Unbreakable💪🏾

On the last day of 2019, I stumbled on an IGTV story by a powerful female I felt so drawn to. She spoke of her life experiences that shaped her. She started off with how her high school boyfriend took her virginity without her consent which made her logically convince herself that she loved him. She stayed with him for three years until her 17 year old younger brother and her best friend found out about her trauma and convinced her to leave him. The plan was for her to break up with him the next day but that night, she lay crumpled in a heap on her bedroom floor sobbing and heaving. Her brother found her, sat down with her and made her realise that she wasn’t the bad person she thought she was.

In her words, “Somehow at 17, my brother knew what most adults still don’t. There are no pieces of me. I cannot be broken. I can be bruised, shaped, demented. Sure! But I am always whole”.

Her words sat in my stomach like lead. How many times have we gone through emotional hurt and we labelled ourselves broken? How many times have we claimed to be unlovable due to past experiences of our lives? How often do we shy away from being who we were created to be just because we hit a speed bump at one point in our journey?

She continued her life tale with talking about her mum. Her mother was the mother of all. The woman that always had her front door open, snacks in her house, waved and spoke to every kid she came across. She wanted everyone to feel seen and loved. Well, her mum and brother were murdered in their home in a botched burglary by one of the troubled kids her mother tried to make feel loved.

After the death of her family, the entire community and even her university lecturer said her life was over and she’d never be okay or bounce back from all that had happened to her. Thankfully, she met another lecturer who had had a lot of loss in her life but was still one of the happiest people in the world and it was from this woman she learnt.

The experiences you go through in your life will most definitely shape you but never has to break you. You cannot control what happens to you in life but you always can decide what it has to mean to you. In life, you’d play several roles but you are always bigger than whatever part you play. A sister, a friend, a lover. You are bigger than whatever it is. You are wholesome.

You need to give yourself the permission to heal your wounds. You cannot keep hiding under the shell of pain and hurt. You have to move past it. Yes, it will take everything you have got but it will most definitely show you all you are. Once you see all you are, it is impossible not to be whole. It is impossible to not show up to everything with all you’ve got. It will be super hard to not give your all in everything you do.

People who are whole know how to help others without constantly abandoning themselves. They see people in pain and get on the floor with them instead of just walking away. They remind them that though they are bruised and bleeding, they are so whole and they always have them. They tell the hurt ones that they will get through it all together and of course, they do.

Now I want you to sit down, reflect and ask yourself “Who am I? What has shaped me? Who do I want to be?”. Write your answers down and work everyday to be that wholesome individual that makes things happen.

I am rooting for you always.