The Trying

It was a little bit shocking to realize that I’d gone quiet on sharing a longer piece of writing for almost a month, mostly because I’ve been writing so much.

But it was all my novel-in-progress, and the odds of anyone seeing that yet are exactly zero. I would say that right now my main fear is that I will die in the rough draft stages, and my family will gently pity my delusional self as they quietly and unanimously agree to dispose of the evidence.

It’s going so well, obviously.

By which I mean that it’s messy and incoherent and rough and jagged, and Not Very Good…yet. YET.

And that last word is the key one.

The last few years have taught me so much about myself. I have had to learn, rather painfully, how much I resist the part of the learning process where I am simply not good at something.

(My clients are reading this right now and laughing because yes, my friends. We get it. Give us flawless execution or give us death. Guess which one we’re definitely getting.)

And I had a lot of strategies for avoiding the imperfect! Some favorites: get “perfect” by myself, set the bar so low that I’m guaranteed success, choose the most “logical” path as determined by other people, and oh yes, my favorite: dance around the edges of what I actually want and attempt to make things adjacent to my heart’s desire work for me.

Anything and everything to avoid pouring my whole heart into something I *really* want…and falling short. Anything to avoid really trying, going full out, taking the big leap… and experiencing the heartbreak of failure.

Better to experience the heartbreak of never having tried at all, or so I used to think.

In February, a trio of events smacked me right in the face. The details don’t really matter…what mattered was that all of them were *really* important to me. They were big dreams, y’all.

And I failed. Pretty hard. And it felt like the ultimate confirmation of that story that it’s a lot better not to try.

But I’m nothing if not stubborn. So I hired a bunch of people and spent a lot of money to address all of them, because …and I can only see this in retrospect….I had learned a NEW strategy, which was something like “Fix yourself so that you never fail again.”

And those people, god love them, seemed to agree that there was definitely something broken in me. I had picked my partners from my wounding, I had no boundaries, I was weak, I was suffering from my family lineage, I was frozen in a trauma response, I was out of integrity with myself, and so on.

Here’s a seemingly unrelated fun fact! My mother seriously considered naming me Rhiannon. Like everyone else, I love that Fleetwood Mac song, but my favorite line, the one that hits me in the gut is “Will you ever win?”

“Will you ever win?”

I don’t know if my whole life is the answer to that question, or if that question is the reason for my whole life.

Another fun fact! One of the best parts of my ayahuasca journey was realizing how *funny* she is.

During that journey, she called me… as in this body, this personality, this collection of facts that I am… “this vessel”. And at some point in that conversation, she said with some exasperation, “This vessel is very impatient.”

And I had to laugh, because it reminded me SO MUCH of my father saying, in the exact same tone, “Can’t tell her nothing, she’s got less years in her than she’s got digits, but she already knows everything!”

But she also told me that there was nothing wrong with me. Nothing at all. That I was ancient, and vast, and wise…that I don’t have to come back here, but that I do because I *love* reunion. That it’s my favorite thing.

“Will you ever win, Tara?”

I don’t know. But I know that I’ve finally learned how to let myself play the game.

My ideas exceed my skill level, and I don’t like waiting, and I’m terrified of never getting what I want…but I am playing to win regardless.

For me, winning looks like happy healthy children, a blended family, a blank page, a yoga mat, a full client roster, a waitlisted Phoenix III, a big cosmic love story.

But more than ANY of those things, lovely as they are, it looks like finally understanding all the way down into my bones that there’s nothing wrong with me. That the part of me that tries is the best and bravest and truest part of me. I don’t need to fix it, or repress it, or protect it… only love and honor it, and unleash her.

“She rings like a bell through the night, and wouldn’t you love to love her?”

I think I finally do love her.