2020 has been a year of so much heaviness, darkness, and isolation.

It has been a year of missing so many people, missing proximity (even sometimes when you share a household with others), missing normalcy, missing boundaries to be embraced instead of set, missing escapes.

It has been a very hard year.

But, personally, there have also been some profound moments of healing, insight, and becoming.

When there is nowhere one can escape to, when there is no one or nothing to set boundaries, when you must resist the demands from the outside to listen to the voices of those closest to you and those within you (yours and those of the ancestors you carry with you), you are forced to become something different.

It’s been a strange few weeks since the end of November when I forced myself to take a week without meetings. The world continued. I felt better. Things were good.

After that though, I found myself in such a fog. Not wanting to return to the 80 hour weeks I had assigned to myself (because there is always too much work to do), confronted by the numerous projects to which I had committed (but not allotted sufficient time for), often wanting just to be done with it all, but still compulsively doing it because it felt like the thing I had to do (even though these were the things that might not fully deserve the level of sacrifice I gave). I was exhausted from the inner battle. I knew I needed rest and to act differently. I had seen that this was possible. But I knew I could not just drop everything indefinitely.

In talking with my therapist this week, I told her about the struggles to show up for myself to set healthy boundaries for myself, to do the things that I needed when I felt others needed me more or when they felt they needed me more. I told her that it didn’t feel like anything was right and it was all a jumbled mess in my head and my heart.

Then she asked me if maybe this was something that was so hard for me to sort through because it was something that I carried with me from previous generations.

And her question broke me.

[Fortunately, I was bound together by the jumbled mess of obligation I was caught up in, so this just resulted in a lot of tears and no actual collapse into pieces.]

But, the brokenness was the beginning of healing.

Of course it was.

Because it was a new grief, for my mother and grandmother who fought such different battles than those I have, so that I could have the privilege to fight the battles that I do. I don’t diminish my battles to make theirs more noble. Our battles are different, but done with the same depth of love.

They pushed forward to survive for their children so that I could push for greater opportunity, not just for my children, but for the children in the (future) classrooms of the teachers with whom I work.

They sacrificed so much of themselves so that I could sacrifice less of myself.

But what do I know besides sacrifice?

So how would I know to choose differently?

I don’t….yet.

It is a lot.

But through the fog, I have found myself closer to them, and closer to myself.

Drawing closer to them and closer to myself, I find myself closer to healing.

For all of this, I am deeply grateful.