It has been said that your experience is a reflection of your internal world, or what upsets you the most is what you see in yourself.
When suicide made an indelible mark on my life, the most intense and prevailing emotion I felt (and sometimes still feel) was anger. I was angry that a person could take the most sacred of all gifts, life itself, and throw it away as though it was worth nothing. It felt like an action full of hate, irreverence and disrespect. A squandering of the limitless potential of the future.
The other day I saw something on Twitter than I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
Trying to be someone you’re not is like suicide to the person you truly are.
It’s hard to know when it happened. I went from bubbly, confident, and sexy to withdrawn, angry, and self loathing without even noticing. I was trying so hard to be the perfect wife, the perfect employee and the perfect daughter that my true self withered up and died. I spent most of my adult life trying to be someone I wasn’t. I let my authentic self commit suicide.
Fortunately, this is a metaphor and metaphorically dead things can be revived, recreated and reborn. I breathed new life into who I really was and gave up striving to be someone else.
The authentic me deserves a chance to live, to cherish the sacred gift of life and to explore the limitless potential that the future holds. I have no right to smother her, strangle her, or asphyxiate the life out of her.
The official term for suicide is “intentional self harm”. I have been guilty of the very thing I have fiercely denounced.
These days I embrace the real me. I don’t care if I’m not the same as everyone else. I have my own individual style, my own unique view of the world and my thoughts and feeling matter. I am me, a divine component of the collective energy and intelligence of the Universe. To be anything less is to throw away the most sacred gift I have ever been given.