The inevitability of making mistakes as a human can be a tough pill to swallow.
When we accidentally hurt someone, when we are reactive, when we are reminded of our own messiness- do we armor up, become defensive, look away and pretend it never happened? Or can we sit with humility and allow it ground us, to further open us to the world?
Instead of categorizing them as failure, we can take the necessary steps to move forward and remedy our errors with grace. We can bow our heads and acknowledge that, even though we do the best we can, we always have more to learn, and that there is nothing wrong with that.
feelings
Loss of the fantasy.
Warning: eating disorder trigger.
When we experience grief over the loss of a person, environment, identity, etc, what we’re often grieving is the loss of the fantasy that whatever it was represented for us.
This was my experience with the loss of what I had come to think of as “the perfect” (aka thinnest) body. When restriction failed me and I gained a lot of weight, I grieved the feeling of being untouchable and forever in control. The numbed out fantasy world that I was floating in evaporated, and I landed flat on my face.
Fantasies are there for a reason. They give us perceived safety from a reality we’d rather not living be in. When the bubble bursts it’s frightening and might feel excruciating, but it’s from there that we are given the opportunity to build a life we won’t need or want to run away from.