Epiphany...

I called my friend to complain this morning....I've acquired some amazing skills in this area and I was hoping to refine said skills over the phone.  I began with the obligatory, heavy sigh...weighted voice and the over dramatized pauses...I was gearing up for one of my finest performances.  But, something was different today....

I had awakened...refreshed...what?...and in a fairly good mood.  Prepared for work efficiently and made it to my desk on time...something is wrong here....So, I decided calling my friend to revitalize my funk of several weeks/months/2011.  Because she is a wonderful friend, she answered the phone.  Because she really cares about me, she asked how I was doing...understanding fully that she was opening herself up to the same story she's already heard a million and one times.  "Sigh, sigh....me, me, me....blah, blah...I, I, I...me, me....enough about me. Let's talk about you.  What do you think of me?"  You know, the usual.

She stayed in there with me, and then it happened....like curtains opening on sunny morning to smeared, cracked glass...there it was...an epiphany.  As I tried to blather about my new favorite funk, I started to make sense...I told her how I have always feared and secretly known that parts of myself were broken, or at least scarred, but the not broken parts of myself are very intuitive.  What I refuse to see in myself, I see quite clearly in others and I am drawn to it.  Like the Sixth Sense, I see broken people...and I innately love them.  I feel at home.  I don't feel better than them...I feel at home, not so different or odd or weird.

So, the man that I have loved for 25 years...since I was 16...what if the love at first sight was, in fact, broken at first sight?  What if we were soul mates of broken-ness?  How would I know that he was the yang to my yin of emotional damage?  How would he know?  What if every one of the emotionally distant men that I have been in relationships with were actually the equivalent of an opposing magnetic force meeting my emotional longing? What if what I love most about that man is that I don't feel so damaged with him and he doesn't feel so damaged with me....we were and have always been kindred broken spirits?  We've just never been able to work out the enabling part....we'd have to be around each other for longer than 24 hours...

This broken-ness has creeped into even my most successful endeavors.  I left a highly lucrative career to work with broken individuals for average pay and I'm really good at what I do.  I mean, I'm kick ass...Over seven years, I have created positions for myself, built programs and created a name and reputation for myself.  I even spoke nationally, in 2011, about unconditional positive regard and working with the offender population...broken people.  Supreme Court Justices, correctional professionals and social workers from all over the United States sat in a room and listened, responded to my questions, laughed and clapped to my ideologies and thoughts about working with broken people.

Don't get me wrong...the world needs people who do what I do, and I understand the world I have chosen to serve.   But, I have always refused to admit openly and honestly, to myself, that I get what my clients are feeling, because I feel the same.  I've never seen myself as better than my clients, but I have worried that I am a fraud.  I'm helping them and, if they knew how dinged and dented I am inside, they'd give me the finger and walk out.

I'm not sure what this means for my future....I'm still struggling with the grieving process of so many losses that 2011 offered me...but, somehow, the answers seem to be rising to the surface this morning, like cream to the top.  I wonder if I keep churning away at this, things might just turn out to be just like butta'.