Bringing Forth Your True Gifts
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”
Like many others, I’ve lived most of my life feeling like I am being quietly destroyed by the slow grind of misrecognition. I initially thought this was only a difficulty in being understood by others and that I simply had to keep trying to explain myself but more recently I’ve realised that it has been my own difficulties in seeing myself clearly that have caused me the most anguish. It took me a very long time to identify the endless performative giving and attuning, as not my self but self erasure. The roles I did not mean to audition for among the many other lifelong bids for intimacy are now starting to feel more like erosion than love.
I’ve come to learn through my own unraveling, through witnessing the lives of those I sit with, and through the years I spent tracing the edges of power and incoherence in therapy—an important truth that what is destroying you often holds the key to the gift you are denying.
More often than not, you are the last to see it.
We are taught to tidy ourselves and to curate coherence. But in reality, the gifts that matter most are born of disintegration and collapse, when you can’t quite escape the question: What parts of me had to be exiled for this structure to hold?
We are taught to listen before we can talk and to fit in before we even find out who we are. So the idea that we may have unique powerful gifts within our selves to offer ourselves and the world can feel alien, even ludicrous to us in our waking hours in society. Yet somewhere inside you know this is true. There’s a violence in being harvested for your light before you’ve had a chance to feel its warmth. There is a greater tragedy in realising you offered your light to everyone else for fear of looking at it directly. So ensues a lifetime of attunement, intuition, containment—for everyone but yourself—leaving your gifts brittle, unseen, unlived and ungrieved.
The gift, then, begins not in doing, but in remembering: this is mine. It comes to me first.
How did your gift destroy you ?
