In the seventh week of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course that I participated in, I noticed heavy emotions and a sense of my body collapsing around itself; by that, I mean I shrunk down as small as I could, involuntarily. I was struggling.

I also felt connected. It may seem to make no sense that I was struggling and turning inward when I was experiencing a profound sense of connection, but that is what was happening. I wasn’t shrinking because I was afraid of the connection. I was shrinking because I was attempting not to feel the grief and sense of loss of all the years that I denied myself that possibility.

When we experience trauma, it is protective to avoid being emotionally and often, physically and mentally intimate with someone. In my case, sexual trauma, occurring more than once in my short life, was a seemingly perfect reason to avoid people at all costs.

The safety I began to feel in my therapist’s office back in 2018 began translating into other areas of my life, and I have since built relationships with people outside of my small, safe bubble. The thing is, despite the gratitude I felt (and feel) for the relationships I had (have), I continued to feel as though something was off.

That all came to a head as I sat in the nearing closure of the MBSR class. In an exercise to demonstrate the interconnection of all of us, in the class and in the “outside world,” I felt overwhelming grief. That grief was the thing that was “off.” For years I had shut down the pain of the years I had lost with others, and I was finally feeling it, or at least aware of what I was feeling.

As the wave passed through me, I sat more upright. I stopped sinking and opened my posture to let the others in. I didn’t emote in a way that others could see, but my heart bled. And after it bled, it began to heal. The individuals in that class didn’t know the healing they were both a part of and a witness to. Yet, they unwittingly held the space I needed.

Despite mourning the loneliness that I experienced for well over 30 years, I had a renewed hunger for connection. Connection is much deeper than fitting in; it is a complete sense of belonging. Think of it like this: Some puzzles are cut the same way so that you MUST look at the image to determine whether the piece really fits in that space. A piece may “fit in,” but that doesn’t mean it belongs and perfectly connects to the other pieces. I long to be the piece that fully and accurately completes the perfect picture. In the longing, I can act. I can understand I am responsible for my life. You are responsible for your life. We NEED connection, and we MUST be willing to be influenced by and influence others. We MUST. We are not islands. And for all of us, it isn’t too late. YET.

The instructor of the MBSR class, my friend, introduced me to a poem I found meaningful both in the moment as well as now. I have a significant role to play in the lives of the people I encounter, just as you do; just as the people who came before us and will come after us.

Everything Falls Away

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.
– William Stafford

Sooner or later, everything falls away. You, the work you’ve done, your successes, large and small, your failures, too. Those moments when you were light, alongside the times you became one with the night. The friends, the people you loved who loved you, those who might have wished you ill, none of this is forever. All of it is soon to go, or going, or long gone.

Everything falls away, except the thread you’ve followed, unknowing, all along. The thread that strings together all you’ve been and done, the thread you didn’t know you were tracking until, toward the end, you see that the thread is what stays as everything else falls away.

Follow that thread as far as you can and you’ll find that it does not end, but weaves into the unimaginable vastness of life. Your life never was the solo turn it seemed to be. It was always part of the great weave of nature and humanity, an immensity we come to know only as we follow our own small threads to the place where they merge with the boundless whole.

Each of our threads runs its course, then joins in life together. This magnificent tapestry—this masterpiece in which we life forever.

– Parker J. Palmer