On Disaster

My sweet girl,

Sometimes the worst will happen. The worst outcome, the worst turn of events, the most horrific and unimaginable thing. This is life. Suffering cannot be avoided. I’m so sorry, sweetheart. It won’t be easy.

These moments will feel crushing. Because, as the history of your life will tell, they tend to happen when you’ve found yourself in a place of optimism, energy and hope. And the sense of devastation won’t just be about the “terrible thing that happened,” although each will contain an ordeal from which you will need to heal. The worst will be the way these moments rattle your sense of order in the world, your faith in love and your trusting of the great unfolding. You will wonder if there is a God and if that God is actually love and if there was a God who loved how could they allow you and the others in the world to suffer in the ways it does?

Here is the thing, my sweet girl. You are not meant to know the answers to these mysteries yet. But if you look at the evidence, there’s one thing that seems to hold true. In these moments, love shows up. Friendships and communities are movements are formed around “the worst things that happen.” These things cause us to go small, to go local, to receive and give help where it matters- in your heart, in your home, and with the people you can see and touch with your own skin and eyes. There’s no need to be grandiose, magic is in the details.

But this letter is actually not meant to ponder the mysteries of God and the universe and the purpose of suffering. I want to get more granular.

When great and terrible things happen, as they will, I want you to allow. Simply allow.

The body, the mind and the heart have their own pace and space for healing. Humans think too much. They try to control too many things. You can expect to feel exhausted for quite some time. When people go through a trauma, they need rest. You can expect to feel rage and fear and sadness and hopelessness… these feelings are part of the package too. Welcome them. Wail in the despair. Go numb in the hopelessness. Throw socks at the wall in your rage. Write down everything you fear from the depths of the most animalistic parts of you, even if your writing makes no sense at all. These thoughts need to get outside of your body and into the land of the living. This is the way.

Well-meaning friends may try to rush you through the process. They will imagine that if they were in your shoes they’d handle it differently or better. They wouldn’t. Only you have walked your journey, in your particular body with its DNA and generational wounds and childhood experiences, with the blows and resiliencies you’ve risen through along the way.

It is in the “trying to get better” (which we do because discomfort is painful and resting is anti-capitalist), where we get stuck. If we allow the feelings to feel and the events to process, they will eventually land in meaningful packages of lessons to learn, of direction to follow, of action to take. If we allow grief to expand us in the way grief does, our empathy will grow, as will our compassion and our hearts. If we allow these things to unfold, you will return.

You will return different, of that there is no doubt. The loss will be integrated within you, carried with you always. Your view of the world might have changed, less idealistic but holding deeper truth. You will connect now with the suffering of others in ways you didn’t before. But you will feel like you again. Your energy will come back. You will be ignited again with purpose and passion. You will feel joy and connection. Your love will be bigger, your mission will be clearer.

You will be okay. No matter the loss. Even the losses you think are for forever. Because my sweet, nothing is lost forever (but that is a matter for God and for love and for the universe, you’re simply going to have to trust me on that one).

Take care of your body, or if you can’t, that’s okay too. Feed yourself nutritious food or go ahead and eat those Salt & Vinegar chips. Move. Dance. Stay in bed. Celebrate big the days you get out of bed when you want to stay in. Do gentle things in the middle of the night when sleep evades. Write. Reach out. Forgive yourself for the ways you think you are doing healing wrong; we can only feel so much at once. You’re doing fine. You’ve got this. I promise. I promise. I promise.

I am so proud of you.

Love,

Christina Michelle

Love letters are letters of self-compassion written to me, by me, born of moments of hardship. I often find people struggle with how to speak compassionately towards themselves.

These letters are meant to be an example of how you can begin.

With love, Christina

On Identity

Oh, my sweetest pea,

You have spent too many years grappling with the question: Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

It’s a bit of a self-absorbed question, if you ask me 😉…. Although I say that with great love.

The answer is simple, my sweet. You are love. You are love in a human body.

But human bodies in this human life in these broken human systems create all sorts blocks to love inside them. The conditions of not being seen, safe, loved and belonged, in all the myriad of ways that can occur, create protective mechanisms inside us. Ironically, these mechanisms, which often once served us well, become our blocks. Think of how anger protects but also separates. Think of how anxiety keeps us safe, but lonely and afraid.

