During the calm, happy periods of our lives we aren’t motivated to change. Why would we be? Things are going great and why would we want to ruin the smooth sailing? The downside to this is that we don’t experience any growth during these calm times. After a while, we stagnate. Nothing good comes from being in that state. It’s only during the storms of our lives that we grow.
Storms are powerful and they very often bring great destruction. A tornado tears across the land, obliterating everything in its path. As it passes over the soil it rips it open and exposes what’s underneath. What may have been soil that was dying off is now regenerated because the healthy soil is brought to the surface.
A hurricane barrels across the vast ocean with such force that it reaches down to the darkest depths and churns up what’s down there, bringing it closer to the surface. What was once dying from no sunlight is now given a second chance to thrive because of the storm.
I’ve used this metaphor many times with people over the years to explain how the storms we encounter in our lives can be beneficial to us. Even in the most horrible and destructive storms comes growth we wouldn’t have experienced had that storm not shown up at our door.
I’m so lost in the storm I’m in now I can’t see through to the others side of it. I’ve been trapped in the middle of it for over five months now, from the moment I woke up to Kenny having a cardiac arrest in the bed beside me. I didn’t know when I went to bed the night before that our lives would never again be the same in just a few short hours. In the blink of an eye, everything changed…..everything.
This storm is like no other I have ever encountered. It rages inside of me all day, every day. I don’t get any reprieve from it while I sleep as it’s taken control of my dreams. I see Kenny’s face behind my closed eyes many nights and the dream is never a happy one. When I wake up in the morning I’m exhausted because I feel like it’s been one long emotional wrestling match in my subconscious mind all night.
At the end of most days I’m left feeling battered like a little wooden boat tethered to the dock that’s been beaten apart by the rough water. I feel like I lose another piece of me every day and I wonder if I can ever reclaim the parts of me that have been lost.
I’ve lost the ability to speak up for myself and have allowed people to walk all over me. This in itself is its own tragedy as I had just finally found my voice the year before after living my entire life prior to that without having ever found it. Things I once cared about it, I don’t anymore. Conversely, things that weren’t so important before are very much important now.
This storm has taken its toll on me in all ways…..emotionally, mentally, and physically. I look in the mirror and the face that I see looking back at me is so different than the one prior to October 8th. Sometimes I wonder if the reflection I’m seeing is really me. I’m wearing my grief and trauma like a mask and I can’t take it off. There are lines in my face that weren’t there before that awful morning. It looks like someone made deep cuts into my face with a knife and the lines are the scars left behind.
My clothes fit more loosely now because grief is the most effective weight loss program you never wanted to be on. Everyone always wants to be thinner but this isn’t the way to attain that.
I don’t want to be in this storm. I want it to go away and never come back again. I want to forget it ever existed. But, it won’t go away, not yet at least, because this storm has its purpose in my life. It has lessons to teach me that I’ve needed to learn for a long time. It has growth to facilitate inside me, whether I like it or not, and truthfully, I don’t like it. I want to skirt the edges of this storm as fast as I can, like a child that runs through a dark hallway as close to the wall as they can to get away from the shadows and the scary, unknown things that hide in them.
But, again, I cannot skirt around this storm. I have no other choice but to go right through it. I have to endure all the pain and suffering and turmoil of it so I can conquer it. The only way is straight through it…..there is no other way.
I often wonder if I get through this storm how things will be on the other side of it. Will my life be so dramatically changed from what it is right now? Will I even be the same person as I was before this storm? Will I ever feel happiness again? What lessons will I have learned and how will I have grown? The answers to these questions don’t lie in the outer limits of the storm, but on the other side of it…..after I’ve gone right through the middle of it.