HUMBLED

I am writing this with the hope that no one will ever read it.  That is the only reason I can fully express what I have been sitting within me for years.

Eighteen years ago, I lost myself. It was not in a dramatic or cinematic way; just slowly, politely. I had drifted so far from who I planned on becoming that I stopped noticing the distance. I built a solid professional life, but relationally, I felt like I was behind glass, watching a poorly designed performance of myself. For me, these moments revealed far more than life’s interpersonal disasters. The hardest part was realizing how long I had been absorbed in self-inflicted chaos.

Looking back, what stings the most is how people reacted to how my relationships crashed. Some, who were comfortably involved, abandoned me so quickly that it felt as if they had been waiting for the moment that I stopped being convenient. Their exit was sharp, but it taught me the lesson regarding the true cost of friendship. With the few who stayed, not because of any strength in me, I had suddenly returned and become real. No details or explanations were necessary. I did not need to be polished. They accepted me despite my faults.

The unwritten truth by me is that in being “humbled,” I was not destroyed. I returned to an earlier version of myself. The falsehoods that I had been carrying were stripped away, leaving me raw, but honest. I continue to build from that space – listening to my early life voice that I had buried. As the years passed, I have stopped apologizing for who I had become, which is one after-effect I never anticipated. Being “humbled” was not the end of something emotionally delicate, it was an invitation to revisit my original life story.