(Not) The End of My Story
(Not) The End of My Story
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement address
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been determined to change my life.
I wanted this change for many reasons (the heart of this story), but even if I didn’t, nothing would have stopped me from doing it.
I’ve worked toward one consistent goal during my 39 years on this planet: To turn my life story around.
I didn’t know exactly how I would do it, but I knew one thing: My story would notend in the direction it was headed back when I started.
Over the years, I searched constantly, endlessly for something, anything, the magic bullet that would actually help me change my life story to one I felt good about.
I made a few positive hits during my search, but encountered mostly brick walls.
Finally, in April 2012, I discovered energy healing. Since then, I’ve become a reikimaster, attended countless energy healing workshops, adopted various other energy healing modalities, built a massive crystal healing collection, and spent endless hours researching how energy affects every aspect of your life.
When I realized shifting my energy was the key to changing my life, I didn’t hesitate to get started after my first reiki session. I was ready to release the emotions, beliefs, and patterns that had bottled up to maximum pressure in my mind and body by the time 2012 came along.
I’ve spent the past 5 ½ years continuously working on changing my energy so I could someday open up about my life journey and explain why changing my story was so important.
This is the story I’m finally ready to tell today.
It’s also the story that, I’m happy to say, already has a much better ending than I ever could have dreamed.
I’ll tell you how I got there. But first, there’s a younger Laura who’s wanted to tell her story for years, and today, I give her the voice to do so. This post would nothing but incomplete without first sharing that story, because it’s my final step in letting go and moving on to next chapter of my life.
So, here it is.
My childhood and teenage years were incredibly painful for two primary reasons: First, my mother and I had a difficult relationship that, more often than not, left me feeling unaccepted and unloved as a child. To add insult to injury, I spent most of grade school and early high school being constantly bullied by classmates, which further eroded any chance at a healthy self-esteem growing up.
As a result, I felt like an utter failure as a person for my most of life.
The previous four sentences contain some of the most difficult statements I’ve ever written. Because, despite all the work I’ve done, all the wonderfully caring people in my current life who’ve supported me along the way, I admittedly still found it quite jolting to even capture, let alone read, the above words in black and white.
There. It’s out, and I already feel even better now that I’ve said it. So let’s keep going, just as I did all those years ago.
My story begins and ends with Mom. I’ll preface our story with the following: Today, I know exactly how much my mother has always loved me. She knows how much I’ve always loved her. I share this story not out of anger or disrespect for her, but to illustrate how critical a role it played in both my formative years and in my transformation during the past 5 ½ years.
Healing my relationship with her has been the key to healing my entire life.
Back to Mom. The stage for our relationship was set long before I was ever born. She, an only child, experienced a similarly difficult relationship with my grandmother through constant criticism and rejection. I don’t know much about my great-grandmother, but I do know my grandmother had a similar relationship with her.
I don’t know how far back this pattern goes, but as an adult, it’s easy to look back now and see my relationship with Mom as her firstborn child as simply the next in line of a longstanding generational pattern. As a child? Not so easy to understand.
Mom and I had trouble relating to each other longer than I can even remember. I was an energetic, extroverted, outspoken, curious child who loved to explore, ask questions, and meet new people.
“You never let me hold you for very long when you were a baby,” she once told me. “You were always trying to go somewhere.”
“Trying to go somewhere” is absolutely one of many key aspects of my personality (I think the beginning of this post sums that up adequately), so I wasn’t surprised to hear that.
Mom, however, was an introvert who preferred more calm, quiet time than my personality allowed. She was likely overwhelmed both with first-time motherhood and her best attempts to keep up with my constant activity. Neither personality type is superior to the other, but these differences established the first of many divides as I grew older.
We managed well enough during the first few years of my life. Our differences were balanced out by Dad, a fellow extrovert who also thrived on new experiences and people. We got along well, but I’ll limit mention of him to this paragraph simply because this story and its ending focus primarily on Mom.
I can’t say for sure how Mom and I would evolved if I’d remained an only child like her, but I believe we still would have experienced difficulties.
However, when my sister was born, she and Mom immediately became fast friends, which inadvertently accelerated the decline in my relationship with Mom. Katie was the quiet, calm baby Mom had wanted five years earlier. Their personalities naturally clicked. I instantly felt left out.
