A Birthday Gift

At the end of today, I find myself in awe. Birthdays so often can be fraught. Much like major holidays where we find ourselves around family and close friends, and expectations and emotions run high, there is this stirring it seems, where the silt of our stories that can lay heavy on the foundations of our being is sifted upward, clouding the waters and bringing much to the surface. There is a looking back and an examining of what is here, a “Where am I in the scheme of my life?” and “Am I where I want to be?”

After the year that was 2020, there is a striking contrast. My last birthday we were entering deep quarantine being told not to leave our houses. The parks and the beaches had been shut down and having recently moved to the area, I found myself isolated to one friend in my circle who I was able to share space with. I spent the day taking a walk with her, and I filmed a video of me dancing down a running path… I wanted to share that love and joy were still present, even though I questioned this myself. I ended the evening with a zoom call that, in an attempt to be in celebration, seemed to highlight how much felt the like the opposite.

A year later and everything feels different. As I woke up this morning, however, an old feeling ran through me and the familiar thoughts began their refrain. “Why am I alone? What should I be doing differently? How am I not enough?” So many reasons why I know better than the thoughts, so many practices I engage to sit with them and so much work done to uncover the limiting beliefs, but the feeling persisted. This time though, I let it be with me and I listened in to more than just the smallness. I received a call from a friend, and I mentioned needing to “step out of my own way”. She shared her story of meeting what could have been the most painful and scarring experience of her life, but she showed up with greater love for herself and compassion for those who couldn’t. She reminded me not to make it about myself. Rather confusing on a day when most people are reaffirming how its “your day” and celebration centers around “you.”

Today I found my self in the potent and loving words of the many beautiful souls and radiant beings who I have had the gift to share in this journey with. Friends near and far sent messages of love and reflected how they see me. There was a theme… they all understood me to be loving, capable and someone worth celebrating. This past year forced me to open my heart greater as the world closed in. The isolation became so unbearable that I had to release my aloneness, face my fears that I was truly unworthy and unloveable as I met those pieces of me, and open to the potential that the grace I saw around me, and theorized lived within me, might actually be experienced by me.

This year I found soul tribe, people who saw me in ways I couldn’t see myself. People who I know are so committed to love and connection that they are doing the, at times brutal, inner work… and they saw me. I knew it because I felt them. I witnessed how each of them is full of wisdom, myriad skills, interests and offerings, and how all of them are absolutely exquisite. Their challenges vary, their stories and systems so unique, but each of them, so perfectly themselves and so filled with light, and they saw that in me. They let me be whole in my pieces, they uplifted my strengths and never demeaned places of weakness. They held me to higher standards because they wanted the best for me, just like they want it for themselves and they believed I could achieve it. This was love I could finally trust, because they loved themselves first, and when they couldn’t, they had learned to ask for support.

So, as the loving messages came in, I knew I had asked for this love. I never doubted the love and light I saw in them, but I had battled for so long to feel the love that is me. Today, I look down at my hands and I don’t just love them because they are woven into the cosmos, a divine miracle of being, I also love them because they are Carryn’s, and that’s a first. Love outside me was easy to see, love within was easy to feel, but it was never mine, I was separate from it. But today, I was reminded to stop making it about me, to truly step out of my own way by accepting the love all around me that reflected the love I desperately wanted to give. I cannot give what I do not have. I am the love I give, but I’d so often felt I wasn’t giving enough because I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel it because I never let giving be met with receiving. When I offer love, truly and without conditions, I am given an immeasurable gift, communion with the other and I find them in me.

I love these beautiful humans so much that it is impossible not include myself in that love. My love for them cannot be felt without feeling myself and today, they showed me this, each of them, in the perfection of the love they shared with me. This birthday, the question isnt “Am I where I want to be?”, but the more resonant “am I who I want to be?” and the answer is up to me. Not the woman who stands in the way of love, negotiating its terms and defining its movements, but the woman who stands up for love by stepping in and showing up. Its time to come as we are, releasing the limits of who we have been. Great stories lie ahead for those who are truly present… what a birthday gift!