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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
As I was eating my breakfast and thinking about self worth, I started to ponder the notion of thinking we don't have anything to offer when we don't have anything material or monetary to give. It is where I fell into the "I owe you because" trap.
Let me preface this next bit with saying how much I love my mother. She has been my constant in my life. I am highly attached to her and always have been since childhood. She is a genuinely good and kind-hearted person, but even good people have the ability to wound us deeply and insert a false belief during stressful times in their lives.
I recall a time in my early 20s when I was still living with Mom. She was renting a trailer from her cousin and it was absolutely mortifying to me to ever let anyone know I lived in a trailer park. There's lots of jokes about the kind of people who live in trailers and I knew all too well how people looked down on them. I cried when we moved there. My room was about the size of a shoebox, but at least I had a room. My youngest brother had to sleep on the couch.
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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
I remember vividly a discussion I was having with my mother about my crush and it turned into something very unexpected. Out of nowhere, she sounded angry and said something like, "Well, what do you have to offer anyone, anyway? You don't have a job or money or anything. Who is going to want you?"
Ahhhhhh that was a stab to the heart in such a huge way. It wounded me deeply. I came back with, "I can't believe you would say something like that to me!! You think I have no value if I don't have anything materialistic to offer? I can't believe my own mother can't see what I have to offer outside of materialism!!"
*Cue bleeding out images*
To be fair, from my mother's perspective, she had to deal with her grown children who had trouble staying employed and leaving the nest. Life hasn't been easy for her and I believe that some of this stems from clearing ancestral karma and wounds.
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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
My mom grew up on a farm in Northern Missouri. It was like stepping back in time when we visited my grandparents. They had no running water, no telephone, no indoor bathroom. The "toilet" was an old outhouse past the chicken coop. God forbid you have to do your business at night. You had a choice to either use the chamber pot, which usually had someone else's poop and pee in it, or brave the darkness with a flashlight and use the outhouse, hoping to not drop the flashlight in the hole or be attacked by escaped prisoners. Yes, that was actually a fear of mine out in the darkest dark of the farm. I think it was something my sister had told me to scare the shit out of me because she thought it was funny. lol
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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
My mom's family were poor farmers. The house they were in was the house my grandmother was born in. It was a humble life, but a hard life. My grandmother craved more. She wasn't a particularly warm or affectionate person. A void grew in my grandmother that she sought to fill with things. She saved empty containers and all sorts of things others might throw away. She eventually took to shopping at yard sales and buying things. She bought and she bought and it drove my grandfather crazy.
When my grandfather died, my grandmother moved quickly to sell the farm and move into a tiny town nearby where she could finally have running water and not have to worry about getting stuck in the mud on the dirt road. She had a large enough sum of money that she was able to leave off from buying at garage sales and, instead, buy brand new things. My grandmother bought and bought and bought until there was almost no room for her and my schizophrenic uncle to exist within the space. She had morphed into the kind of hoarder people make TV shows about.
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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
My mom had to go up a couple times to help grandma clear out the stuff. Some of the stuff they took to auction and the other stuff they threw in the dumpster. Grandma never handled this well. She always ended up filling up her space with things and things and things again and again. All the things she had never filled the void she had within her.
She eventually died after having gone back to the farm to see it. The house had burned down and the old cellar had been covered over. I believe the story is that she wanted to get a stone, a keepsake, to take with her and ended up falling into a hole where the old cellar had been. She was stuck there for hours until she could free herself. Her injuries caused her a lot of pain and her memory wasn't great. She didn't remember when she had taken Advil and ended up taking so much that she killed her kidneys. She died a very painful death due to kidney failure.
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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
Oh my god, the symbolism of all of that is rich to see it all together like this!
Symbolism: Grandma fell in a hole she couldn't free herself from easily and the pain of it eventually killed her.
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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
So, my mom, even though she hated the hoarding, inherited the karma and the belief that things are necessary and bring comfort. Running water is taken for granted by most people. For a time, she too, had a problem with collecting too many things. I have had to learn to let go of things, too. For me it was the sentimental things that collected which is symbolic of holding onto the past.
She inherited the false belief of needing things to offer people, that our money and things make up our value and she was passing it on to me. And, while I resisted in the moment that way of thinking, I think something inside me internalized it and took it with me. It is one of the reasons I had such low self-esteem and huge amounts of self loathing.
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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
"What do I have to offer anyone, anyway?" I would ask myself.
I felt inferior, insignificant, and worthless...for a long, long time. My inner dialogue was absolutely abusive, so, was it really any wonder that I didn't automatically see it when people around me were also verbally abusive? I spoke even worse to myself. They were an outer manifestation of my inner self.
It would only be when I looked into my vedic astrology chart that I would come to understand that my emancipation is in the enemy house, meaning, it would be next to impossible for me to become fully independent. I signed up for this experience to learn from. It has been difficult but it was something a favorite tarot reader posted in her community page that gave me hope for breaking free from and finally experiencing independence and freedom.
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| Visit Jess Here |
Funny enough, where I am right now is almost exactly where I was on that fateful day I took on a harmful false belief. I am not employed in a paying job, I have no money of my own, no transportation, nothing of monetary value, but internally, I am a completely different person. I am the phoenix who has burned away the old self and become transformed. I understand what I have to offer within myself is a treasure that is immeasurable. No material thing has value above the treasure I have mined within the caves of self. I know this well, especially when I reflect on where I used to be and how far I have come.
I have no thing to offer, no money.
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| Hilda by Duane Bryers |
What I offer has more value:
- I have love from an open heart to offer.
- I have an incredibly bright light to offer.
- I have nurturing, comfort and support to offer.
- I have wisdom, knowledge and experience gained from a difficult journey to become the person I was always meant to be to offer.
- I have emotional maturity, security and confidence to offer.
- I have intelligence, compassion and understanding to offer.
- I have honest communication to offer.
- I have playfulness, silliness and laughter to offer.
- I have inner peace, stability and calm to offer.
- I have sincerity, loyalty and fairness to offer.
- I have a united inner feminine and masculine to offer.
- I have warmth generated from the huge amounts of self-love I now have to offer.
- I have beautiful words stitched together with love to offer.
- I have creativeness, resourcefulness and the love of simple pleasures to offer.
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| Mary Evans - Meditation, (Illustrated London News), 1904. |
I am both the rainbow and the pot of gold at the end. I am both sunshine and darkness.
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