Looking back, it makes sense. They gravitated to each other because they were similar. I hold no ill will today about this, but it was difficult to digest as a child. Today, I’m proud of how hard my sister and I have worked together to overcome this early divide.
Even as a 5-year-old, the feeling of Mom pulling away from me emotionally, never to return in quite the same way, was quite palpable. I instantly felt alone and didn’t hide my unhappiness. If she’d been able to better show me how much she equally loved me, too, I believe we could have prevented the worst of our relationship from manifesting.
Instead, she began regularly criticizing and putting me down. I suspect she felt guilty enough about favoring my sister over me that focusing on my faults made it easier to justify distancing herself.
By the time I was 7, the gulf between us had widened significantly. We argued constantly. I did my best to rebel against the ugly words she spoke to me daily. She considered me the “difficult child” responsible for any family problems and regularly reminded me how I didn’t fit in.
Up until that point, school and friends hadn’t been a problem. I’d recently started second grade with no issues, but that quickly changed in the span of…one day. On a whim, I’d picked a short hairstyle during a routine hair appointment. The next day, I was horrified when my classmates instantly pointed and laughed at me. The short hair revealed my ears, which stuck out and made them look larger than they actually were – something I hadn’t even been aware of until I walked into school that day.
I fended off constant “Dumbo” jokes long after my hair grew back – for the next seven years, to be precise. From that day on, I was branded an easy target at school. As my relationship with Mom continued to deteriorate, my self-esteem worsened, leaving me an obvious first choice when my classmates needed someone to insult.
As the verbal attacks from Mom and classmates increased, my happy, outgoing personality quickly faded. I became quiet and withdrawn. I cried regularly. Even in photos, the change in my demeanor from 5 to 7 years old is markedly apparent.
As I did with Mom, I’ll preface the grade school portion of my story with a similar disclaimer: Not all my classmates treated me poorly. A few were actually my friends. Some left me alone, and while we might not have been friends, they didn’t participate in the bullying, either. Some I’m still in contact with today. I’m grateful to everyone who fell into one of the above groups. It didn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated as I wrote this post.
We were a classroom of 35 students at a small private Catholic school in the tiny Chicago suburb of Wadsworth, IL. Most of us spent kindergarten through eighth grade together. Stuck in the same room all day, every day, I had little opportunity to shield myself from the worst of my classmates. They went out of their way to be mean to me on a regular basis, even warning new classmates at the beginning of a school year not to be friends with me.
Every day, I tolerated constant scrutiny of my flaws. It didn’t matter if those flaws were real, perceived or fabricated; someone always found one.
The best advice I got was to “turn the other cheek.” I understand the principle: Rise above it and don’t sink to their level. But that didn’t teach me how to defend myself. All I could do was freeze helplessly, powerlessly, as I absorbed their taunting words. I’d already learned my lesson at 5 that expressing my unhappiness would only bring me further excommunication.
Being smart didn’t help.
I read at school whenever I could to escape from the class which, of course, earned me zero cool points. Some of the worst days of my life were spent with a book on the cold school front steps, alone, so I could block out the fact that I wasn’t welcome on the playground.
After almost winning the all-school spelling bee in fifth grade (nearly beating out eighth graders about to begin high school), my abilities were, unsurprisingly, added to the ever-growing list of items I was regularly mocked for. But that didn’t stop me from turning around and winning that same spelling bee in seventh and eighth grade – or taking second place in the 1992 Lake County, IL spelling bee shortly before graduation.
I also started a class newsletter in fifth grade. I had fun with it – until a classmate tore up his copy in front of everyone and said to me, “This is what I think of your newsletter.”
I never wrote another class newsletter after that. In fact, I actively avoided reading anything I wrote in front of the class from then on unless it was required.
One day, in seventh grade, we were asked to read our creative writing assignments out loud to the class. In undoubtedly my most assertive move of junior high, I told the teacher flat out that I wouldn’t read mine and walked out of the classroom. I was not in the mood for the usual eye rolls and insults. Shockingly, she let me leave and asked another classmate to reach the story in my absence.
