Finding Peace with the past and trusting where you are now.
During my meditation this morning, I was listening to Kash Desai on Insight Timer, I heard the words:
| “You are not behind. You are just elsewhere.”
The words rang hollow. I wanted to believe them-I really did. But instead of comfort, I felt sadness.
And, if I am honest, anger.
If I am not behind, what do I do with all the years that I feel that I have lost?
Even writing those words leaves a hollow ache beneath my ribs. I feel as though I have awakened in the middle of an unfamiliar road, unsure of how I arrived here, while in the distance I have always heard other lives continuing without me-doors closing, music fading, footsteps moving further away. I look back and see only years blurred by survival, fear, and choices I did not yet understand. They are not empty years, I logically know that. I lived them. I endured them. But sometimes they feel like rooms I passed without ever being allowed to stop, look around, or choose whether I even wanted togo through them.
People often say there is always time. That it is never too late to find yourself. I understand what is meant, and I am grateful that I am finally beginning to see my life more clearly now.
Yet, I cannot pretend there is no grief in arriving here so late. There is so much I would have loved to have done, seen, learned, and experienced. Lately I have realized that perhaps I need to sit quietly beside that grief and listen to what it is trying to tell me.
Acknowledge the life I have longed for-the places I may never see, the art and music I was never taught to understand, and the opportunities that were never offered to me. Not to push the gried away with gratitude and cover it with reassuring words, but acknowledge the reality. Perhaps healing begins by allowing oneself to mourn what I did not have before asking what might still be possible with the life that remains.
| "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven."
You Are Not Behind
I am beginning to more deeply understand how my life was shaped by the world in which I was raised. Ours was not an ordinary childhood. The rigid beliefs of the church separated us from much of the world outside, while at home, my father’s behavior could change without a warning. At times he was intensely religious; at other, he became dark, angry and abusive. I did not have the language to understand those extremes then, and even now I cannot know whether he lived with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or someother illness.
What I do know is that his unpredictabilty made our home frightening. I learned to become hyperviligent- watching his face, listening to the tone of his voice, and sensing the atmosphere in a room before I even stepped into it.
Perhaps that was where I first learned to beome whatever the moment required.
Later, I have measured myself against other people’s lives and how well I could fill the roles given to me-as a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a woman fo faith. Being useful, obedient, and accommodating was not simply a way of earning approval. It was how I learned to survive. I would become skilled at reading other people, quieting my own needs, and shaping myself around whatever would keep the peace.
I cannot say that I lost sight of the person I once was, because I was never given the safety or freedom to discover her. Before I could ask what I loved, what I believed, or what kind of life I wanted, those answers had already been chosen for me. The grief is not only for the years I felt that I lost, but for the person I was born to become and was never given the opportunity to know.
People say it is never too late to find yourself.
I understand what they mean, and I am grateful that I am finding myself now. But I cannot pretend there is no grief in arriving here later than I wish I had.
There are choices I might have made differently if I had trusted myself.
There are places I would have gone.
Things I might have created.
Questions I might have asked.
Parts of myself I might have allowed into the light much sooner.
And there is something I do not particularly like admitting.
Sometimes I look at other people’s lives and feel angry.
Not because I actually believe their lives are perfect. I know better than that. But I see what they were given, and I know what I was not.
When Someone Else's Life Becomes a Mirror
I see it most clearly when I look at Patrick’s life. He grew up with access to art, music, education, and travel. His family took European holidays. He has traveled and lived in places, I wished I could have seen. He learned about the world, attended college, built a business, and grew up with a sense that there was a place for him within it.
I do not begrudge him those things. I love that he had them. But standing beside someone who was blessed with those things can make the emptiness of what I missed feel painfully visible.
As a child, I travelled through the worn pages of old National Geographic magazines. I studied photograpghs of distant countries and imaged what it would be like to stand in those places-to hear unfamiliar languages, walk through ancient buildings, see the art and beauty I had only encountered in pictures. The world seemed enormous and magnificant, but impossibly far away.
Some part of that girl is still bent over those pages, longing to step inside of them.
I grieve that I was never taught to understand art or music. I grieve the education I might have pursued, the books I might have written sooner, and the journeys I did not get to take. I grieve the confidence I might have developed if someone had encouraged my curiosity intead of teaching me to fear the world beyond the boundaries of the church. But most of all, I grieve what I could not be for my children while I was trying to survive a life I had not known that I could question or even change.
This anger is not about wanting someone elses’s life. It is a grief for the girl who was curious, intelligent, and hungry to know the world but was never given the freedom to discover where those qualities might have taken her.
