Grief Survivor

Grief often comes in waves and grief has no timetable.

Grief is something that one needs to be present for, not escaped from.

I recently wrote in my journal about all the good things I lost, all the good things I missed and I cried.

I needed to acknowledge the pain, the sadness, the heaviness than try avoiding.

Then I needed to let it go….

I honestly have never thought about this up until now, that it’s okay to grieve over the good things that were lost.

I lost a church community when I was kicked off the worship team, I lost community, I felt alone, out of place a lot when I would visit other churches.

“Weeping may last the night

But Joy comes in the morning…”

It’s hard to feel that joy when there’s so much around you going on.

So much chaos, so much pain, so much confusion…

God doesn’t cringe at your grief, He is closer than you could ever possibly know or believe.

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Healing & Breaking

Healing & Breaking….

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means

To heal and to break

A few months ago I had a dream about my biological mother and my little sister. The dream was an actual memory of a situation that happened, and how it played out wasn’t good.

My mother introduced me to physical abuse at a very young age, and it’s not something you can just “forgive & forget.” There’s loads of unlearning that need untangling.

There are loads of lies that I believed about myself…that I was somehow damaged goods…that I didn’t deserve good things in my life….

I wish it was just as simple to drop the baggage ,and I believe I did at one point in time

Then it just kind of came back…

It took me a minute to actually understand that healing isn’t linear, it’s not about golden rainbows and happiness shooting out of your ass all the time.

That may be a part of the healing, but healing mostly looks like you laying on the floor and crying

And doing A LOT of that…

And writing, and crying some more…

A friend of mine told me that healing is messy and she was right

it’s so damn messy…

Healing requires vulnerability and vulnerability is painful ,and breaking requires feeling your emotions and that is perfectly okay.

Allow yourself to break and give yourself some grace when breaking. Allow yourself to feel the things you’ve avoided feeling.

It’s okay to break, and it is okay to heal.

Exchanging Pain for Love

“Walking alone to hear your pain

And feel the sound of your shame Exchanging pain for love

Exchanging pain for love”

I wrote those lyrics in 2008

So YEARS ago

I wrote it in attempt to try and grasp the feeling I felt inside of me.

That feeling of hopelessness, darkness and despair. I wanted someone to rip that feeling out of me.

I look back on it now years later with different eyes and a different perspective.

At the time that I wrote this, I wrote it in an attempt to try and be deep, because I felt so deeply within myself. I guess I was trying to process the things I didn’t know how to say.

I read it now and maybe I wrote it for the other people in my life, or for people who knew me. Maybe I wrote it to my future self….

We all have pain or some kind of trauma from our past. Maybe that pain or trauma resurfaced recently, maybe something was done to us.

Maybe it was something we did or something we said to others, and we can’t get over it….

Exchanging pain for love could mean different things to people. For me it often means writing poetry, prayer, and reading the Bible.

It also means for me to learn and relearn to love myself, learning to listen to people without shooting off at the mouth or waiting for them to finish so I can talk about something different.

It also means sometimes you don’t need to post on social media everyday, it means it’s okay to sit in the silence and be still, sometimes you don’t need the music on 24/7.

Maybe the silence is what we all need

Maybe if we exchange all our pain, all our trauma, all our past mistakes for Love, we actually will experience inner peace.

Positive-Affirmations

Hey everyone I hope you all are having a good day so far.

So I’m jumping right in with this one.

A few months back I did a thing where I had to look in the mirror and talk to myself.

Yes…talk to myself…

The words we use are so important, they can either tear you down or build you up. There’s something about our words that hold so much weight, we can literally bring light into someone else’s day or we can bring darkness and death.

It’s so crazy to think about, our tongue is the tiniest part of the body, yet no one can tame it. There’s a verse in the Bible that talks about this exact thing.

“Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”
‭‭James‬ ‭3:5-6‬ ‭NIV‬‬

So the basically our mouths hold power, that’s why we need to be careful what we say about others and what we say to others and also about what we say to ourselves.

I could remember for the longest time speaking so much death over myself, so much self-loathing, so much self-pity. I often called myself an ‘idiot’ to get other people to tell me I wasn’t an idiot, pretty messed up right…

Yet all that attention seeking didn’t do a whole lot for me, yeah sure it felt good to be told I wasn’t an idiot or whatever name I felt like hurling at my self esteem. I only craved that more and more until I realized how terrible it actually was.

So talking to myself in the mirror, positive affirmations have actually helped, when you say positive things to yourself, you don’t feel as heavy on the inside.

I’m no expert in this, and it’s been awhile since I’ve last put this into practice, I need to do this more often, and I’m saying this to myself as much as I’m saying this for you all.

Stay awesome y’all

Austin Jenkins

-Openhandspoetry