I’m still incredibly proud of this moment because it was the only time in grade school I stood up for myself without any help. Indeed, it was one of the few times anyone advocated for me there, period.
Graduation finally came around, and while I was hopeful about beginning a new chapter of my life, I was also wary. Approximately half of my grade school class was also attending the same private Catholic high school in Mundelein, IL; many of them were also the meanest of my classmates.
It didn’t take long. Shortly after freshman year began, a girl from grade school launched a particularly nasty ongoing attack that left me reeling every day. Luckily for me, she left our school permanently later that year, but the damage to me was already done.
Things weren’t much better with Mom by then. The stress of never knowing when or where to expect the next traumatic verbal attack at home or school took its toll on me. After that incident, I developed the first signs of an anxiety disorder at 14. My mind could no longer cope with anticipating and sustaining the constant emotional pain; my body was in a constant fight-or-flight state.
I withdrew even further. Our high school was just big enough that, with a little effort, I could stay under the radar and out of the line of sight. Out of self-preservation, I did exactly that, and thankfully managed to avoid much additional bullying for the remaining 3 ½ years of high school.
It was emotionally safe, but utterly isolating. It certainly didn’t help my anxiety. Still, it was better than being bullied, and unequivocally more pleasant than my arguments with Mom before or after school every day.
Life finally brightened for me when I took my first summer job before junior year. I quickly, easily made several new friends. The thing was, none of them knew me. They didn’t go to school with me, nobody was there to warn them off from befriending me, so…they saw who I really was, liked me, and became my friends.
I emerged from my shell a bit and even felt safe making a few more friends at school. By the end of senior year, one girl from our class noted that I was actually an extrovert – not at all the introvert that my withdrawn behavior had initially suggested.
That proved correct when I started college. I was elated to learn that not one person from my graduating class would be attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison alongside me. This was officially my chance to leave my old life behind and start completely fresh.
My first weekend was more fun than all of my previous years of school combined. I instantly made friends and spent the next four years making up for all the lost fun I’d never had.
My anxiety, however, continued to intensify. Although I did my best to stay busy, enjoy life, and distract myself from it, I couldn’t escape it.
In early 1997 during my freshman year, I went to a doctor and received an official anxiety disorder diagnosis. Finally, an answer. I was relieved to learn that anxiety is (unfortunately) very common in modern society. I immediately started medication that significantly reduced my anxiety. More importantly, it allowed me to enjoy the new life I was creating in Madison. I enjoyed an amazing four years there.
However, while medication helped me control the worst of my anxiety symptoms, it didn’t treat the root cause. It certainly didn’t heal the repeated emotional trauma I’d faced from constant verbal abuse throughout my lifetime.
While I was finally able to attract good into my life (something absent from most areas of my childhood), I was still simultaneously attracting people and situations that reinforced the low opinion of myself I believed true.
By early 2012, neither my body nor my mind could stand it any longer. My mind and body were going haywire from constant stress.
I finally discovered reiki in my quest for more effective stress reduction. I tried my first reiki session and immediately sensed the heavy anxiety slightly ease up. Tension drained away, and even my spinning thoughts felt like they were being pulled out of my head.
I suddenly knew that reiki and energy healing were exactly what I’d been searching for all along.
I’ve spent the past 5 ½ years gradually chipping away at the emotional, mental and physical blocks that led me into such utter distress. During that time, my life has shifted dramatically.
In summer 2012, I attended an energy healing weekend workshop focused entirely on heart chakra-based healing. Simply put, the energy helps you access and release stuck emotions so you can shift your energy. Anyone, even non-reiki/energy practitioners, can experience dramatic results because it’s not focused on technique, but on feeling and expressing authentic emotions.
The most powerful exercise from that weekend involved revisiting my early childhood issues with Mom and finally giving a voice to what I could never say back then. She wasn’t present with me during the workshop, obviously, but I spoke to her as if she was.
I told her how awful a lifetime of criticism and emotional distance from her felt. I told her how much it hurt at 5, how much it still hurt at 33. I told her how much I’d needed a mom in my corner throughout life.
Then I gave her a chance to respond to me energetically, simply by using my intuition to listen to what she had to say. She admitted that she hadn’t known how else to be a mother to me. She also told me how much she truly loved me.
