Reset

My heart goes out to all affected by the recent wildfires in Hawai‘i. Please consider donating to help support the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.

I’m here at one of my favorite coffee shops — Grounds for Thought — in my hometown of Bowling Green, Ohio. Even as I’ve traveled the world, this remains a place where I can sink my soul into, recharging and reconnecting with my spirit. In fact, I’m sitting at the very table I’d come to when I was in undergrad, the same table where I’d journal my late-night thoughts, processing my own internal acceptance of my sexuality before mustering up the courage to share it with the world around me.

I came back home to Ohio from my home in Hawaii for a couple of weeks to visit family, reconnect with friends, and personally intentionally reset. At this chapter in my life, I’m going through a painful divorce, challenged with the financial navigation of owning and operating a small business, and facing the inevitable that life is changing, we are aging, and moments are fickle.

Yet, on this trip so far that’s been filled with work, catching up, and reminiscing, I haven’t had the chance to sit down and begin the resetting. But I begin it here now.

In a recent session I had with a client, we were discussing the power of human spirituality and the notion that so many of us are disconnected from ourselves, each other, and our spirits. Through our conversation, I posed the following questions to my client to support their own spiritual re-exploration:

“Why am I here?”

“What does my soul feel like?” (borrowed from my coach)

“What do I believe about the meaning of life?”

It’s about time I ask myself these same questions, plus this one:

“Where have you been getting stuck?”

Let me start with that last one, first.

I’ve been getting stuck in the worldly matters of life. I’ve been getting stuck with budgets, timelines, emails, text messages, marketing, pressure to make more money, pressure to make other people happy, pressure to do what other people want. Through these points, I’ve been losing me again, piece by piece. This has been a revolving lesson in my life, one that I continue having to confront because I’m not grasping the very thing that I know I need to do: be myself.

You know, it’s so interesting — in most of my sessions with clients, the core we often arrive to is the desire to be ourselves.

Even more, all throughout life, we’re encouraged to be ourselves. But so many of us, myself included, don’t know how. Or we don’t feel safe and allowed to do so. Or we get in our own way, even with knowing this is what we want for ourselves and what others want from us, too.

I’ve been getting stuck because I’ve allowed myself to become disconnected from myself. This has happened over time, and we don’t really recognize when this is happening until we wake up one day and say, “Holy shit, I’m so far away from who I know myself to be. I’m lost. I’m not happy. I’m not here, I’m not me.”

When I scroll through the rolodex of my life, I’ve been through a lot — this isn’t atypical. We’ve ALL experienced trauma, pain, hurt, heartbreak. These are the experiences that shape and influence us and our brains, just as the happy, joy-filled, and empowered moments do, too. In my personal story, there’s much I’m still heartbroken over. The loss of my grandfather at 10 years old. The dissolve of my family. The tragic losses of my uncle and my childhood best friend. My own sexual identity. Scams and catfishing. My inability to continue the family farm. The loss of ideas and expectations. Sexual trauma. Boyfriends who didn’t treat me well. My marriage.

I think there’s a big part of me that’s still stuck in each of these areas. While I verbally embrace change, my heart has a hard time doing the same, probably because I’ve told myself just to “power through it” without allowing time, space, and attention to grieve it out or to allow myself to be sad about these things.

Most recently, the one that has really been sticking me is the loss of my marriage — which, yes, was my decision. For a while, I didn’t allow myself space to grieve this out because I was told that I didn’t deserve to grieve... because it was my choice, my decision. But my best girlfriend helped ground me here: “You’re allowed to feel anything you need to feel. Just because you made a decision that was necessary for you doesn’t mean it was what you wanted. It was what you needed.”

I got married when I was 24. We were married for four and a half years, and we got married after knowing each other for just about a year. It was fast, and I knew it at the time, but I pushed that aside and tried to divert attention away from this. He was joining the military, so we felt pressured to rush it. I was just coming out of a hurtful relationship of two years and my childhood bestie recently passed away, so I was crying out for love. The pains that I mentioned three paragraphs ago were much more raw at this time, and so I think I was inadvertently seeking someone to heal these for me. I didn’t want to face my reality and the choices in my life that I made up until this point, so I wanted to escape, and in a big way, my spouse provided this escape. Because of the military, we were able to move from Ohio to Texas, Florida, and to my current home of Hawaii.

The beginning of our dating time was idealistic and romantic. We had limited time together (when we formally started dating, we had 6 weeks to see each other before he needed to leave for Basic Training), and even then, we lived 3 hours apart. So, we had plenty of time to miss each other. And then once he left for Basic Training several states south at the height of new relationship energy, we could only communicate through letters and a single phone call throughout a couple month span. Then, once he was out of Basic and into the next step in his training, we remained states away, and this distance made our hearts grow fonder. In my perspective, I didn’t really get to know him while we were dating — we could only experience the highs of emotions. Further, I couldn’t ask myself if this is what I actually wanted because I was fogged by the romanticism and desire to undo the hurt of my heart from the past.

I got married because it sounded so ideal. I didn’t assess within my own self if marriage was an honest goal of mine. I got married because that was the next step in the social script that I learned “the American dream” is made of. I got married because for so long, gay men couldn’t, and I wanted to stick it to society’s face that “hey, look, we exist, and we have every right to exist as you do.” I wanted to get married because I thought that’d make up for all the hurt and loss I’d been through until this point. I got married — and took his last name — because I was hurting from the loss of my own family, and I wanted to show that marriage can last, can be idealistic, and I can have a united family again.

