Let me by myself

I release fixing my weaknesses, I embrace building my strengths.

It’s time to escape the trap of the amateur for the last time.

Please help me release this physical pain.

I woke up, and felt a twinge of pain, and suddenly I’m writing this down. I don’t know why I’m writing this. I just know the why doesn’t matter as much as the words.

I changed last year. I even know the exact date. I got a gift, of a strange, synchronistic day and a hallucination that healed me. And ever since, I’ve been different.

But I’ve been walking a lot in the path of who I was. When I do, I repeat old patterns, but I see it this time. For the first time in my life, after all that meditation and introspection, I can finally see my thoughts and feelings.

Every time I’m walking into some old pattern, I end up in pain. The physical pain I’m in is separate from this, but the anguish, the despair, all of that, it happens every time I live as who I was, not as who I am.

I know who I am, finally, after all these years. And it’s time to let go of all the old stumbling blocks, and things I’ve left in the way, because while the person I was needed them, the person I truly am has different needs.

The person I am needs to walk into the new life as if I’m already there. Because with each step I move a little closer to waking up in the place I was always meant to be. And every day, inch by inch, I move a little closer to there.

I finally found the gift in this physical pain. And I finally feel released from that suffering. I would neither give the gift of physical pain to anyone, nor do I wish to lavish myself with this particular gift. But since the gift is in front of me, is part of my present experience, I can appreciate it, and use it to understand and transcend.

And I’m grateful.

Related talks & stories

Fred speaking on this

Growing up as the only kid who looked like him in a small, unkind town — and the unlikely place an escape route showed up.

Written for a parent worried about their own child — about a family that went quiet after a loss, and the long process of learning to speak again.

Why he stopped celebrating his birthday, and what nearly thirty years of strange, sudden loss taught him about staying alive.

A childhood nighttime visitor, a phrase he didn’t understand until years later, and a piece of his family’s history he didn’t know he was carrying.

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