But you can get lost.
Ever since I started doing work in the space of well-being and what I now call wholeness, I have debated how overtly to say this …
Your new life is going to cost you something. But maybe it isn’t what you would think.
If you choose to cross thresholds in pursuit of wholeness (instead of fracture) … if you choose to dig deep into your roots and re-weave your foundation … if you stop accepting culture’s excuses and hacks and quick fixes for the deep ache inside of you … you are going to leave some things and some people behind. Not everything or everyone is coming with you. But you are not going to lose yourself. The parts of you that are essence, ineffable, untainted.
Years ago, I was in my closet getting ready for an event. I had been nominated for an award. In my moderately sized community, this award was one of the most high-profile given to women leaders. As I tried to decide what to wear, I noticed my ambivalence. And then it hit me: whether or not I was chosen out of the nominees to receive the award, I wasn’t going to feel like I was “enough.”
I had just turned forty, and suddenly I couldn’t un-know that my whole life had been undergirded with a fear of not being “enough.”
Enough for whom, I wondered? Enough for my parents? My mother had passed away a few months before and my father had been gone for seven years.
Enough for the woman who raised me (not a parent)? As part of her recovery from alcoholism, she had long since acknowledged that the abuse I endured at her hands as a child had harmed me in untold ways and was undeserved.
Enough for the perfectionist, authoritarian boss who had been a surrogate father figure in some ways for the first ten years of my career; the same boss who asked me on the day my profile was published as 40 Under 40 in our local business journal if he would ever be proud of me (in response to a mistake)? I hadn’t worked for him for four years.
And frankly, my decision to leave that role had been a pivotal moment in reclaiming my own sense of my possibility and potential. Because, for ten years, he had consistently questioned my value and contributions to the company; overtly (and sometimes brutally) reminding me of all of the ways I felt short and all of the things I couldn’t be and couldn’t have. Choosing to believe there was something more for me out from under his gaze was the moment I stopped letting someone else’s perceptions dictate my life—even someone whose approval I had been desperate to earn at times over the course of that career.
Other than those select few players in my life, I hadn’t generally abdicated my self worth to other people (at least not consciously).
The next thought … “if I have been living in fear of not being enough for all of this time, and I didn’t know it, am I really who I think I am?” It was an unnerving question for someone who was pretty well known for “having her shit together” and who was generally described by others as “the most self aware person” they had ever known at my age.
I now know the answer to the questions I was asking more than a decade ago. The parts of you that are truly YOU are never lost. They may be obscured. They may be exiled. They may have been choked out of your awareness as the protective parts you need(ed) to survive took center stage.
You may have been over-indexing on the qualities, characteristics and skills that were accepted, applauded, and embraced within your relationships and your cultural and professional context(s). But you are still YOU. And all of the parts of YOU are still here. Waiting to be acknowledged. Waiting to be heard. Waiting to be invited into wholeness and integration in the present.
I also now know that perfectionism and hyper-independence are adaptive nervous system responses. I know that my capacity for chaos was adaptive. My ability to compartmentalize, to stifle my emotional and sensory experience and to rely almost exclusively on rational thought and logic was adaptive. My compulsion to show up for everyone but me was adaptive. My inability to truly rest when there was still “work to be done” was adaptive. Willingness to run myself into a wall again and again and again in the name of persistence, resilience and achieving my “goal” (or at least not getting crushed by both known and unknown forces) was adaptive. My distrust that anyone or anything had the capacity (or would choose) to hold me was adaptive.
But through all of the trauma, all of the thresholds, and even through mental illness, I am still here. I am still me in all of my human dimension, nuance and complexity. And I am more fully myself than I have ever been even as there are parts of me that have yet to be more fully (and consistently) embodied and expressed.
I am a lightbearer. A healer. A cycle breaker. A rebel. A warrior. A words person. A complex systems thinker. I am strong. Open-hearted. Radiant. Brave. Strategic. Badass. Stubborn. Warm. Introverted. Loyal. Supportive. Steady. Grounded. Focused. Determined. Encouraging. Driven. Unafraid of a lot of things. Soft but not fragile. Able to hold a whole room and also socially awkward in certain contexts. And so much more.
The parts of you that you have relied on to get you “here” are all very real parts of you. Just because your adaptations may be driving the bus or over-developed doesn’t mean they aren’t very real and authentic parts of you. Just because you may not be able to remember all of who you used to be, doesn’t mean those aspects and qualities of you are lost.
Thresholds are invitations. To expand more fully into who you came here to be in the first place. To reclaim parts of yourself you may have had to abandon in order to survive. To re-integrate body and soul at the root.
Like all invitations, you don’t have to accept. At least, you don’t have to choose to orient yourself toward wholeness as you cross a threshold. I don’t think we actually get to choose never to cross thresholds on this human plane. But you can keep putting band-aids on things. At least for a while.
In case you haven’t heard me say this in a while, please know that living your life with your body and soul fragmented will make you very, very sick. It is wholly unsustainable. The fractures will come out sideways if they are ignored or overwritten for too long.
Just because a threshold is an invitation toward wholeness doesn’t mean it isn’t disorienting. Unnerving. Even terrifying. I have been held and supported during certain thresholds. Others I have walked through while deeply terrified and very much alone.
When we are alone in a threshold, it is really easy for the shame and isolation to amplify and keep us locked in a self-perpetuating spiral. We wonder why we are the “only one” struggling. Why everyone else seems to be “fine.” Why we can no longer accept “good enough” or “not overtly harmful.” Why we cannot “get with the program.” Or why our default coping skills aren’t working like they used to. We wonder if we can hold the next iteration of our vision or our expansion or if we are an imposter and we will be “found out” soon. We question if we actually deserve goodness, beauty, joy and abundance in our lives (without efforting all of the time). We wonder if we can trust ourselves. The shame we feel perpetuates isolation. The isolation perpetuates the shame. Together the isolation and shame feed our hopelessness and helplessness.
Feeling held, supported and resourced during a threshold crossing can powerfully shift the experience and the outcome. Having language, context, orientation, connection, witnessing, belief, and relational safety and support makes a huge difference in how we experience and move through thresholds. Being held and guided through nervous system integration and capacity building—as we develop our own set of resources to do this work—eases the experience in extraordinary and profound ways.
This is why I am now offering Thresholds: A 12-Week Private Client Intensive to help you move through thresholds anchored in the deep wisdom of your own body and your expansive capacity for wholeness. If this isn’t you right now, save this email. It will be you at some point in the future.
And if you know someone who is moving through a threshold right now and could benefit from this level of support, I hope you will share this offering with them. As a reminder, my website is about to be under construction so all of the details are below.
Love, Booth