FINDING FRANCESCA : TWENTIES-Awakening With Therapy

FINDING FRANCESCA : TWENTIES-Awakening With Therapy: “Truth is not far away. It is not hidden.  It is planted deep in the center of your heart. If you haven’t uncovered it yet, dig d...

TWENTIES-Awakening With Therapy

“Truth is not far away. It is not hidden. 

It is planted deep in the center of your heart.

If you haven’t uncovered it yet, dig deeper.” 

     By the time I was twenty-nine, I knew that something was off with my life and I was doing nothing about it. Until one day, my bestie, Tanja, pointed to a book at The Halcyon Store and said, “You need to get that book!” It was called, Parents Who Love Too Much. Even though it was a parent book, I purchased it immediately and read it from cover to cover. The examples given in the book resonated with me. I WAS THAT KID! I showed it to my parents, “thinking” that they would catch on and see that the way they were parenting me wasn’t working. Can’t blame a girl for “trying.” My father ignored it, and my mom read it without much input. Clearly, it was up to me.  

     At the age of twenty-nine, I decided that I needed therapy. I created the illusion of safety because I told myself that my parents “loved me too much.” By going to therapy, I wasn’t disrespecting my parents, I just simply wanted to understand and change myself. I was still being their “good little girl.” 

     The therapist’s mouth dropped with my stories. Up to this point, I hadn’t received much validation for my plight. My friends (and my artist) were too busy seeing the THINGS that were given to me, continually telling me how lucky I was. In the first session, there was only one ominous statement that I can recall. He said, “It is like you have had a gun to your head your entire life.” As awful as that sounded, I knew it was true. I had lived a life of...”you do this...or else.” I never wanted to experience the “what else” part, so I did as told. As much as I loved being validated, I created an anger that I didn’t recognize. I was waking up to what I knew all along but had denied, a painful place to be in the awakening process. To deeply realize that control and obsession is not love and that now I am responsible for my life was as scary as hell. I knew that my parents weren’t there for MY best interest, but I had no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to get out from the dysfunction. I had leaned on them for my entire twenty-nine years, and now I had thrown myself in the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. I felt disabled to be on my own, and yet I knew “deep in the center of my heart” I could do it. Always a choice. 

      In the following three years and beyond, I would make life-altering changes that would reveal the enormity of my father’s fear, destroying forever what we “thought” we had.  

     

TWENTIES-Awakening To Vanity

“A miracle is a shift in perception from fear to love.”

-Marianne Williamson

     By the time I turned thirty, most of my peers that were the same age were married and having babies. Dancing on bar tops and waiting for the next party at my house was no longer satisfying. I felt stuck and ready for a change. Little did I know that this would be the year that would change the course of my life forever. The year that my eye (resulting from inability to see fully from the removal of the tumor) started to drift ever-so-slightly to the left. 

     I first started noticing that my eye looked weird in photos. The camera’s flash would capture the scar tissue which lead to some freaky white glow versus a red eye every time a picture was taken. Up to this point, my eye looked almost perfect. No one could tell that anything was wrong with it, making it easier for me to forget about the cancer. I was beyond devastated and began asking my friends if my eye looked different because I couldn’t understand why my photos were changing. Some of them did notice that it was slightly veering to the left. My boyfriend, the artist, didn’t seem to mind, but I knew that we weren’t going to last. I feared that I would end up ALONE. Was anyone ever going to call me beautiful again? Do I look like a monster? I had been the girl that had been treated like a princess because of my looks. Back then, I would have never admitted that out loud, and it was true. The world treats you differently when you are good-looking, and I was amongst a herd of (I would say) very attractive people. First to get in lines. First to be paid for. First to be invited. First to be liked. First. My appearance was my worth and now my albatross. 

     My doctor said that he could fix it, and so I went into the surgery room expecting a miracle. Well, I did get my miracle, but I was yet to learn that often miracles come from situations that we DON’T want. The surgeons made it worse! 

     So now my eye was (more than) slightly off, and I was devastated. People would mistakenly believe that I was looking at the person behind them. I would end up squinting, looking down, or even wearing sunglasses when the sun had already set to avoid seeing the confusion on their faces. I can’t express how hard it was to go through. Much harder than the cancer itself. I had yet to learn that it was needed for my spiritual growth, and that it was actually here to awaken me from the shackles of vanity. We are taught with words that beauty is only skin deep, and yet, our societal models reflect anything but. I have experienced both worlds now. A life of living in the superficial world while botoxing every new wrinkle to living in a world with less focus on the outer self and more focus on the spirit of who we really are.