Molding Your Discomfort Into Divinity
By: Anne Crow
Tags: Empowerment, Identity, Change, Women, Love

I’ve learned a hard-earned, mindful kind of vulnerability over time — the kind that involves me actively prying myself open so that other people aren’t tasked with that labor. It requires me to be raw and naked, like an oyster without a shell. All I’ve got to show for it is this pearl everyone’s after, but it’s beautiful, and it’s mine.

This habit of extreme openness often lends itself to my assumption that other people are just as aware of who they are and what they want. However, I’ve learned through trial and error that not everyone is comfortable with that level of intensity, and those people are not for me.

When I say intensity, you might picture a brooding scowl and angst-ridden ramblings about the past. While that has its time and place (one I’ve certainly visited), an even larger slice of the pie is the abundant love, laughter, and authenticity I’ve acquired at this point in my life. I seem to be bursting at the seams with it these days, so when I find a good place to let it spill over, I get pretty enthusiastic.

I am unapologetic, because I now know that people either let themselves live or they don’t. I choose life. I choose the goddess within.

Of course, some people are just out to collect pearls. They see them and think, “How novel, how beautiful, how perfect — I don’t have that kind yet! Show me what you have to offer me.”

That’s the risk we all run if we want to choose life, and perhaps that’s a tragedy, or maybe that’s what makes it so beautiful when someone sees you without exoticizing you like a trophy.

Despite recent pains, it feels like I have starlight bubbling up within and emanating from me. I’ve considered that this might be a protective reaction — the result of being scavenged so many times that you remember your innate ability to thrive no matter what.

The Hindu goddess Akhilandeshvari, or “The Never-Not-Broken Goddess,” finds her power in uncertainty and creates prisms of light out of the unknown. She is eternally split into many pieces and therefore comprehends a kind of self acceptance which is almost unfathomable. Transformation is her identity.

I remember my divinity and want to share it. It shines too brightly for just me.

Choosing my divinity is a lot like realizing I have this amazing ability to derive beauty from chaos — to let disruption fuel my calm resolve — and standing firm in my strength.

My hope, of course, is that if I let myself shine with abandon, I will be seen and appreciated for who I am, warts and all (well, pearls). And why shouldn’t we shine, each and every one of us?

It’s time to normalize openness, because life’s too short for anything less.

You can only see other people for who they are if you are first able to see yourself. Step one is to remember what your own light looks like without the influence of others. Someone recently asked me, “Who are you without the things you pathologize?”

As I’ve been exploring the answer to that question, I’ve found a baseline level of joy that was never present before. It’s the joy of knowing that I’m a shooting star of a human who will burn as brightly as possible while I’m here no matter what, and I only have that knowledge because it’s been put to the test time and again.

I finally see myself.

I don’t mean that in some narcissistic way; I mean it in a self-compassionate way.

“As I began to love myself, I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is AUTHENTICITY.”

-Charlie Chaplin

And you know what? I’ve since decided that sometimes it’s good to take myself out, buy myself flowers, and buy a new dress. Sometimes the best thing to do is immerse myself in a hot bubble bath or swing myself in a hammock while I listen to the trees. Doing so allows my cup to overflow, and I find that I now have more to go around and more to share.

As a result, I’m now better able to see others when they show me who they are — and people will always show you who they are. Keep a close watch on those who don’t accept the you that you present to them, because they do not know themselves.

We should all be so lucky as Akhilandeshvari, to know with such unshakable fortitude how to create, rebuild, and live fully present in this moment, forever shredding and weaving our way through whatever we encounter and finding the light within no matter what:

“She uses trauma and pain as tools — joyfully, purposefully — to attain her own liberation. And she teaches us that we can do the same.”

Some people won’t like my light, and maybe I won’t like theirs either. Maybe it’s too bright or too dim or not the right wavelength. Perhaps we don’t belong to the same solar system.

That’s okay.

What’s important is that we not waste what little time we do have wishing things could be some way other than how they are now. The person across the table from you has led their own journey, and they are who they are, just like you.

The best way to be here now is to accept. That’s how we choose life. That’s how we show other people who we really are.

That’s how we shine.