After an hour or two of attempted assisting, when sweet talk and sympathy didn’t work, I resorted to a raised voice. I’m okay with cajoling and listening, but not raising my voice to manipulate someone into compliance. Even when, as in this case, it was for their own well-being.
Raising my voice feels foreign, like I’ve shifted into another body just adjacent to my own, morphed into a primitive version of self that I have in fact outgrown perhaps by many lifetimes.
But clearly, this primitive persona was just waiting to come back for one last great unleashing.
*****
I would, in fact, put myself first. Which I now realize is my version of sovereignty. My personal sovereignty depends upon knowing what is for my own highest and best good, focusing on myself and taking care of myself.
As anyone who is the mainstay of their family knows, at times that seems nearly impossible. But amazingly, once I made the commitment to take care of myself first by refusing to engage in unnecessary drama, the trouble area sorted itself out quite quickly.
*****
We can’t hang onto luggage filled with leaden, unfinished karma, old wounds and old ways of being that we’re meant to process and dissolve once and for all.
The bad habit of seldom putting myself first is fast becoming a faded scar on my psyche. It has been soothed by the gold wash of my sovereign self, which knows how to take care of Numero Uno. And offer no apology for doing so.
