Grateful for both.

I was having a conversation with a good friend last night. She checked in, we updated each other on a few things, chatted about the ways we’ve been managing our energy through the chaos both of our lives have been throwing at us since we last spoke.

We understand each other and speak the same language. After a couple of years of working together we have come to know the ways we experience many things in the world the same. The conversation flowed with the ease that comes with that and after a while she asked ‘How are you though? Not everyone else? You?

 I hadn’t realised I had been telling her all about how my work supporting people is going and how I’ve been supporting my son and how I’ve been supporting my husband and how two of my children are doing well, thank goodness, but occasionally piping up with something that says “hey Mum where are you, don’t forget we need you too”.

How am I, I thought?  Hmmmmm…

I’m busy and I’m tired. And then I thought that I could add how grateful I am that she asked me that question!

I’m not busy and tired in the way I used to be. I’m not being pulled in different directions I don’t want to be going in. I’m not chronically depleted from giving everything I have to anybody who asks. Not anymore.

I’m directing my energy into things that are important and inspiring to me, I have boundaries to protect my energy and tools to replenish it often before I hit empty. But right now I’m busy and I’m tired and until I was asked that question I hadn’t acknowledged that or really heard myself on how I’m feeling about that.

We tell our stories in different ways, at different times. We are given opportunities all the time to tell our story. Every conversation (the real ones that aren’t just about the weather) holds a piece of our story, a layer of it. When we sit down with a new friend or one we’re catching up with, when we reach out to a practitioner for help and support we tell them about who we are in the moment we are with them. We tell them that moment’s version of our story. The parts of our past that weave through what is happening in our present. Never the same story, never the same combination of pieces twice.

In response to our story we might find an overlap and hear a ‘me too’. How affirming and nourishing that feels. We might find a conflict and have the opportunity to rethink the things we thought we knew about ourselves and about the world. How uncomfortable and powerful that can be in equal measure. Either way, we are heard by them and in their being there with us we have the opportunity to hear ourselves.

We see ourselves in their responses to us and their questions of us and that space of story telling, sharing and hearing is a sacred one. Because it is the space where things land. Where they come out of our heads and into the world, from background noise to pins pushed into the map of our lives we can then take a step from in order to move forwards. To write the next piece rather than blindly walk into it.

Being heard and being trusted to hear. Today I am grateful for both.