Christmas 2016… I Almost Lost the Light—Here’s How I Moved from Survival, to Growth, to Thriving.
I’m sharing this because we learn and heal through each other’s experiences. This is happened to me on Christmas Day, 8 years ago. Many of us find the Christmas break amplifies emotions—financial stress, family dynamics, and a stillness from our busy work which exposes inner murmurs we usually successfully distract ourselves from.
On the calm, clear morning of Christmas 2016, I awoke at dawn, alone and with a fright. Heart racing, skin clammy, and a full-body panic gripping me in the grey pre-dawn light. When I searched for a reason for these feeling, no explanation was available, and so my terror amplified in the confusion. What was happening? The cool, crisp sheets stuck to my sweaty skin as I franticly tried to kick them off. My breath shallow and rapid. I was disoriented and scared. I crawled out of bed and on to the floor, I fell through the floor and through the world itself. Endless falling. Time distorted—seconds felt like hours and minutes passed in a blur. The stillness of the room contrasted with the urgent panic, my ears full of the sound of my rapid breathing and my heart thumping, sweat dripped down my face and back.
Was I insane? Was I dying? I was engulfed in whatever this was. I tried to escape it by moving around, going outside, but the spinning and terror crippled me and I became worried about what other people might think. I felt insane. I found the most peace within a foetal position crying and sobbing on the floor. I still didn’t know what was happening and it didn’t seem to be passing. In time, I would discover this confronting moment had been building for decades, continued intensely through all the bright blue days of summer, and took years and years to heal. This was the bursting of a large emotional boil, that had been accumulating and festering for so long inside me. This moment was my breakdown, and quite literally a breakthrough to a new life. I was 36 years old. I thought you had to be weak, or somehow inferior to suffer a breakdown, and I knew I was neither. It turns out when you don’t resolve your wounds, they don’t go away and simply fester unless they are given attention and healing. This morning was the tipping point where my wounds spoke up and forced me to pay attention.
It started from the age of 12, when the colour in my life began to turn to grey, as a teenager, mum was chronically sick, my family was emotionally disconnected, and school was difficult for me. I watched in disbelief and horror as mum’s dementia took her humanity, withered her body, and stole her love of life. At 16, I escaped home to avoid witnessing the end of this slow-motion horror show. I carried my inner chaos and fear out into the world, alone. After losing mum, in the next decades I would lose my brother, then dad, and I’d leave a series of failed relationships behind me. In hindsight each relationship was an attempt to seek comfort, and refuge from my inner chaos, a persistent emptiness, and so many unnamed pains.
My response to this was to seek refuge in my mind. I embraced a 'rise and grind' mentality, threw myself into cognitive excellence, drove my career, chased progression, engaged in more than a decade of competitive CrossFit. I qualified as a Commercial Pilot, became a Police Officer, progressed my corporate career. Yet none of it earned me peace. Then, the morning of Christmas 2016 came to break me loose of this running away. At the right time and in just the right way, the loving, healing intelligence within me—and within all of us—applied a pressure I could no longer ignore. Instead of resisting, I began to listen.
From that moment, I started to put the pieces of myself back together. I’d spent more than 20 years breaking and smashing myself into pieces. All to contain and isolate the different pains I‘d accumulated. I'd tried to escape my inner chaos by turning the volume up on everything, to drown it out. I’d disconnected and separated from myself to drown, contain and isolate the pain. Through support from friends, counsellors and coaches, and my own intuition and self-love, things changed. Over the years I went from healing wounds, to fresh new growth, to blooming in ways I had no idea was possible.
I have walked through the valley of my own shadow and I now hold incredible compassion for others encountering this, in it’s unique form, in their lives. It’s important to me to be the helping hand somebody else takes hold in their darkest hours, because I relied on so many of these myself, in so many moments over the years. Then, beyond the valley of shadows lies growth, and further ahead lays blooming as we reconnect with our True Self and allow it to shine through.
