The best thing I learned about myself in 2023

“I don’t think they have anyone around them who encourages them. They seem totally isolated, stuck and alone…” is what I spilled to my therapist in the midst of a guilt laden break down. I am well-versed in the language of guilt. It was a dialect taught to me at a very early age and I was fluent in it. Guilt often has me questioning myself and my reality because, at my core I don’t always believe that I deserve the things I have. This guilt had been bubbling over as I would think about loved ones who became casualties in a war they didn’t start. Every time I would think about how alone they must have been, my heart would break, and then I would feel instant guilt that myself and my family did not mirror their experience. It was all consuming at times. The weight of guilt I felt from still maintaining a community who loved, cared for, and poured into us felt like it would crush me some days.

2023 was a year of survival.

The year started with a whirlwind of confusion, loss, anger and pain. The chaos that surrounded me in the physical had awoken old, hidden wounds of abandonment, fear, frustration and panic. I didn’t know who I could trust. Nothing felt safe. I often felt like I was standing in a safe, cozy room while people outside shouted at me from the outside that the building would collapse. The integrity of individuals who I had spent years doing life with was suddenly very fragile and threadbare. We spent a lot of those early months of that year in total fear of our conversations being recorded and watching every surrounding for potential violence, all while receiving phone call after phone call that person after person that we loved and trusted became spiritually and emotionally hit by shrapnel in a war that wasn’t theirs to fight. The level of paranoia I experienced was like nothing I had lived through in my conscious memories. I had worked in trauma surgery for years and I don’t think my nervous system was ever tested as much as it was in 2023. There will be a time when those of us who the Lord kept silent during that season will tell our story, but this post is not that time. I was blessed enough to have started seeing a beautiful therapist a couple months before that January and I can look back now and know that was totally God’s provision.

“Why do you think your experience is different?” she asked me from the dark blue chair across the room. We had chosen as a family to stay planted until our emotions had worn off. We had chosen what we believed, and still believe, the Lord wanted for us. We did what we thought was best for our family and our children. In making that choice, we had kept many people who walked the grief and chaos with us. In making that choice, we built meaningful, lasting tight-knit relationships. We were not alone at all.

“What does that say about you?”

I took a deep breath. “…That I can make good decisions…”

It felt like a dam has burst open. I barely got the sentence out before it crumpled me into a mess of sobbing. Not as a result of the the deluge of the answer, but because of the release found in the truth within it. I can make good decisions. I can trust myself and my husband to make good decisions for our family. We were living the fruit of that. My therapist and I both cried good tears during that session.

I can make good decisions.

That is the best thing I learned about myself in 2023.