About two years ago, my life began a time of a hold your breath readiness that I have not quite learned how to be prepared for. I am used to those moments, the butterflies in your stomach moments that signified change and possibility. I am used to understanding when I need to take the time to look around and place myself in the correct position to give into the emotions that sometimes take their toll. I am used to hope as well as despair; I am used to the knowledge of something greater than I am and the knowledge of how much less I am.

Lately, in the last two weeks or so, a wide abyss seems to have opened up before me. I am embarrassed to tell you that I can’t tell you what triggered this final moment of truth or dare. I can’t tell you why this large, unending hell has reached my conscience and made me begin to understand the journey that I was supposed to be preparing for these last years, is right in front of me.

I wish I could poetically describe what this abyss actually looks like; and I probably would try if the doctors wouldn’t freak out about what I was seeing. What is easy to describe is the almost incomparable beauty this dark, large representation of all that is changing in my life seems to naturally possess. As we know, it isn’t only greatness that can be beautiful but also the destructive and dark emotions that force us to be what is naturally misunderstood.

This abyss, in all its magnificent glory, is not one that I wish to be standing in front of. I know, as we all do when confronted with the moments of life that alter the very being we are, that this abyss represents for me not only the darkest emotions, but possibilities that what I have known my whole life has been simple falsehoods. The truth about walking into an abyss isn’t about the blackness or the length of the journey, it is about what you have to give up to learn that which has always been. An abyss as the one we are speaking of here isn’t a roller coaster, it is not pretending by its very definition to be something. The one we are speaking of here is basically a portal from one point to another. But the point that you finally reach will not be the one you have been expecting; the darkness guarantees that the point you finally reach is so important that it must be hidden until you can be at a truth that allows you to see what you never have seen before.

The abyss is the two sides of the coin; the yes and no of every question. It is the reality of purpose that exists on a spiritual plane unlike any you will ever know. It isn’t a plane that this world offers lightly; but rather a spiritual plane that defines you in ways that will in fact break you.

You can stand at the edge of that abyss for as long as you wish. The abyss in fact won’t actually accept your being until it feels you are weak enough to finally break. It is the question of whether you wish to find truth and enlightenment or you wish to stay stagnant and safe. Because there is one thing we all should know – when elected to go into an abyss to search for answers that have always been there, we are not safe. When you allow yourself to look beyond that which Facebook defines you, or when you look beyond what history has taught you to be, you are not safe. When you began to understand that the truths as you know them are not in fact true, you are not safe.

What allows one the purpose, the emotional need, to walk into an abyss and find answers that change the very person you thought you were? What gives one the strength to be so weak that a change is a foregone conclusion. Each abyss represents a personal change, and yet each abyss requires the same amount of fortitude as it does an almost addiction towards finding the real truth.

I sat in my doctor’s office yesterday and for the first time cried while sitting on that couch. What is more remarkable is I never believed that this doctor was the one to help me. I knew going in three months ago that I was on the precipice of change, but in the talk of the mundane I wondered if she could actually get me to the edge of that abyss, sweating and weak, but ready. Yesterday she taught me that she could in fact take me right to that point.

As you have read in previous posts I am dealing with the very real feeling of shame. Shame about who I am, what I am, the place I have built, and the world that I have lost. Shame comes to me as naturally as breathing. I have never looked into the mirror, even with all the work of people paid to make me look beautiful, and said I was beautiful. I have never found myself as something other than less when I look at my life and the life I believe that others not only have but the life others wish for me. I have never celebrated even the smallest of victories, nor have I celebrated the ones that were so large as to be unavoidable.

While I am not a person who likes herself, I am a person who tries very hard to listen to the world around me, waiting for the questions that need answering and the truth that needs to be found. The problem is I have always ignored any of these questions regarding my true self. It is easy to give the world a version of myself that can satisfy them long enough that I can change the topic of conversation. Hating oneself, having shame about oneself is a great burden; it is a great deficit that can change not only the person you are, but the reality of the world in which you live.

Yesterday, I sat in that office and I began to remember moments when I was celebrated for no discernible reason. Reasons that did not require an application or even interest in the subject. Yesterday I remembered times when the Gods were silent as those truths that I have always believed were ripped away from me. Even remembering the events in question, the events that should have changed my whole world if I had just listened, I found myself putting aside the undeniable answers those events brought for the reality I was comfortable with. And for the first time, I got a glimpse of a world in this abyss that I have ignored since the day I was born.

And that glimpse broke me. It broke me in a way that I knew made me weaker and therefore, more open to the possibilities that things aren’t real; they are simply my reality. That single glimpse of two events that I don’t talk about made my heart hurt with the realization that there was something there I missed. The single glimpse made me recognize that the greatest change of my life could be on the other side of that scary, dark hole.

I write often of easy topics. I coach them in poetic words but I never talk about the mystical or the spiritual. To be truth spirituality is an idea that I believe is so personal as to literally not contain words in which to explain. It is too personal and should never be shared. But I write of easy topics in order to sell to the masses but more importantly to avoid the very abyss that I am staring down at. By giving only portions of myself, I have never had to give more than the reality I have allowed myself to know.

But that bathtub size abyss is there. It isn’t going to go away, and like I have known for two years now, it is waiting until I am weak enough to find my own real strength to capture me and give me that which scares me most. I won’t become melodramatic (anymore than I have) and wonder at who and what I will be at the end of this journey.

Here is the only thing I do know; the journey I feel compelled to take can not be sent from a God or even the world in all its glory. It can only come from my own soul, ravaged by years of my own lies and desperate for the truth.