Many years ago, I had a patient, just a wonderful young man who was loved by the staff, and so it was something of a shock to us to realize that he had no friends. He lived by himself, he would come in for chemotherapy by himself, he would receive his treatment, and then hed walk home alone. And I even asked him. I said, Hey, how come you never bring a friend with you? And he said, I dont really have any friends. But he had tons of friends on the infusion floor. We all loved him, and people were going in and out of his room all the time. So at his last chemo, we sang him the song and we put the crown on his head and we blew the bubbles, and then I asked him, I said, So what are you going to do now? And he answered, Make friends. And he did. He started volunteering and he made friends there, and he began going to a church and he made friends there, and at Christmas he invited my husband and me to a party in his apartment, and the place was filled with his friends. Claim your experience. Dont let it claim you. He decided that the meaning of his experience was to know the joy of friendship, and then learn to make friends. So what about you? How are you going to find meaning in your crappy experience? It could be a recent one, or it could be one that youve been carrying around for a really long time. Its never too late to change what it means, because meaning is dynamic. What it means today may not be what it means a year from now, or 10 years from now. Its never too late to become someone other than simply a survivor. Hear how static that word sounds? Survivor. No movement, no growth. Claim your experience. Dont let it claim you, because if you do, I believe you will become trapped, you will not grow, you will not evolve. Many, many years before, I had been fired from a job that I loved, and I would not stop talking about my innocence and the injustice and the betrayal and the deceipt, until finally, just like this woman, people were walking away from me, until I finally realized I wasnt just processing my feelings, I was feeding them. I didnt want to let that crucified self die. But we all know that with any resurrection story, you have to die first. The Christian story, Jesus was dead a whole day in the tomb before he was resurrected. And I believe that for us, being in the tomb means doing our own deep inner work around our wounds and allowing ourselves to be healed. We have to let that crucified self die so that a new self, a truer self, is born. We have to let that old story go so that a new story, a truer story, can be told. Claim your experience. Dont let it claim you. What if there were no survivors, meaning, what if people decided to just claim their trauma as an experience instead of taking it on as an identity? Maybe it would be the end of being trapped in our wounds and the beginning of amazing self-exploration and discovery and growth. Maybe it would be the start of defining ourselves by who we have become and who we are becoming.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 09:08:33 +0000
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