But love! It is the core of you, as is true of every single human out there. Isn’t this exciting! You are love. They are love. There are no better or worse humans on the planet; sometimes it just seems that way because some humans have more blocks.

Please be as patient with them as I am asking you to be with yourself. It is hard to be human.

But my dear girl, the question then is not: Who am I? But instead: What is your unique expression of love?

I like to imagine if every person identified their own unique expression of love- be it painting or music or mathematics, plants or building things or dancing, we would find our path to peace. To unity. To love and beauty. Imagine the inspired world that would be? Imagine it. Dream it. Write it here. Perhaps this will be the place the magic begins.

But as for you, my love- you have the gift of seeing. Of seeing people. Of loving people.

You have the gift of self-awareness. And you’ve walked a journey of healing and growth that will inspire- if you use your voice to share it.

And you know it’s your gift because it comes easy.

There is a caveat, my dear- the talent may come easy, but the practice of living it requires discipline. I know you’ve got that, my sweet.

Because here you are, right now, writing.

My goodness, you’re magnificent.

I love you,

Christina Michelle

Love letters are letters of self-compassion written to me, by me, born of moments of hardship. I often find people struggle with how to speak compassionately towards themselves.

These letters are meant to be an example of how you can begin.

With love, Christina

On Grief

Oh my little sweet pea,

Relationships are going to end. A lot of them. All of them, in fact, at one time or another, for one reason or another. And they end for a lot of reasons, but there is one in particular: we are human. And being human means a lot of things. We are broken and afraid. We make mistakes and hurt each other’s feelings. We struggle to tell the truth of our experience. We struggle to hold other people’s truth about us. We can be selfish and needy babies, masquerading as adults, playing out our mother and father wounds in real time with the people we care about. We align with people in certain moments of time, and then we outgrow them, noticing a shift in values within our own selves. We become exhausted by the people who need too much, and we are made lonely or hurt by the ones who give too little. We fail to tease out what is ours and what is theirs, holding tight to our egos, blame shifting because the shame is too powerful to be with, or over-blaming ourselves because, well, old patterns. Accountability is a razor-thin line that requires tremendous courage, integrity and humility. It also requires the other to show up with the same courage, integrity and humility. This is rare. Thus, relationships end.

Some relationships will end in a quiet fade, and some will end in an explosion, the aftershocks leaving you (and them) in violent grief. It is the way of endings, they are painful.

And yet each relationship will reveal a (or many) lessons:

• The parts of you still in need of healing; the ones capable of acting outside your values.

• How to know and speak your truth.

• Allowing others to carry an untrue story about you.

• Compassion and forgiveness.

• Boundaries and how to have other hard conversations.

• Not taking things personally that aren’t yours to carry.

• When to stay and when to walk away, and how to either stay or walk away with integrity.

• What love is and what love is not.

• What abuse is and what it is not.

• How to love well, how to listen, how to show up.

• How to know and love yourself. Because that is all there is, that is your whole job, baby cakes.

And from those lessons you will learn to choose people who will stay. The ones you can trust. The ones who will see the deepest and most beautiful parts of you: your courage, your love. The ones growing alongside you. The ones you feel safe enough to be honest and flawed and broken alongside. The ones who are full of gratitude to be in your life.

I do not want you to experience these ended relationships as something inherently flawed, unworthy or unlovable inside you. You are human, just like everybody else. Worthy because. Worthy because my love, do you hear that? Do you feel that?

Have you made mistakes? Yes. Have you learned from these mistakes? Yes. Has it taken several tries to learn some of these lessons? Yes, yes, yes. Will you make new and more mistakes? I would assume so.

It is why you are here, my most beautiful, sweet pea. Your spirit is in the “School of Being Human,” and relationships are one of the mechanisms by which we transcend.

Let yourself grieve them, let yourself learn from them, then let them go.

Your story is today, and it is a sparkling one.

I love you,

Christina Michelle

Love letters are letters of self-compassion written to me, by me, born of hardships I have experienced. I often find people struggle with how to speak compassionately towards themselves.

These letters are meant to be an example of how you can begin.

With love, Christina