Choosing yourself isn’t always bursts of sunshine and butterflies set to an empowering soundtrack.

(sometimes it will make you feel like shit).

Note to self: 

Choosing yourself isn’t always sunshine and butterflies.

You won’t get an empowering soundtrack queued up by a magical DJ who always knows how to play the exact right tune for the moment.

You probably won’t walk off into the sunset filled with peace and a solid knowing that you’re never going to self-abandon again.

Yes. Sometimes choosing yourself is pure and immediate emancipation and celebration and blessed relief. 

But sometimes, choosing yourself will make you feel like shit. Sometimes that choice will feel like the dark underside of hell. Sometimes it’s soaked in so much grief it’s hard to tell right from wrong. Because the space you are leaving (the life, the love, the work, the place) is or once was a thing you loved dearly. A place you thought you could abide. 

And now it isn’t any longer. Or to stay places you in conflict with your contract with yourself. Or some small, quiet voice that pulses beneath your rib cage pulses that it is time. And so you must go. 

Photo by Dustin Tramel on Unsplash

All of this can be true, and you can feel solid in your choice, and it can still rip the air from your lungs and hurt like a motherfucker.

That hurt? It can make you doubt and question and wonder and want to do a big ole U-turn to land back in the safe familiarity of the thing/person/place you are leaving behind. 

These feelings? The suckiness and the grief and the fear and the doubt and the panic and the keening edge of loss?

They do not mean you chose wrong. 

They just meant you are human. And leaving one life to build another is hard. Especially when you have no idea what comes next. 

So, when the panic hits. When your breath gets tight. When you start romanticizing the gilded cage or too small room or the love that couldn’t hold the whole of you…

Pause. Breathe. Remember who you are.

A being brave enough to break your own heart. 

A human wildly resolved enough to choose an inconvenient truth. 

A spirit with so much spark you knew that, despite all else, you had to go. Had to listen to the call. Had to make a home out of your own sovereign knowing. 

A heart hell-bent on existing full out, despite the risk and the loss and how much it sometimes hurts.

Yes. Choosing yourself sometimes hurts like a vicious motherfucker. Chosen grief has an edge you cannot prepare for.

But that doesn’t mean you chose wrong. 

On the contrary, love. You are the rightest choice you have ever made. 

jeanetteleblanc

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__________

I wrote the above piece squished into a middle seat on the plane returning to Phoenix, way back when masks were still required during all flights. It was one of those times when the words came as I was rushing through security, and I tried as hard as I could to remember them until I sat down and let pen fly on paper.

I wasn’t supposed to be on a plane that day. I was meant to be ensconced in an AirBnB with the woman I loved, finally in each other’s arms again after a long-distance Covid courtship. There was to be dark chocolate and rich red wind and long, deep conversation and hours lost exploring each other’s bodies after so long apart. 

Instead, I was flying home several days early with a heavy heart; my ticket changed at my own request.

The why of that changed ticket is a whole story all its own. A mixed-up tale of non-monogamous relationship dynamics and male entitlement and communication that didn’t quite do what it needed to do, at least not in time enough to save our planned romantic getaway. 

She cooked me a beautiful meal the night before my flight at the condo she shared with her nesting partner. I got to see her space for the first time and experience her energy in a whole different way than I could when she visited me or as we soaked in each other’s presence in our rented basement hideaway. This was where she lived and worked and loved. Where she had been for most of the days and weeks and months of our own falling. A space infused with the essence of her. 

We ate on her tiny patio that night. I cannot remember much, just that the meal, like the woman who made it, was entirely lovely. 

Then, at the end of the night, her partner came home as planned, I met him for the second awkward time, and things went rather sideways. And by rather, I mean entirely. And by entirely, I mean that—after being shocked by his abrupt and inappropriate and not-all-the-way kind comments and questions when she briefly went to the other room—all hell seemed to break loose. 

l left my love and her partner inside their condo to hash out their stuff—stuff that had everything and nothing to do with me—and sat alone outside on the steps to contemplate the choices ahead.

