Listen, I want you to know that it’s not just you.
Your anxiety, your codependency, your trouble standing your ground, using your voice, creating what you are inspired to create. Please don’t mistake these as being only your personal problems. Reach back into the history of your foremothers. Ponder the story of your family. Realize where you have come from.
There is a heavy burden that has been passed on for countless generations. It is being handed to you now. And you, now, finally, have the option of not taking it.
You have been born into a world, in a time and place, where you are free. Only a few generations ago, this level of freedom is something that your great grandmother could never have imagined.
But just because you are free, does not mean that it is easy. The legacies of the past haunt us all. They live within you, and within those around you. What is today a stigma, was yesterday, a death sentence.
Just because you can survive using your own voice, does not mean your cells don’t tell you the story of your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, who could not speak up without the certain danger of being burned at the stake, or simply abandoned, without resources to care for herself, and her children.
Your foremothers could not afford to have integrity. Not if they wanted to survive; not if they wanted you to survive. Integrity was a privilege for a free person. No, your mothers had to learn to bargain, to pretend, to stifle their truth. They had to learn to play along, to placate.
You live in a glorious, miraculous age. You can speak your truth because you can support your own self. You can live your own life. You can create whatever you imagine. But first, you need to reach back into the past. You need to see the suffering and the slavery of the women who came before you. You need to feel it. You need to care about it. And you need to send your love back through time. You need to turn the legacy around.
You say, No, my mothers. I will not take your burden. I will live in a different way. Not only for myself. But for you, as well. I am not betraying you. I am, finally, setting you free.
You reach your love back through time, and you give your mothers a taste of this freedom that you feel. You humbly show them that there is a new way now. You love them for all that they sacrificed, all that they suffered, to carry you forward. They survived. They protected their children. They brought you here, through their sacrifices, through their suffering.
And you are the one who sets them free.
Honest Wanderings 