There is a point when you just can’t take it anymore.
You’ve tried. God knows you’ve tried. You’ve turned it over in your mind, talked it through, tried to make sense of it, tried to find a way to make things feel different. You’ve told yourself to hang in there, that things will work themselves out, that maybe tomorrow you’ll feel differently.
And then tomorrow comes.
And there it is again.
That feeling. That heaviness. That awful sense of being right back where you were, carrying something that seems to get heavier with every passing day.
How much more can you take?
There is something about reaching that place that is hard to put into words. It’s beyond being frustrated or having a difficult day. It’s the feeling of being so full of something that you don’t know where to put it anymore. You might find yourself crying, feeling angry, wanting to scream, wanting to disappear for a while. Maybe you are tired of hearing yourself talk about it. Tired of thinking about it. Tired of waking up and having it still be there.
And somewhere inside, there is this feeling: SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE.
You can feel it. You know it. You may have known it for a long time. And yet here you are, still trying to figure out how to make something different from where you are standing.
I think about how much of our lives we spend trying to work things out from inside the very experiences that are causing us so much pain. We go over what happened, what someone meant, what we should have said, what we could do now. We look for the answer in the circumstances, because that’s where everything seems to be happening.
And the more we turn it over, the more entangled we can become.
It’s exhausting.
I know what it means to be squeezed to the point where you feel there is absolutely nothing left. That moment when you throw your hands up. When you are done trying to make it work in the way you’ve been trying to make it work. When something in you simply says, enough.
There is so much emotion in that moment. And I don’t want to brush past it with some lovely sentiment about letting go or finding the lesson. When you’re in it, it can feel awful. It can feel frightening. It can feel as though you have run out of places to turn.
I’ve been in those moments. And I know how consuming they can be.
What I also know is that there is a whole lot more happening within us than the story we are caught up in.
Sometimes we become so immersed in what is happening that it feels as though there is nothing beyond it. Everything seems to lead back to the same place. Every thought, every conversation, every attempt to find a way forward brings us right back into the same feelings.
And somewhere in all of that, we lose sight of ourselves.
We lose sight of the part of us that can stand back and see what is happening. The part that can witness the experience without being swallowed by it. The part that can begin to see something beyond what has occupied so much of our attention.
There is a profound difference between being inside an experience and being able to see yourself within it.
When that shift happens, even a little, something can feel different. You may begin to see what you couldn’t see before. Something that seemed so tangled begins to reveal another thread. You recognize a feeling that has been with you far longer than the circumstances in front of you. You see how much of yourself has been caught up in trying to make something happen, or trying to keep something from happening.
And perhaps you feel a little space around it for the first time.
There is room to breathe. Room to feel something without immediately having to do something about it. Room to see what is yours to meet, what is yours to release, and what may be asking for a completely different response.
This is where things can begin to move in ways we couldn’t have imagined while we were caught in the middle of it.
Sometimes the change is in what we say. Sometimes it’s in what we choose. Sometimes we walk away from something we have spent years trying to make work. The most profound movement happens within us, in a place that no one else can see.
I’ve come to recognize that these moments can bring us face to face with parts of ourselves we have carried for a very long time. And when we finally see them, really see them, something that once had such a hold on us can begin to loosen.
Often that kind of recognition is hard to describe until you’ve experienced it. It’s as though the room you’ve been struggling inside suddenly has a door you hadn’t seen before.
You can breathe again. You can see beyond the immediate moment. You can begin to meet your life from somewhere other than the place that has been hurting.
And perhaps that is something worth remembering when you find yourself at that edge, feeling as though you simply cannot take another moment of what you’re experiencing.
I see you. I know how much it can hurt. I know the exhaustion of trying and trying, and the longing for something to finally shift.
There is so much more to you than what you are experiencing right now. And there may be so much more happening within this moment than you can yet see.
Sometimes the first breath of something different comes just when you think you can’t take another one.
With love and blessings,
Susan
Work with Susan
If something in these words speaks to where you are in your life, you can learn more about my private sessions and ongoing work together here.
Read my book: Lost In The Truth