When I look back on my life, I would say that the word "Messy" seems to be a very adequate adjective for it.
I started my early formative years in a dysfunctional home, to be eventually passed on to my grandparents to be raised, where I then lived with almost a decade of sexual abuse. It was a world that seemed borne from chaos and instability, and that trickled down throughout my life as the years went by.
I had probably close to a year of my life where I wasn't sober. I spent everyday pouring booze into my body in the hopes that somehow the pain would be numbed. But, every morning I would wake up and it would all still be there, and each day the depression that I felt kept creeping closer and closer.
I left my marriage of 12 years, in the hopes that I could find myself before it was too late, and I moved across the country with my children with the promise to myself that it would all be better. But like they say though, no matter where you go, there you are.
I went from one dysfunctional relationship to another. I spent another decade lost in alcohol abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse and adultery, never believing I could have or deserved anything better. Just when I thought things couldn't get worse, my partner of 13 years left me, and then 2 1/2 months later took his own life. The wheels were finally coming off the cart.
So "Messy", ya that sounds about right.
Everyday I tried to pretend that I was okay. I tried to hold it together because that's what I was supposed to do, but the day came when I couldn't fight the pain anymore, and I made the decision to take my life as well.
I was two short days away from taking my life, when I attended a workshop that changed everything in my life. I listened to several speakers. Some spoke about learning to love yourself, and two speakers candidly speaking about living with depression and suicide and how they had changed their lives. It was right then that I had my AHA moment.
I realized that I could transition my life from Messy to Message.
Everything that I had gone through, everything I had endured, I could choose to let it continue to destroy me from the inside out, or I could use for good. I could share my stories and struggles and let people know that I know what it feels like to sit in the dark.
So a year later, I took the stage at that same Workshop and I spoke about my struggles and the decades of mental and emotional pain I had endured, and how learning to love myself was enough. The simple knowledge that through the sufferings of my past I could help others shed the stigma of depression and abuse.
I choose to live a life of Purpose, I choose to embrace the Mess that my life had been, and I realized that I could transition my life from Messy to Message.
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