Every Day An Epiphany

Lately, my life has been a series of Epiphanies.  Change does that I think.  Three times in my life, I have gone through "major upheavals": once as a young adult; another as a young mother; and in this last two years, as a divorcee-to-be, as an orphan (of sorts...given that both of my parents are now deceased,) and as an empty-nested mother.  All three of these last transitions lumped together into one major mega-change, years in the making.  "Major upheaval," sounds like something negative, but change is felt in many ways: it can be positive and desired, or negative and unwanted.  More often than not, it is a combination of both positive and negative, all at the same time.  For example, each of my children's births was a wonderful and amazing experience, yet each profoundly altered the flow of my life in ways that were at the same time very difficult to manage.

With hindsight, I am able to see that each major life-changing event I have experienced has had four distinct phases.  First was the acute phase.  At the worst times, my feelings were tender and raw and I wept every day, seemingly at the drop of a hat.  I felt intense sorrow, and it wasn't unusual for me to think that my sadness would never end.  This phase lasted almost two years during the hardest change of my life...and it was a monumentally difficult path to endure.  I suffered greatly from depression, a symptom of my medical disease, which went undiagnosed, then undertreated for at least three years.  When we suffer like this, the intensity of our reaction affects us greatly, spilling over from us to those we are close to, affecting every relationship we have, aggravating and adding to the core issues we face.  I felt overwhelmingly out of control, of my emotions, my daily activities, of my whole life; that was the hardest part of all.  Aggravating this feeling were the well-meaning efforts of friends, encouraging me to "think positively," to "chin up," to "suck it up," to simply "believe."  But for those who have truly experienced this deep, engulfing misery, you know that it is almost impossible to think yourself out of the muck...it just takes time to heal, to move from this stage to the next. 

When I started feeling brief periods of respite from sadness, it was a signal that I was moving into the second phase.  I wasn't falling apart every day, although sadness would often "move in," occasionally followed by a sense of hopelessness, and I still found it hard to imagine that I could be truly happy again.  I was on a roller coaster ride: up and down, up and down, full speed around a dangerous curve.  My thinking self was too busy trying to find peace amongst the chaos to digest what was happening to me, to understand how the event that precipitated my despair was going to affect me in the long term.  At least I wasn't crying every day, and thank God, I wasn't feeling that intense sense of hopelessness without relief that eats away your spirit.  There was some reprieve, although often very small, from the intensity of the sadness I felt during the earliest stage of change.

At last, in the third phase, I would find the tipping point, that magical moment when I moved from predominant unhappiness to dominant happiness.  For me, it has happened two different ways.  The first two times I went through monumental "Life Changes," as a young adult, and then as a young mother, I seemed to hit this third stage literally over night.  One day, I suddenly realized that I was more happy than unhappy, more relaxed than stressed, more joyful than sad.  It was an incredible feeling to move past the despair that had attached itself to the event, the depression that I didn't even see clearly enough as "depression," to call depression.  Finally, I could breathe, as if a boulder had been lifted off my chest, a boulder I hadn't even realized was there.

Then finally came the fourth and final step: integration.  Epiphany time.  Insight.  That is where I am now, although I'm still a little in the third stage too.  I remember a cleaner transition during the last two Life Changes; this time, insight seems to come in fits and spurts.  Of course, the change isn't fully complete: the divorce isn't final, the baby of the family doesn't move out until the end of August, and the pain of losing my mother is still raw.  This triad of changes is much bigger than anything I've faced before.  And of course, I realize that change is a dynamic process, and it is never really "over."  As I integrate the things I have learned in the last three years into my Self, that whole package of who I am, I still have every-once-in-a-while a down day.  Still a little part of me left emotionally in phase three, but intellectually moving to phase four.

And with this last "major upheaval" I have fully started to grasp that, even though I am able to distinguish a sort of beginning and end to each of these monumental events, and an awareness of associated personal growth as a result, my life is constantly changing.  Sometimes in big, huge ways, as I have described as "major upheavals."  And sometimes in very small, but important ways.  Imagine the small change in attitude toward homeless people you might discover in yourself, after seeing a homeless mother on the street, with a three year old holding her hand, and a baby in a sling across her chest.  Or imagine the personal strength you might experience after months of financial tribulation, when you finally pay off a long-held credit card debt.  These are smaller, yet very important changes and they happen all the time in our lives.  Unfortunately, we seldom pay much attention to them, and we lose the power of consciously integrating the experience into our psyche, we give up the gain we might have made if we would have been aware and intentional in our emotional processing of the events we experience every day.

Change is constant.  Sometimes big, gargantuan.  Sometimes teeny, barely registering in our conscious awareness.  A back and forth: a small event-a simple lesson; a major upheaval-a life-altering lesson.  One with the other, over and over again, as we go through life.  When we pause to integrate what we experience, whether a big Life Lesson, or a simple, random event, we grow, we gain wisdom.  Learning from each day, appreciating something amazing from the small things of life, something amazing in the overwhelming things in life.  But always a new awareness, if we let ourselves be open.