The Outsider’s Endgame
Honoring Your Life and Experiences
The Mark That Can’t Be Scrubbed Away
“Get on with it,” they say, like your healing has an expiration date or a deadline. “Shouldn’t you be over this by now?” they wonder out loud during their more candid moments.
And all you can do is sigh. You know that they are mistaking the speed of your growth for paralysis because it’s not fast enough for them. But that’s their perception and their discomfort – not yours.
They worry that your trauma has become your identity. But that’s the rub. It IS your identity. At least part of it. You can’t escape it. It happened to you. It’s part of your history. It has influenced who you’ve become and all the changing and growing and therapizing doesn’t make it go away.
The people who care about you don’t want you to be marked by any difficulty in your life. But you ARE marked. The problem is they keep trying to scrub off the mark instead of reading what it says. In your discomfort, you may want to scrub it off yourself. But if you scrub it off without paying attention to its meaning and impact, you may fail to understand yourself on many untold levels. And there is something real contained in that understanding.
If you’re honest, part of you is still waiting for me to tell you this all goes away. I’m not going to.
The mark may fade in time, but it represents your life. Even the bad times are part of the precious time you have on Earth. Would you really want to cut off a segment of that and throw it away even if you could?
And let’s be clear. You can’t. So, why waste your time hoping and trying to make the impact go away.
If this resonates with you, you’re already part of the community. You’ve already found your way here. Staying is easy.
What you can do is absorb the message and the textures the experiences have sent your way from your past. And you have the choice of how you want to respond to these integrated pieces of your existence.
Most healing cultures quietly promise erasure. When you meet a certain goal, the belief is, the wound goes away. But while transformation may often be about forgiving, it rarely includes forgetting. Real transformation is about integration, not denial.
It’s not wallowing.
It’s not romanticizing.
It’s simply integrating all of life’s experiences into a healthy context.
Finding the Gold: How Wounds Become Wisdom
My favorite story from the Old Testament is about Jacob wrestling with God, who came in the form of a man. He wrestled the man all night. And when the man saw that he could not overpower Jacob, he touched Jacob’s hip and dislocated it. But even with the pain of dislocation Jacob would not give up, and the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” And Jacob said he would not until his opponent blessed him. So, God changed Jacob’s name to Israel and blessed him. But along with that blessing, Jacob also walked away with a limp.
Jacob was marked. And he was blessed. And both came at the same time.
Such is life.
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The point of psychological and spiritual transformation is not to deny the existence of your limp. It’s not about dismissing your wounds as much as it is about stubbornly refusing to leave the most hard-won parts of yourself behind.
The victory of survival and the lessons of the battle are gold that is earned. Healing in a way that integrates your difficult life experiences is more about bringing them forward into a more mature light that translates them into something valuable.
It’s the man who’s been abandoned who never lets a struggling friend face it alone.
It’s the man who was never heard who becomes the one who actually listens.
It’s the man who had no one in his corner who shows up for others without being asked.
It’s the man who survived the chaos who becomes the stillness someone else desperately needs.
It’s the man who’s been abused who now stands with the underdog.
These are the gold nuggets born of wounds.
And finding such gold is the endgame.
But if you deny or ignore the wounds, you’ll never find the gold.
And you’ll be poorer for it.
Integration is harder to do alone than it sounds. If you're somewhere in this — still carrying the weight, still looking for the gold — I have a free 30-minute intro coaching session. Come as you are.