen my faith in God. Just like being searched at the airport, sometimes we are called to dump everything we have in that moment to have our stuff removed just so we can get through the process and to get to the other side of what is waiting for us.