This week is one of my very favorite holidays : Passover. All the holidays around this time of year have a distinctly "Ever Forward" vibe -- freedom, redemption, Spring, etc. However at the seder I participated in on Friday, I was particularly struck by a vital part of both the Passover story and my personal Ever Forward Movement alike--the importance of looking back to look forward.
It is no mystery why I am so drawn to Judaism, theatre, and drama therapy--they all have the common thread of valuing storytelling as a way of healing and making us who we are. They also all use metaphor to help us understand ourselves, our worlds, our sense of wholeness and spirituality. In Judaism, we pass stories from generation to generation lest we forget and become doomed to repeat suffering. Anything physical can be taken from us, but what can never be taken is our sense of community connection, our shared history, our minds, our stories and collective memories. What's more, we don't only tell the stories as they happened to our ancestors, we tell the stories from a personal perspective as if they happened to us personally. This way we give ourselves less distance from the lessons of the narrative (very drama therapeutic!). So, the Exodus out of Egypt story is not just about when my great great great great great great (etc) Uncle Moshe came out of Egypt (kvetching the whole way, I'm sure, if he's truly a relative of mine), it's about moving out of whatever my own personal "Egypt" is. I've been thinking a lot about looking at my history so I can assess the things I am still a slave to and which of those are of my own making.
I can honestly say that I am no longer enslaved by my reproductive disfunction. It took me a long time to be able to genuinely say that. It doesn't mean that I never think about it, or get stressed about all the unknowns pertaining to that mysterious abyss known as my uterus, but it does mean that it is not controlling me by occupying the majority of my mental and emotional space (possibly because the free-for-all that is my new normal keeps me perpetually on the verge of a mild nervous breakdown which is actually quite consuming of my mental capacities if you can believe that). Even though I have moved into a new phase, I have still been re-visiting the story of the past year and the years that preceded it as a means to taking stock of where I am and where I want to go.
Up until a certain point, my life moved smoothly(ish) along a set, steady track. My inner insane perfectionist saw to that. I definitely still find myself enslaved by how life is "supposed to" look or how I always thought things would go for me. In this season of rebirth and regrowth, I am trying to make my peace with the fact that just because my life followed a pretty linear path up until The Great Crashing & Burning, doesn't mean that things have to continue that way in order to be "right". I've been telling myself my own personal history lest I forget, lest I am doomed to repeat the thought patterns that lead me to have such stringent expectations of the way my life was meant to go. My miscarriage was always going to hurt like a B, no way around that, but that pain was intensified by the marked shattering of my oh-so-lofty expectations. In a way, that was one of the gifts that the trauma gave me, it shook me up and forced me to look at the things I want for my life in an intentional way and not just because they were next up on the docket of "To Do's". I still have a ways to go out of this particular enslavement, but seeing the shackles and the way they are restricting me (although scary and jarring to see) seems to be the first step. Buckle up your sandals, y'all!
It is no mystery why I am so drawn to Judaism, theatre, and drama therapy--they all have the common thread of valuing storytelling as a way of healing and making us who we are. They also all use metaphor to help us understand ourselves, our worlds, our sense of wholeness and spirituality. In Judaism, we pass stories from generation to generation lest we forget and become doomed to repeat suffering. Anything physical can be taken from us, but what can never be taken is our sense of community connection, our shared history, our minds, our stories and collective memories. What's more, we don't only tell the stories as they happened to our ancestors, we tell the stories from a personal perspective as if they happened to us personally. This way we give ourselves less distance from the lessons of the narrative (very drama therapeutic!). So, the Exodus out of Egypt story is not just about when my great great great great great great (etc) Uncle Moshe came out of Egypt (kvetching the whole way, I'm sure, if he's truly a relative of mine), it's about moving out of whatever my own personal "Egypt" is. I've been thinking a lot about looking at my history so I can assess the things I am still a slave to and which of those are of my own making.
I can honestly say that I am no longer enslaved by my reproductive disfunction. It took me a long time to be able to genuinely say that. It doesn't mean that I never think about it, or get stressed about all the unknowns pertaining to that mysterious abyss known as my uterus, but it does mean that it is not controlling me by occupying the majority of my mental and emotional space (possibly because the free-for-all that is my new normal keeps me perpetually on the verge of a mild nervous breakdown which is actually quite consuming of my mental capacities if you can believe that). Even though I have moved into a new phase, I have still been re-visiting the story of the past year and the years that preceded it as a means to taking stock of where I am and where I want to go.
Up until a certain point, my life moved smoothly(ish) along a set, steady track. My inner insane perfectionist saw to that. I definitely still find myself enslaved by how life is "supposed to" look or how I always thought things would go for me. In this season of rebirth and regrowth, I am trying to make my peace with the fact that just because my life followed a pretty linear path up until The Great Crashing & Burning, doesn't mean that things have to continue that way in order to be "right". I've been telling myself my own personal history lest I forget, lest I am doomed to repeat the thought patterns that lead me to have such stringent expectations of the way my life was meant to go. My miscarriage was always going to hurt like a B, no way around that, but that pain was intensified by the marked shattering of my oh-so-lofty expectations. In a way, that was one of the gifts that the trauma gave me, it shook me up and forced me to look at the things I want for my life in an intentional way and not just because they were next up on the docket of "To Do's". I still have a ways to go out of this particular enslavement, but seeing the shackles and the way they are restricting me (although scary and jarring to see) seems to be the first step. Buckle up your sandals, y'all!
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