The woundings.

“It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires.” 
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The question that spreads out into my inbox and lingers in me in the earliest hours of the morning is one about friendship. An uncertainty of being able to bond with a circle of women, of not being able to show up for others or connect with others becomes a question that I used to answer differently than I do now.

I used to tell people that they could get what they wanted from the circles and it didn't matter how much they showed up for others as long as they showed up for themselves. But the problem with that is, well, a lot.

It overlooks the wounding.

The wounding that makes us hide and not risk the vulnerability of sharing our story and sharing our time. It gave permission to stay safe and not risk an edge of meeting someone else in their pain and sadness. Or to close our eyes to the triggers others words may hold in our own woundings.

This isn't to say you have to do the work of magic in a group, it is quite powerful work on your own. What I mean to say is, when you've chosen to be in a group what you seek is belonging. And we are powerful masters of making sure we don't belong.

My step daughter's identity lies deeply in 'not having friends' and being strikingly different. She has friends (we hear her on FaceTime with them), but she needs that story so that when she becomes part of a group (like volleyball or clubs) she doesn't have to belong (risk being rejected or left out because it is who she is).

Dave will ask me what he should say when she claims to not have friends after he picks her up from practice and I remind him that this is who she is choosing to be. Until she doesn't anymore.

Days after announcing she didn't have friends on her team she was asking if a friend could come over and practice at our house.

When people tell me that they won't be good at the connecting part I believe them. Because it is their truth and it is their story and I can promise you it is mine too.

This circle I decided to do things differently because it is so easy to stand on the edge of a circle rather than the middle, and the edge often leads out of the circle unless someone sees you and asks for your hand.

I will ask for your hand.

I am adding in different ways to connect.

The option to connect with me personally, because everything we need to explore does not always feel safe shared in a group. The option to be on a WhatsApp text thread and the entire first week of the circle spent on connection and story.

The text thread I am hoping will feel fun and light. The way you might text a friend when you are at the store with no idea what to make for dinner because you are so tired and you stand in the produce isle and text, "Help, what do I make for dinner?"

Then they tell you to grab frozen pizza and you do exactly that, with tears in your eyes because they know and somehow you had forgotten all about frozen pizza.

My story is that I suck at friendship. I have a boat load of proof. I run from expectation of others.

I can stay there or I can gently work in the shadows, in my woundings, and say also, that I belong.

The most powerful magic can be found in our words.

I belong.

This is also true.

Our woundings aren't the end, they are the opening for the most beautiful kind of transformation of self.

Vulnerable? You bet. Magic will do that to us. I'm asking for your hand, you will not be left outside the circle.

xo H