Perhaps that is why the words You are not behind. You are just elsewhere initially rang so hollow.
“Elsewhere” sounds almost gentle, as though I simply chose a different world and enjoyed a different view along the way. But much of my elsewhere was not chosen. I was surviving. I was adapting to fear, obeying rules I had not written, filling roles that had already been decided for me, and trying to keep the peace.
I need to tell the truth about that..even if just to myself.
Perhaps two things can be true at once: I am not behind according to some universal timetable, and I still lost years that I cannot recover. I can be grateful for the woman that I am becoming while grieving the woman I might have become under different circumstances.
I do not need to silence the grief with reassuring words. I can sit beside them and listen. I can mourn the places I may never see, the things I may never learn, and the earlier versions of myself I was never given the opportunity to know.
But grief does not have to be the end of the story.
I am here now. I am writing. I am creating. I am learning about music and art in my own way. I am seeing beauty through my camera ans trusting the questions I was once afraid to ask. I mave arrived later than I wanted, carrying sorrow for what was lost, but I am finally being given the opportunity to meet the woman was waiting beneath all those expectations.
Perhaps I am not behind.
Perhaps I am only now stepping into a life that is truly my own.
Sometimes we are not jealous of another person's life. We are grieving the possibilities we once wanted for our own.
Reading Someone Else's Escape
One afternoon, I sat down and read Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, and I felt jealous.
It was not an emotion I was proud of.
Tara had endured so much, and I admired the courage it took for her to question the world in which she had been raised.
She stepped outside of everything she had known and discovered that the world much much larger than she had been taught to believe.
What painfully grabbed at my emotions was how young she was when that world began to open.
Her journey was not easy or without cost, but she had years ahead of her in which to discover who she might become.
I found myself thinking: Why did it have to take me so long?
That question carried a weight I could feel in my chest. It was not Tara’s education, accomplishments, or the life that I wanted.
I wanted the years that she still had ahead of her freedom. I wanted time. Time to discover. Time to change direction. Time to become.
Perhaps what I felt was not really jealously. Maybe it is the grief for the younger woman I once was-the woman who did not yet know that she was allowed to question, choose, explore, and become.
Meeting My Younger Self
Writing my memoir has brought me face-to-face with her. She does not return as a tidy list of dates and events. She appears in fragments. A light-blue dress. Bare feet against the pedals of a car. The heavy heat and unfamiliar smells of a market in Thailand. The lump in my throat, when a police’s offer’s face appeared in a car window.
As I write, I see things I could not see while I was living them. I see the girl I had to become in order to feel safe. I see the young woman who accepted what she had been taught because she did not yet know she could question it. I see the woman who kept going through difficult marriages and confusing seasons, often believing that she was the one who needed to change.
For a long time, I judged my own choices. Now I’m beginning to understand them. I wasn’t weak-I was doing what I knew how to do, with the belief and possibilities I had at the time.
I couldn’t see the whole road. I was standing inside it-a fog so thick it wrapped around me, heavy, suffocating, closing everything except what was right inside of my face. I couldn’t see past it. I could only feel my way through, one step at a time, breathing air that never felt like I could take a full breath.
Now I live with the window open, the ocean breezes billowing the curtains. I can finally take a full breathe. Free.
I can look at that younger self with compassion instead of shame.
I can stop asking: What was wrong with me?
I can begin asking: What happened to me-and how did I keep going?
Living in Two Timelines
The meditation spoke about the cost of living in two timelines: the life we are actually living and the life we believe we should have lived.
I know that division well.
I can look at someone else’s life-or at the life I image I might have had-and feel that familiar ache of being behind. Comparison makes me believe there was one correct path and that somehow I failed to find it.
But behind whom?
No one else has lived precisely my life. No one else has carried my wounds, loved the people I have loved, believed what I once believed or survived what I have survived.
There can be no fair comparison because there is no shared measuring stick.
Perhaps I am not behind.
But I am grieving. Both can be true.
Lovingly Embracing What Was
Maybe embrace is a difficult word to use for parts of life that felt horrible.
How does one embrace years lost to addiction, abuse, illness, depression, fear or a relationship that slowly erased who we were? How do we embrace choices we regret or years when we were simply trying to survive?
Maybe we do not have to embrace what happened. Maybe we begin by embracing the person who lived through it.
We do not have to love what happened. We can learn to love the person who lived through it.
That person may have been frightened, confused, lonely, in pain, or any combination. They may have made choices they would never make today. They may have stayed too long, trusted the wrong people or used whatever they could find to numb what they did not know how to carry.