We spoke back and forth like this until, eventually, we forgave each other for our differences.
The immediate energy shift was immense. I cried as the energy swept through me, shifting away years of pain and tension. To this day, it is one of the most powerful energy shifts I’ve experienced since I began this journey.
My relationship with Mom shifted, too, rapidly and dramatically, shortly afterward. During a routine weekend visit home to the suburbs, my sister noticed that Mom, then 63, was displaying possible early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
I visited Mom the following weekend to investigate. I quickly confirmed my sister’s suspicions for myself and gently asked her to talk to me about it.
She admitted that she was, indeed, regularly forgetting things. She was having trouble managing her finances and was afraid to drive to unfamiliar places because she couldn’t always remember where she was going or why.
She could still live alone and drive at the time, but it wouldn’t be long before Mom would need specialized care. Until then, my sister and I, both Chicago residents, would need to make frequent phone contact with her to check in and ensure her safety.
Our defenses both down, Mom and I talked, cried, hugged – and said “I love you” to each other more sincerely than any previous time in my life I can recall. It was eerily similar to our energetic conversation from my workshop.
She’s never criticized or insulted me once since that day.
Instead, she freely expressed love and praise for me as her genuinely sweet nature took over. Hearing the excitement in her voice when I called, seeing her face light up when I walked into a room, her insistence on walking me downstairs on my way out because she wanted to enjoy a few extra minutes with me… None of that ever got old.
After four years in assisted living and fairly rapid progression of the Alzheimer’s, Mom stopped recognizing us most of the time this summer. Shockingly, I was the very last person she remembered.
I walked into her room one day, fully prepared with the knowledge that she probably wasn’t going to recognize me, the daughter who’d made her a mother. I’d already accepted that she had probably said her last coherent goodbye to me last time we’d seen each other and spent the previous day grieving.
“Laura!”
She jumped up as I walked in and immediately hugged me. Shocked, I somehow managed not to drop the box of chocolates I’d brought her.
“Thank you!” I whispered mentally to the universe.
We spent a wonderful afternoon together. I ate dinner with her, gave her some reiki, and made the most of our time together that day.
It was Mother’s Day. The best Mother’s Day we ever spent together.
Nothing is a coincidence when you do energy work. Nothing.
I made that day our official goodbye. She hasn’t shown that flicker of recognition or said my name since then, and I haven’t asked her if she remembers me, because it’s OK if she doesn’t. She remembered me on the day it mattered most to me, when I least expected it, and that’s what I’ll remember forever.
Back to energy healing and the rest of my life. There’s one more chapter to cover.
Since I began this path in 2012, my life has reflected equally rapid, consistent, positive growth in all areas as I heal my childhood issues. Although my life was working much better, I still had one area crying out desperately for my attention.
I still needed to learn how to love myself.
This summer, I paused my regular life to spend 7 days in Virginia for an extended version of the same workshop I attended in summer 2012. Though I’d attended others in Chicago since then, they were shorter, and I still went home to my daily life every night.
This workshop offered me a full week away and included evening sessions. I could completely immerse myself in the energy healing process without distraction.
I set exactly one intention that week: Manifest self-love and confidence that would be reflected in all areas of my life.
As predicted, my energy shifted dramatically throughout the week. I let go of what I could and did my best to further open up my heart to life.
That exercise I did with Mom in the 2012 workshop? I did it again, at a deeper level, and then I did it a third time with my grade school classmates. I left no stone unturned that week.
Halfway throughout the week, I realized happiness is a choice: I could continue to find reasons to stay unhappy, or I could decide that I loved myself enough to be happy. I chose the latter.
I went home and watched my life continue to evolve rapidly with several consistent themes: I stopped settling for what wasn’t working for me and started focusing on the life I wanted to create instead. I regularly feel respected, valued, welcomed and empowered in my daily life.
Yes, I feel confident more often than not now. And yes, I do finally love myself.
I still experience anxiety. I still have insecurities and flaws. I still have more to heal. Don’t we all?
The whole point of self-love, I learned, is accepting your flaws, navigating your insecurities, and loving yourself anyway even if things aren’t perfect.
No one is perfect, yet I’ll admit that no one was a harsher critic on me than my inner voice at its worst.
