I’m many things beyond being neurodivergent and yet all I’ve ever written about is what it’s like to be neurodivergent in this world. But there’s something unsettling about only seeing ourselves through such narrow lenses and even narrower stories. It keeps how we know ourselves and our world so limited and small.
There are parts of us that keep us within these lenses too. They criticise us over what we’ve been told we lack, why we don’t fit in & what makes us different. These reminders of these societal expectations and criticisms come to us like waves. We know the stories these waves carry so intimately, it as if they define who we are.
Except they don’t.
Because, how would we even begin to recognise what we’re not if we never had an innate knowing of all we are? We are so much more than the sum of what we can’t do or couldn’t ever be.
We are not just the waves.
We’re more like the ocean, vast and wide. Oceans with horizons stretching far beyond what the eye can see and depths that extend beyond the limits of our imaginations. Oceans that hold knowledge we could one day learn about ourselves and so much that we never believed possible for us too. We are oceans that are home to many waves.
But what might we fail to ever know of ourselves if we only lived as waves and never learned of our expansiveness as an ocean?
[ID: Some waves in the expansiveness of the ocean under a cloudy sky. Unsplash photo by Matt Hardy]
We’ve been conditioned to see these parts, these waves, as who we really are. But they are merely slivers of a much grander, limitless being. A being so expansive and boundless, that the simplified, distorted lenses from which we came to understand ourselves could only serve those who chose to define us that way.
We end up swept under by the waves, never believing we are capable of even accessing the power of an ocean, let alone being one.
An ocean that holds the stories of our realness, our worthiness and our truths. An ocean that’s always known we were enough exactly as we are. An ocean that holds our power to change things when we decide to rise beyond the waves and reclaim all that we are. The ocean of our true selves
But it’s hard to believe we could be oceans when we’ve always being told we’re only waves.
How are you learning to see the ocean of who you are beyond the waves that have been used to define you?
(The metaphor of the waves and the ocean came from Tara Brach. The words are from me!)