Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,165

I am a deeply sensitive, feeling person. You see, I ‘got’ emotions on a much deeper level than most people. I felt when things were off in a room, and because of that, I was often responding to messes that quite frankly other people didn’t even notice. So, you see, I understand these sensitive souls who find themselves trying to cope with the mess that is life. I know. I’ve been there, done that, and I have 25 T-shirts at the bottom of my closet to prove it.”

Several people laughed.

“But what I’ve found is that I was approaching this thing from a bad angle. I was trying to tame it, to control it, to find a way to manipulate it into not being what it was—life. I recently heard someone say that you can grow past your mistakes, you can advocate against stupid things you did in your past. That doesn’t make you a hypocrite, it means you’re growing, and that is the point of life. I think that is my new aim—to tell as many people who are like me that it’s okay for things to be messy. You really don’t have to fix everyone else’s life or even your own. Stop being so hard on yourself. Take some time to really look at your life, at the goods, the bads, and the uglies. See them for what they had to teach you instead of judging them or yourself because of them. What wisdom did you gain from those mistakes? And how can you use that wisdom to benefit others?

“It’s really not about doing life perfectly because that is one of those high expectations that none of us can hope to attain. That’s okay. Do it better. Do it better today than you did yesterday. Learn something today that you didn’t know yesterday. Use today to become a better, deeper, more profoundly-you version of yourself. No matter what, keep moving forward even through the mess that today might be to you.

“I have learned that once I accepted my own flaws, they could no longer be used against me. Once I forgave myself for not being perfect, once I accepted that life can put some real messes in your path and that’s okay, I started being able to meet those messes head-on without having to rely on coping with them or fixing them all the time. The crazy thing is, I recently met up with a woman I went to school with back in the day, and she kept saying how different I was. It was like she had known a version of me in the past that didn’t even really exist anymore. I am more authentically myself, less influenced by what was happening around me than I was back in college.

“We talked about it a long time, and I told her that accepting that I wasn’t perfect was the first real step in my journey of healing and self-discovery. It was in recognizing that I was enough just the way I was—with all my insecurities and past mistakes, with all the dark chapters I had tried to hide so no one could ever read them, with all the memories of the things that had tried to destroy me along the way. With all of that, I was me, and that was okay.

“I remember her saying, ‘Well, that’s easy for you…’ and I saw in that moment that it wasn’t easy. It isn’t easy for any of us… but it’s worth it. To take responsibility for working on yourself, to really take the time to get to know yourself like a best friend, to work through the stuff that needs to be forgiven and to learn to love who you are so much that no expectation or judgment can touch that. That is the healing we are called to do. And it’s not about disorders and diagnoses of mental illness. Mental illness simply means we are ill, there is a dis-ease inside of us. We have dis-ease because we’ve bought into the lie that who we are is not enough, that who we are is not good enough, not strong enough, not capable enough, and our best bet is just to find ways to cope.

“That is a wrong interpretation. If there is dis-ease in your mind, it will eventually manifest in your body. Physiologically, we become what our thoughts and beliefs tell us we are. We develop psychosomatic disease within our body because we shove the emotions down into our