What I am coming to see very slowly over time

Today I don't walk around looking over my shoulder, afraid of being found out. I don't fear picking up my phone or looking at texts or opening my mail. I don't protect different versions of myself, and I don't have to keep track of my stories, because there aren't any - there's just the one life I'm living.

I'll never forget the day it hit me that things were altogether different...My mind started to wander, searching for the familiar grooves of worry or scheming or protection to run down, but there wasn't anything there but smooth spaciousness. There was the warm sun making rainbows behind my eyelids and my bare feet hitting the baking asphalt and a bit of chewed-up carrot in my mouth.

I had nothing left to hide.”
― Laura McKowen

“I used to roll my eyes at looking back at the past. Digging into my childhood for answers about my present patterns, blaming my parents or others for how I turned out - it seemed like a convenient rationalization, a bunch of psychobabble meant to excuse me from responsibility. But I've learned it's not at all about blaming. It's being willing to look at it all with clear eyes - to have compassion for the reasons people fell short but also to admit that they did. This was the hardest part: to admit that parts of my childhood were not okay. To stop protecting people. It is hard to type this even now, because I can hear voices telling me to stop playing the victim, that it wasn't all that bad. But I know that acknowledging the truth is actually an act of maturity and autonomy - it is, ironically, how we relieve ourselves from the victim role. Because once we are operating in reality, we can begin to take responsibility for what's ours, and stop taking responsibility for what never was. Denying works for only so long; eventually that shit will come out, and it will be ugly.”
― Laura McKowen

“We are all magnificent monsters, capable of everything — all the light and every bit of the dark.”
― Laura McKowen

“...perhaps you can see a little more clearly the ways in which you've left the center of yourself in order to get to love. Even more importantly, you might see how you didn't do whatever you did to get love because you are weak, or broken, or wrong. You sought love simply and only for the same reason I did, and still do: because this is how we are wired. As A Course in Miracles states, all human behavior is either love or a call for love...Once I started to look at it this way, it softened my shame about my patterns...It allowed me to see myself as someone who was hurting, instead of someone who was weak.

What I am coming to see, very slowly and over time, is that nothing that requires or causes me to abandon myself is really love. Love is a mirror that reflects you back to yourself, not a portal through which you jump into oblivion. It doesn't ask you to be different. IT doesn't secretly wish you were. Yes, a relationship is always going to be compromise, but when you start compromising yourself, it becomes something else. A hostage situation, maybe. An arrangement, A use. An abuse. I have been on both sides of all these scenarios.”
― Laura McKowen