I woke with a start. In the dream, I was crying. Startled awake by the force of it, I discovered real tears trickling down my cheeks. I told my husband about it later, and he asked why the dream made me cry. I dreamt I failed at something important in my everyday, real life, and various people flitted through the story reminding me of my failure, telling me, “You’ll never be good enough.”
I cried because even in my sleep, my mind repeats the narrative of “not enough”. Not enough in my parenting, my relationships, my faith, my work. Not enough, never enough. These are not the words I speak over myself by the light of day because I know they aren’t true. But, my mind plays tricks on me in the dark. It pulls from the deepest places of insecurity, the places I cover up under routines and busy-ness and lists. It goes down to the pit where the ugly words grow, and it brings them up to the surface. At the forefront of my mind, they try to absorb all the light.
As we end our 31 days of Speaking Life, I want to encourage you to examine your own internal narrative. Think about the words you tell yourself in the dark. Do they speak life to your own soul or do they crush it? Do they give light or absorb it? What ugly things bubble to the surface when you’re not looking?
Before you can speak life to others, you need to speak it to yourself. Grab the oxygen mask of good, kind, true words, and place it over your soul first. Let’s tell the truth about ourselves. Let’s change our personal narrative to one of compassion for our broken places and celebration for the beautiful work of art they help us become. May your dreams speak life to you, friends.
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Thank you so much for joining me this month. It’s been quite a journey, yes? I’ll be back in a few days with the usual smattering of random chatter. We have much to discuss, namely the fact that my daughter told me I need to cut my hair because I don’t want to be “That” mom. Oh dear.
This is the last post in a series called 31 Days of Speaking Life. Want to know more about the 31 Days writing challenge? Hop on over here. Want to receive these posts via email straight into your inbox? Sign up below.
