Swan Dive: My Turning Point

I’m not certain where to begin because I don’t feel there is a way to pinpoint the onset of such a journey. I believe the beginning of my metamorphosis was defined somewhere in the decline, but I find that the lines are heavily blurred between decline and transcendence because one rarely wakes up a completely different person from who they were when they fell asleep. There are many events, words, emotions, feelings etc. that transpire to bring you to any given point; good or bad. They say how you handle a situation is the most influential part of the direction everything will go, even as simple as your perception of it. I’ve always tried my best to manage my situations to the best of my ability. I have great since of logic and reality in addition to the ability to trust in dreams, so this was something I felt I had mastered as well as the law of attraction.

A few years ago you couldn’t tell me anything to knock me off of my cloud. I felt as though I was eternally residing in a magical castle in the sky, with the adversities of earth nowhere in sight. I gave so much attention to the small beautiful details of life- the breeze, the rays of the sun, genuine people… then one day I experienced my first true betrayal. There are many betrayals everyone faces in life, trivial to life changing, but this particular one made me feel as though who I was at my core just separated from my body and went straight into a swan dive off of my castle in the sky into an eternal fall. For years, I’ve had a sense of being two different entities. My hollow body; lost, confused, and detached and my soul, my core, that was in endlessly falling further and further away from my body. My shell spent months, which lead to years feebly attempting to reunite my two selves, but the natural trials of life coupled with my self-loathing that grew from continuing painful events out of my control had me numb and spiritually paralyzed.

This year my soul, my core, finally made impact with the ground following that several year decent. It wasn’t a fairy-tale landing; it was ugly, and gruesome, and terrifying. 2016 has been surreal for me, I have faced so many agonizing events and feelings that individually should have broken me. However, they were often dealt to me simultaneously to ensure suffocation. People would applaud me, telling me that they don’t know how I did it and tell me how strong I am, but I resented it. Oh how I resented it! Because, to me, I didn’t have a choice. I felt like I was in some sort of medieval torture chamber and everyone was cheering for me for not dying yet, telling me I’m doing a “great job”. I didn’t want to endure any of it obviously, I tried my best to turn around my situations, but it’s so hard when you can barely feel anything. It’s like trying to open a jar with numb hands. It seems simple enough, I just wasn’t capable.

When I made impact as I reached the bottom I felt something unfamiliar and that was the ability to feel in itself. I think anything I had been feeling was just a simulated reaction according to how I thought I was supposed to feel fueled by my insecurity that had filled all every crack of my being. The aching was a reminder that I am a functioning human being who feels deeply… a reminder that the present is truly the most important thing in existence… a reminder that if I don’t like how something feels, that in that present moment, I can make a conscious decision not to accept whatever that is anymore. As I neared the bottom of my fall there was a phrase that seared through me that shaped how I would later deal with everything. In order to be more all-encompassing and able to be applied to more situations, it was essentially that if you’re not going to put a stop to something negative in your life, then don’t think about it. If you’re not going to leave a situation, then ignore what’s hurting you. This was the most insane concept I’ve ever heard in my life because the first step in changing anything is being aware of all of the variables along with it, good and bad. However, it did ensure that from then on, once I established my awareness of my situations, that I would take action- and I did. This is where everything changed.