Birth is messy. Life is messy. Humans are messy.
These are some of the many thoughts ringing through my mind this week.
My path as a business owner has been super messy, and as my sixth year of business gets into full swing, it’s easy to reminisce on those early years with a generous, kind eye - the details in distant view and the lessons I needed at the forefront.
Looking back, I see the ways everything was leading me down my unique path. But while it was happening? At moments it was absolutely, embarrassingly messy.
I entered birth work driven by a deep desire to be a companion for others navigating a life event that traumatized both my son & I.
I've told the stories of using my nights, weekends, and PTO from my healthcare job to attend births all while raising a toddler, awakening to my spiritual gifts, and rising into my power in a global pandemic.
It's convenient for my ego and image to romanticize this time in my life and tell it as my "hero's journey." People love to see a single mom overcome challenges and come out on top. And all of that is true. But the full picture is far more complex, uncomfortable, and sometimes even humiliating than I want to admit.
This week it feels important to talk about what we don't see when we look at our doulas / healers / practitioners / people we trust with our tender moments and sacred initiations.
I don't think care professionals (or anyone for that matter) are obligated to disclose the intimate details of our lives, but I also think if I want to help dissolve expectations of perfection and purity, puritanical lies that often prevent us from building collective power), why not share some things you'd never see if I didn't tell you, like:
Emotionally crashing out in my family home
E-mail replies in my drafts + texts & DMs unanswered
Cancelling plans to cry and lay in bed all day
Never rescheduling a class I cancelled and refunding money I really needed.
Letting my kid have uncapped screen time
Blocking people when I could have just had a conversation
Under-delivering after over-promising
Even typing this out still gives me flashes of shame, humiliation, and the desire to run into hiding and never return again. I almost did that a few years ago when a colleague i opened up my personal world to sent me a scathing email at 4am telling me I wasn't who they thought I was. It was so hard to not absorb their stories of me, based on a small fraction of perspective, and I was so close to giving up because I disappointed one person I admired.
But when I imagine letting my messy moments stand alone, I’m brought back to the faces of my clients and their babies.
I see the rested single mom who got in a nap while I made her soup. I taste the matcha in my client’s living room as we exchanged hopes and dreams with her midwives at our last meeting before the birth. I smell the newborns and hear the laughter on Zoom and feel the elation in my heart walking away from my sessions and homes thinking to myself, “Whoa, I am exactly where I am supposed to be.”
It blows my mind that I have gotten to experience being both hero and villain while also knowing I’m neither of those things at all.
Lately, especially online, I’ve been noticing the ways people get flattened to one choice and sentenced in the court of public opinion. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely situations that call for protecting the community, but there are also times it seems like people are getting torn down for possessing basic human traits.
I sometimes wonder how is anyone expected to heal and grow when every misstep carries the potential of trying to be eradicated entirely. And the irony being that its often the people who celebrated the most loudly who are the first to pull out their pitch forks.
We see this a lot on social media. Curated glimpses of a human turned into a caricature for people's projections and expectations, put on blast and chased off the internet for things that could be handled with conversations, accountability processes, and the hard relational work of not throwing eachother away.
Of course, like everything, you knew I was going to tie this back to colonialism. In this case, the purity culture and policing that not only punishes the messy reality of being human, but also scares many of us, including myself, from continuing to show up and try to be better so we can fulfil our greater callings.
Going on six years here, there are still days where I feel like I’m unworthy of being in a position to help and heal because of the imperfections I carry. So I'm truly grateful for the clients, collaborators, & mentors I fell short with who saw me as the human I am, offered feedback or distanced themselves respectfully. They all gave me room to grow. It's through that grace that I’ve been able to step into my fullness and into my business.
It's a practice to both give and receive but I encourage you to march forward with a little more grace, compassion, and a lot more appreciation for the ones willing to let us witness their messy journeys whether in private or public.
That’s the kind of leadership we need right now: not perfect people, but those who refuse to let imperfection pull them off their path.
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