How I rebuilt my life from rock bottom, and how you can too
Audio version:
An Invitation:
Sit with me, will you?
Pour yourself a cup of something warm and stay with me for a minute while I tell you something that’s been resonating in my heart for a while.
Early on, I learned something valuable about myself: Life didn’t have to be as hard as I was making it.
It took me years to actually believe that, and longer still to live it. But that first message came to me early on, and I want you to hear it from someone who once thought hard was the only way life could be.
When I was thirteen, my life took a hard right in a direction I never could have imagined. My mother left our family, and only a few years later, my father died. Nearly everything I knew as my life was gone. The ground I’d been standing on simply wasn’t there anymore, and I didn’t know how to stand without it.
So I learned to live in the shaking. I became addicted to upheaval. I trusted nothing, and I felt more at home in agitation than in any smoother flow of life. Calm actually made me nervous, as if it were the quiet before the next thing fell apart.
It was what I knew. It was familiar. So I adopted a way of being that took no ownership of my actions. I blamed everyone else, told lies to cover my insecurities, and tried to control everything to quiet my fear of the unknown. None of it worked, of course. It only kept me spinning. But when you’ve been hurt that young, spinning can feel safer than standing still and feeling what’s underneath.
I’m telling you this old, worn story now because something occurred to me after writing last week’s blog, The Best Summer Of My Life, And Why. You might think the uplifted, reflective life I live now came easily, or that it’s polished for Instagram. I want you to know the raw truth. The gift my life gave me was a rock bottom in my early thirties. It was the place where every way I’d been coping finally stopped working all at once, and I had nowhere left to hide from myself. That bottom slapped me awake, and I’ve been building a foundation ever since. I’m not perfect. I still slip into old, unsupportive behaviors. The difference now is that I know it when I do, and I know my way back.
That way back was never a grand leap. Honestly, the first steps were so small I almost didn’t count them. Telling the truth in one moment when a lie would have been easier. Pausing for a single breath before reacting. Letting someone help me instead of insisting I had it handled. None of these would make a dramatic story. But each one was a tiny vote for the person I wanted to become, and slowly, the votes added up.
Many things have helped me come to trust a life that was once tumultuous, terrifying, and agonizing. But now, 35 years later, I understand that every step I’ve taken toward myself has taught me the same thing: the only way forward is to begin again, over and over. Life is huge, and it isn’t the huge steps that carry us through it. It’s the tiny ones. And if we’re lucky, we notice how those steps feel inside us. When they feel good, we keep going. When they don’t, we gently try another.
So now I want to talk to you.
If you are standing in the hardest place of your life right now, I see you. Maybe you’re the one who keeps everything under control, so no one notices you’re falling apart. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself you should be further along by now. Maybe you can’t even imagine what better would look like. That’s okay. You don’t need to imagine it yet.
You don’t have to climb out all at once. You don’t have to fix your whole life this week, or this year. You only have to find the next tiny step, the one that feels just a little kinder to you than the last. It might be drinking a glass of water. It might be saying no to one thing. It might be resting without apologizing for it. It might simply be reading this and letting yourself believe, even for a moment, that change is possible for you too.
Because it is. I’m living proof that a life can be rebuilt from the bottom up, one small, ordinary, brave step at a time. And if I could find my way, so can you.
So my question for you today is: What’s one tiny step you could take for yourself today?
Start where you are. Start small. Start again as many times as you need to. I’ll be right here, cheering you on.
As forever, my love from my corner by the sea,
Sarah
