Bringing Forth Your True Gifts

(Not in spite of what broke you, but because of it)

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 but more recently I’ve realised that it has been my own difficulties in seeing myself 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 now starts to feel more like erosion than love.

I’ve come to learn through my own unraveling, through 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.

Usually, 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?

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 forth your light 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.

These are some feeling states that may be