There’s a major issue here: none of these reasons have to do with the actual connection we shared. At least not in my perspective.

As you can imagine, over the years, as we started intertwining our lives, I began having the opportunity to confront the questions I didn’t ask before — if this is what I really wanted. And the data started piling on that, “woah, this ‘marriage thing’ isn’t for me.” I first recognized this a year into our marriage, and for the next three years, I went to therapy to try to “fix” within myself my “broken” approach to marriage. Over time, I realized “oh, there isn’t anything wrong with me. This just isn’t a system that I want right now. And that’s okay.”

What wasn’t okay was the hurt that I was doing to my partner. We were on two different pages, and the more that I tried to talk this through, the more toxic our patterns became, the more argumentative our fights became, and the more pain we splattered onto ourselves and each other. This led to my ultimate decision of we need to stop, and I’m ending this for us.

In my eyes, this was the biggest act of love I could give him — releasing him of his attachment to me so he could find a person/people that does align with the love and structure he’s seeking and interested in. Understandably, this isn’t how he sees it, and he’s profoundly hurt, and I get it. And no, this isn’t some act of “martyrdom” on my behalf — this was as simple as me recognizing that I didn’t have the capacity to love him as he deserved, and that’s not fair to him, and I want him to have a better life than the one I was capable of giving him.

Through this all, this brings me to where I’m currently at, sitting and writing my story at Grounds for Thought in Bowling Green, Ohio.

I’ve been stuck because I’ve seen how I’ve hurt people throughout the first 29 years of my life, I’ve seen the mistakes I’ve made, and I’m not where I want to be.

Scratch that last part... I am where I want to be because I have the opportunity to reset, reorient, recharge, and renew — which begins with me being here now.

Let me move to the next questions:

“Why am I here?”

On this planet in this lifetime, I am here to love.

I am here to help people know they are loved, they are not alone, and that they matter.

I am here to use my skills, talents, and abilities to support my fellow humans through their challenges.

I’m here to love and help.

I’m here to make people happy.

“What does my soul feel like?”

This question initially came from my therapist and coach Tamara Driskell, LMHC. She asked me this in one of our sessions four years ago while I was living in Pensacola, Florida.

At first, I went on a two year long journey to find what my soul feels like. I was on a hike one day in Hawaii (Ka’ena Point Trail). I was by myself, walking alongside the cliffs that jet into the sun-setting ocean. As I was watching the sunset, looking off into the distance, I watched as the gentle waves breathed up and down, rhythmically and synchronistically, over and over again, never ending. Calm and continuous, the ocean just kept on breathing. And this was the “aha” moment — that is what my soul feels like.

When I’m most connected to myself, that’s what I feel like: calm and gentle. Present. Serene. Spiritual. Grounded. Natural. Alive.

Over the past few months, I’ve had a longing for the farm I grew up on, and this specific memory continues coming to mind — the memory of me driving down the back lane at my Grandma’s farm, driving out to the back fields as the sun is setting, the soybeans flowing in the gentle breeze. I’m sitting in the truck, just taking the entirety of this moment in.

That, too, is what my soul feels like — that moment.

As I explore it further, perhaps my soul is a gentle sunset.

When I have that feeling, that’s when I feel here as the person I know myself to be. And that’s the feeling I want to strive to get back to, each and every day.

“What do I believe about the meaning of life?”

I believe life is about love.

Connecting with each other.

Loving one another.

Supporting one another.

The recognition and the celebration that we’re not in this alone, that we have one another, and that we are spiritual beings taking part in a human experience.

Perhaps I was naive in thinking that a simple two week trip home to the place where I grew up could heal me and resolve all of the challenges I’ve been enduring lately. Perhaps I was naive in thinking that some time back home would provide me with all of the recharge needed to start brand-new again once I return home to Hawaii, finally and formally healed from the pains of divorce, healed from the pains of hurtful relational wounds, and healed from the shame of starting over again.

The reality is it’s a process. It’s beginning here today, but it’s not ending here. It’s not a finite, definitive process. It’s on-going, continual, and ever-evolving. It’s transformative, just like I am. This reset is a practice in mindfulness, to give myself permission to be in the moment, taking the recharge as it comes and goes, navigating along the way, and maintaining the intention of growth with each new hour, each new day.

We’ll continue moving along. We’ll continue finalizing a divorce to honor the chapter that’s closing and welcome in a new chapter that’s just beginning (and full of hope). We’ll continue building a business that highlights humanity and provides the safest space possible for folx to explore themselves and their emotions. We’ll continue having fun and enjoying life. And we’ll continue loving all along the way — loving clients, loved ones, friends, family, and myself.

Thank you for being here with me in the resetting. Brené Brown talks about the rising strong process as the stumble, the falling down, the scraping our knees, the feeling the pain of that experience, and then the courage to learn the lessons we need to get back up again and continue going on. Thank you for being here with me in my own rising strong process.

I share my story with you in hopes that there might be one nugget you can relate to and/or align with. I believe in the power of community, and to me, that means sharing our stories with each other to support one another, letting one another know that we are not alone in life.

Life is a beautiful mess. It’s incredibly difficult at times, and it’s also the most profound experience we can comprehend. Let’s keep walking through the mess together, laughing as we tumble, and dusting our knees off as we need.

It’s never too late to reset.

And you can reset as many times as you need.