The Courage to Move
I was about 20 the first time I visited my Godmother’s place alone. She had always been a fixture in our lives, popping up when I least expected, but I had never had the opportunity to hang with her solo.
It had been a handful of months since my Mom died (Grief is a raging beast.), I was exploring a new relationship with an old friend (I later learned we were better as friends.), and was thinking about moving close to 700 miles away from everything familiar (I wasn’t running, I needed a change of pace. OK. Maybe a LITTLE running.) and was in the 2-week-wait period after having an HIV test (Talk about the longest 2 weeks of my young life.).
While I had never personally leaned on my Godmother for a heart-to-heart, I knew my mom had. And if my mom trusted her, I knew I could too.
She greeted me with her million-dollar smile and the tight hug I had grown up loving. We quickly joked about how tall I am and how short she is, giggling as though we hadn’t exchanged height jokes countless times over the years.
She showed me around. Her place was the kind of cozy and warm that would put the most insecure stranger at ease. Immediately I felt like I had found refuge, shelter from life’s current storm.
We sat and talked about everything that came to my mind and hers. Minutes turned into hours. That afternoon I laughed, I cried and I laughed some more.
“Sometimes we have to look back in order to move forward.”
That is what I always tell my clients. But what does that mean?
As I think about the young lady who walked through my Godmother’s door that afternoon, now more than two decades and countless (similar) chats later, I admire her courage.
No. She didn’t feel courageous at the time. In fact, if you asked her, she was the antithesis of courage. She was scared. The kind of scared that brings you to your knees in tears as you sit alone in your apartment. The kind of scared that makes you wonder why you keep trying. The kind of scared that feeds loneliness and desperation.
The girl who walked through my Godmother’s door that afternoon did not see then what I see (and I know my Godmother saw) now…
She was a young woman committed to finding her way through the most painful, life-altering loss of her life. And in spite of such a great loss, she was still excited to explore this thing called “love”…in a state that was unfamiliar.
She was a young woman inclined to face an uncertain future in order to do the right thing now. She was not fooled by the idea of failure, it was a word that did not exist in her vocabulary.
When we take the time to look back, we can choose to focus on the bumps and bruises that happened along the way OR we can choose to celebrate the successes of a soul that was willing, open and excited in spite of the bumps and bruises.
As I look back, I have no choice but to be moved by the courage that lived in me before I knew it existed. I am moved by the ability to see the bumps and successes, free from the emotion of being caught in the moment.
Looking back reminds us of our strength and pushes us to keep moving forward, one step closer to our goals.
I am not only eternally grateful that my Godmother held space for me that day, but for the fact that I have learned to hold space for that young girl now, to see her for the courageous, amazing young woman she was then and the courageous, amazing (still) young woman she is now.
Have you been feeling less than courageous? Maybe you are feeling unsure of where you are going and how you will get there? Do you need support (re)connecting to the part of you who knows what she wants from life and is unafraid of taking the steps to get there? Let’s talk about it!
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