For some, those lost years may have been spent inside an addiction. For others, they may have disappeared inside a difficult marriage, grief, illness, religious control, caring for everyone or simply living the life they were told they should want…check, check, and check.
Some things happened to us. Other things involved choices we made while hurting. Both can leave shame behind.
But if we reject those years completely, we are also rejecting the person that we were during them. We leave that earlier self standing alone in the darkess part of our story, still believing that they were unworthy of love.
What if, instead, we went back for that person?
What if we could sit beside our earlier self without judgement and say:
I understand more now.
I know how much you were carrying.
You did not always make the right choices, but you are still part of me.
You can come home.
That does not excuse the harm we may have caused or erase the consequences of what happened. We may still need to make amends, ask for help, forgive, heal or grieve.
But shame does not have to be where our story ends.
Can Lost Years Be Restored?
There is a scripture that I have held on to for many years:
“And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten” ~Joel 2:25
I do not think restoration means the calendar pages are returned to us. We cannot go back and live those years again.
Perhaps restoration happens when the past no longer controls the way we live now.
The years may have given us compassion for people we once would have judged. They may have taught us to recognize suffering hidden beneath anger, addiction or silence. They may have shown us what we no longer want and helped us discover what is true.
The pain does not become beautiful simply because we learned something from it. But something beautiful can still grow within the person who survived it.
Perhaps this is how lost years are restored-not by being returned, but by becoming part of a life now lived with awareness, honesty and love.
The Life That Is Here Now
The present is not some abstract spiritual idea. It is something that we can see, hear, and touch.
It is the morning light falling across Fritz, as he lies on the bed next to me in the morning. It is the weight of the camera in my hands and the small click of the shutter when I notice something that catches my eye. It is the cup of coffee beside the chessboard while Patrick and I consider our next moves. It is the salty smell of the ocean and the unfinished pages of the memoir writing that I am struggling to put on the page.
This is my life now.
It may not be the life I would have designed if I understood myself sooner. There would be books I might have already written, photographs I might have created and places I might have explored.
I am allowed to grieve that.
But peace does not require me to pretend nothing was lost. Peace means recognizing that life is still here, quietly asking me to participate in it.
I can write now.
I can create now.
I can continue to wrestle with my God and my faith. I can create photographs that reveal the beauty that I can see and recognize now. I can create a home that is a sanctuary for Patrick and I and all those who pass through.
I can become softer without becoming smaller.
Perhaps authentic living begins when we finally put down the ruler we have been using to measure ourselves against other people.
Comparison asks:
Why am I not there yet?
Peace asks:
What is here now?
"Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new things."
🌷I am Here🌷
The beautiful truth I am coming to realize is that nothing was lost.
Something was lost. Some years were taken away from some of us. Some were surrendered because we were not aware of another way to live. Others were spent doing the only thing we could at the time-survive.
We are allowed to grieve those years.
But we are not behind.
There is no universal timetable for becoming ourselves. There is no particular age by which we should have healed, recovered, awakened, understood or begun again.
Your lost years will look nothing like mine. They may have been consumed by addiction, illness, grief, fear, responsibilities or choices you wish you could change.
You may be like me, and look at other people and wonder how they could be so blessed and have moved forward so much more quickly, while we seemed to be stuck in the same cycles over and over again.
But we are not disqualified because we took longer to see the light and understand, to recover, to leave, to question or to come home to ourselves.
We are HERE. In this moment.
Being here does not erase what happened. It does mean that the past did not take everything. There is still a part of us that is capable of choosing what happens next.
It is never too late because authentic living does not begin at any particular age. It begins at the moment we stop hiding and running from who we were and lovingly accepting the person we are becoming now.
There is a memoir for me to finish. There are photograpghs still waiting to be made. There are questions about God and life I still want to explore, beauty I want to notice, people I want to love and a sanctuary I want to create.
My past will always be a part of me, but it does not have to keep taking from my present.
I am not behind.
Neither are you.
We are here-and here is where the next honest part of our lives can begin.
The road ahead is still unfolding, carrying love, beauty, and the possibility of a little magic around the bend.
The gift I want to leave behind—not simply journals filled with the story of where I have been, but the reminder that love has a magic of its own. It survives in the smallest things: a familiar photograph, a handwritten page, a shared memory, or a butterfly kiss sent across the distance.
I cannot return to the roads I was never allowed to travel, and I will not pretend there is no grief in that. But I can still notice the beauty beside me now. I can love the people walking with me, make a little magic from ordinary days, and remain curious about what may be waiting around the bend.
With Love, Blessings, and a Touch of Magic for your day❣️
