We’re All Alone in This Together

“The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.” — unknown

This year has felt like a lifetime in an instant.

And yet really, in the grand scheme of things, it’s just an instant in a lifetime — albeit the most transformative one I’ve experienced in my 54 years on the planet!

We’re in month 8 of the watershed year that is 2020 and I’m curious to know where you are in your journey and how your heart is. How are you responding to these tumultuous, transformational times?

What’s alive for you?

What are you birthing?

What beauty are you finding in the Great Breakdown?

My year began with a deeply painful, heart-wrenching breakdown, one that preceded — and perhaps foreshadowed — the larger, societal breakdowns that followed. One that I only started to get perspective on and fully appreciate this past week.

2020 was supposed to be a year of joy. A year of relationship. One in which I got to explore my first intimate, romantic coupling with a woman. A beautiful divine feminine soul I had fallen hard for and journeyed with last fall.

But like all things in 2020, it didn’t turn out as planned.

I started the year in a state of profound grief, experiencing the loss, heartbreak, and heartache of this stalled relationship. Longing for a belonging that, despite all my seeking and finding — all my contagious vulnerability — remains elusive. That of an intimate, romantic, committed partnership.

I have found belonging to me. I have found belonging to We. And yet I am still longing. And not just for all beings to belong. A dimension of belonging that I didn’t give voice to in last week’s exploration of belonging — one for which I am still deeply longing — is belonging to she.

I am a woman seeking women. Seeking a woman who will meet me and walk shoulder to shoulder with me as my soulmate for the remainder of this precious lifetime.

I thought that I had found her — thought that I had finally looked into another’s eyes and found my person — but the Universe had other plans.

As I reflect back on my journey this year — a journey that has been a lonely and deeply challenging one — I realize that had things worked out as I had hoped, I would never have experienced the depths of self-discovery and personal transformation I’ve chronicled in the series that is Contagious Vulnerability: 2020.

This series might not even exist or, if it did, would have an entirely different tenor and story arc. And more importantly, I would not exist as I do now and my life story would have an entirely different arc.

I would not have found the self-awareness, the self-knowledge, the self-love— the depth of belonging to me — that I now experience.

The beauty of this breakdown is that it catalyzed a fantastic — and at times deeply painful — voyage to the center of my own being. One that revealed and healed core wounds and took all the courage and strength I had.

I discovered a treasure trove of riches inside myself. Discoveries I would not have made had things worked out with this woman as I had hoped and dreamed that they would.

I found my voice.

I became a writer.

I publicly owned and celebrated my innate queerness.

I came to know and love all of me — and to realize that there’s a vast, magical multiverse inside me to curiously explore for the rest of my days.

This was a journey that I had to do alone. One that would not have happened in the way that it happened had I been partnered. One that was necessary to prepare me for the kind of authentic, intimate partnership I seek.

A prerequisite to finding belonging to she.

Paulo Coelho wrote: “If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.” My 8 months of loneliness has yielded a self-knowing that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I’ve learned so much.

I’ve learned that heartbreaks like other breakdowns contain so much beauty.

I’ve learned that heartaches aren’t pains to eradicate but longings to pay attention to — longings that contain wisdom and clues for the path forward.

I’ve learned that grief work, as Francis Weller says, is the gateway to soul work.

I’ve learned that when things don't work out, they work better — that the Universe has a divine plan, the wisdom of which we can’t see while it’s unfolding.

I know I am not alone in journeying with loneliness and breakdowns in 2020. We are all alone in this together. At once deeply alone and profoundly united as never before in our collective vulnerability. Each of us on a solitary hero or heroine’s journey of self-discovery that we must take alone.

What beauty have you found in the breakdowns in 2020?

Are there ways in which things not working out as planned — or not working out at all — has brought unexpected gifts?

Can you see how perhaps, things not working out are actually things working out exactly as the Universe, in her divine wisdom, intended?

If you’d like a guide to help you find the beauty in the breakdown, book a curious conversation to see what the Vulnerability Doula can do for you.