Before, I relentlessly sought self-perfection, believing it would save me from others’ criticism. Ironically, it did the exact opposite: The harsher my inner voice, the harsher the outer world I attracted into my life.
As one of my best friends told me almost exactly 20 years to the date ago: “Laura Zegar needs to be comfortable with herself before anyone else can be.”
She was right.
Today, I do my best to leave people better than I found them, even if our paths cross for a mere second and my only impact is a smile or kind word.
I don’t always hit the mark; I’m still learning and I make mistakes just like everyone else. But when I operate from a space of self-love, it’s easier to radiate it out to others. The more I generate, the more I attract.
There’s one more thing I have to do before I wrap up this post.
Giving myself the voice I never had as a child to offer forgiveness has been the most important part of my healing process. I’ve told you about it twice already, and now I’m going to do it an abbreviated version of it here, one more time.
Yes, I believe it’s the final step in this stage of my healing process, but everyone can learn from this. No, you don’t have to be an energy healer to do this. Anyone can do it.
To my fellow grade school classmates:
Believe it or not, I’m grateful for the time we spent together.
First, I appreciate everyone who either befriended me, went out of their way to be nice to me, or at a minimum, didn’t participate in attacking me. Again, it did not go unnoticed when I wrote this post. Your kindness still made a difference, even if we barely talked then or not at all today. You still managed to sprinkle some sunshine on an otherwise dark period of my life. Thank you.
I also appreciate the lessons I learned from everyone who mistreated me. I’ve already outlined in this post how much it hurt, so I won’t repeat myself. Though painful, those experiences increased my empathy for others who struggle in life. I don’t know that I would have sought out energy healing without this trauma to heal, but now that I have, I can use it to help others heal their traumas. That’s a beautiful gift.
Remember how I said no one is perfect? I understand. Grade school, especially junior high, is an awkward time at best for most kids. Everyone wants to fit in. It’s easy to get caught up in group-think and behave in ways you might not act if you were alone. It’s probably not a stretch to imagine that some or all of you also brought your own parental struggles with you to school every day, even if they were nothing like mine. I just finished illustrating how deeply such struggles can impact a person’s life. If that was you, I empathize.
Let’s leave everything in the past where it belongs and clean the slate. I forgive you all. To the girl who did apologize to me several years ago, I’m sorry I couldn’t accept it then because I was still too angry. I accept it now.
As Mark Twain so eloquently stated, “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
Thank you for this experience.
Laura
Dear Mom:
You’ll never be able to read this or have this conversation with me during the rest of your life on earth, but I know from experience you’ll hear this.
We’ve always been psychically connected. You correctly predicted details about both of your daughters via dream before we were even born. When you still used the phone, you somehow always managed to call me during or just before/after an energy healing session, without me telling you ahead of time. And you’ve sensed every energetic shift I’ve made over the years. It’s uncanny.
I’ll always cherish the moments we spent together over the past 5 years. They were some of the most beautiful moments of my life and, I hope, yours. I’m so grateful we finally connected as mother and daughter before it was too late.
There’s not much left to say since we’ve covered so much energetic ground together, you and I, but I’ll give it my best shot.
Thank you for making sure Katie and I each had a sister so we wouldn’t have to grow up alone like you did. You’ve brought us closer together than I ever thought possible. She has truly become the best friend I always wanted in a sister. I love how much we make you laugh every time we visit you together because we’re, well, us. It makes me happy to see you happy.
If you still doubt how much Grandma loved you, don’t. She loved you as much as I do, and I’ve already forgiven both of you (and our entire line of maternal ancestors), so there’s nothing left for either of you to feel guilty about.
If I ever have children, they will know every single day how much I love them, how proud of them I am.
Thank you for giving me an experience in this lifetime that ultimately taught me how to love so I can pass it on.
I don’t know how much time we have left together on this earth, but we’ll be together in my heart eternally.
I love you.
Laura
And there you have it. (Not) the end to my original life story. And the beginning of an entirely new one.
I’d love to hear from you if you’ve gone through a similar experience (or an entirely different one), are interested in energy healing, or just want to share your thoughts with me.
Email me at lkzegar@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter at @laurakzegar