I just got back from a 4-day cruise with 5 of my Soul Sisters – girlfriends who’ve known each other most of our life, some since kindergarten. That’s a long time when you’re 65. 😉
There’s something so comforting about being with your “no matter what” people – the ones who KNOW you and still love you, flaws and all. The ones who hold the mirror up to parts of ourselves WE don’t even like sometimes, so we can heal a little more.
All of those things happened on this trip – some were quiet little moments, some were messy, some were hilarious – all of them mattered.
The beautiful thing about life-time friendships is they grow and stretch and change WITH you – at least the healthy ones do. But just like relationships with family, they can be challenging if you hold each other in a perception or expectation of who you’ve BEEN rather than who you ARE.
Great example: I changed my name from Katherine to Kate when I was 7, but my sister who’s 4 years older than me could not or would not call me Kate until her children called me Aunt Kate – 20 years later! And that was just my name.
The same thing happens when we hold onto old perceptions and judgments of ourselves and others. We can get stuck in who we think we’re supposed to be or who others need us to be, and lose our sense of who we ARE.
We’re still in there. We just need to know how to find her again.
I didn’t always feel worthy of showing up in ALL of myself, but thanks to this work, I’m happy to say I feel more free to be messy, human, perfectly imperfect ME than I’ve ever felt in my life – and I like her.
She’s REAL. She takes no bullshit. She’s got the potty-est potty mouth. And she loves her people fiercely.
By the end of our cruise, we’d ended up naming ourselves like the 7 dwarves: Bossy, Goofy, Salty, Sassy, Spicy, Crabby…