Sometimes life delivers us to moments we do not at all want, wouldn’t have sought, and could not have predicted. Often, it is in those moments we come face to face with our wounding but also, hopefully, with our own unrecognized growth. 

I tasted both that night. Yes, there was frustration and anger and hurt and letdown. But also solidity. And resolve. A grounded sense of self that I had lost a while back. A sense that perhaps I had not quite realized I had, somewhere along the convoluted path of living, finally regained.

Yes, I could have stayed and finished the trip. We would have muddled through, she and I. I know this.

This woman is a true beauty, you see. Eyes that see into the depths. A question-asker who listened with her entire being for the whole answer. A healer with a deep lineage of wisdom tradition. A being of rare capacity and gentle seeking. For the time that we were given, she and I—we loved each other gently, carefully, and very well. Deep healing lived in the spaces between us, and we remain connected even now. And so, yes, we could have navigated the remainder of that trip. 

And still, I chose to leave. 

What I realized while I sat there on those steps, shivering in that cool Colorado air, wondering what was happening back inside the walls of that condo…

This was not my work. 

This was not my work, and so I chose to change my ticket.

This was not my work, and so I chose to remove myself from the situation. 

This was not my work, and so I did the impossible thing, the thing I had never before had the strength to do, I left.

By “not my work” I mean not my healing. Not my lesson. Not my conflict. Not my place. Not my role. Not my battle. Not my job. Not my focus. Not my relationship. Not my calling. Not my responsibility.

Not my circus, and not my monkeys, and not my rodeo.

For the first time I could remember, I chose myself instead of the love. Not months and years later. Not after we’d become two beings worn down by the constant force of misalignment. Not after the love had drained out of the spaces between us and left nothing but emptiness and resentment. 

I chose myself that night. In an instant of singular clarity. I listened to the suddenly solid voice, rooted and rising from the bowl of my pelvis, when she said, “No, not here. No, not now. No, not this”. 

And I took action. 

It wasn’t easy or comfortable or without risk or grief. For a long time I wanted to take it back or find a different way through. It did, in fact, make me feel like shit. But I did it.

Because what lived between my love and her partner was not my work. And it was not work I wanted to insert myself into or subject myself to holding. My leaving was not an act of rejection or judgment. It was an act of love, respect, and clearly discernible limits. For her and for myself. 

Because the things that do fall within the scope of my work are sacred. Because my work requires all my attention, capacity, and care. Because far too often in this life—before and many times since—I have chosen to pour my attention into a thousand variations of ‘not-my-work’ at the expense of my body, heart, and soul. 

I don’t know exactly how to make this lesson stick and expand and become the default. I know that I am (that most of us are) unraveling a whole lot of trauma, codependency, and attachment wounding that causes us to cling to spaces and places and people that are, quite simply, not our work. 

I know that I am a work in progress and that this is one of my ongoing areas of practice. I know that sometimes I have moments, just like I did that night, when the answer is clear and the response is swift. Other times I return to an earlier version of myself, mired in disorganized attachment and anxiety and {insert a long list of reasonable and unreasonable fears here}. 

I know damn well that there isn’t an easy answer here or a way to guarantee I will ever take two steps forward without following it up with at least one step back. But I also know that this life isn’t made in a singular instance. It is built with the bricks made of every one of those moments. Some of those bricks are stronger and steadier than others, but the whole goal is not to never lay a wonky brick; the goal is to lay enough with clean lines and strong mortar that the structure is able, always, to support itself, crooked bricks and all.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

And I know that the question born that night; “Is this my work?” is one that helps me to continue to learn to be a better bricklayer, to stay in integrity, and to become a more conscious, reliable lover of myself and what is mine to hold. 

It is true, love, that choosing yourself won’t always feel like sunshine and rainbows. But it is true that the more times you do it, the more you come to understand what strong and steady feels like in your bones. And the more likely you are to make the same choice next time. 

Because this is one thing I know to be true: I am, you are, and we will ALWAYS be, the rightest choice that can ever be made.

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jeanetteleblanc

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