Lisa A Romano - The Road Back to Me: Healing and Recovering From Co-dependency, Addiction, Enabling, and Low Self Esteem.

Time has passed, leaving me with memories now. The subjective has become objective, and in its wake peace has finally arrived. It was not always so. Born into fear, I became it. Unaware, innocent, fragile and new, my tiny being absorbed the oddities of the place I would learn to call home. I could not have known my truth. I could not have known truth. Those who raised me were blind to their own. How then could I have possessed a self? This self, whom I should have known, I did not. Being selfless, detached from the essence of me, resulted in a life I lived in my head. I had to. My world did not see me. Conditioned to believe that my identity was determined by the value others placed on me, life was a maze of constant frustration. This self lay quiet, frozen and still, denied its breath. Beneath the burdens of my every day, my self remained a stranger amidst the valleys so wide. This disconnection within so vast, so deep, it is a miracle it did not swallow me up.

It has taken decades to wash myself of these ghosts called guilt and shame. My childhood, soiled by a haunting sense of unworthiness, has led me down many straying paths. I have known the soothing voice of suicide, and the aroma of death as a welcoming. Pain can splinter souls and leave carcasses as the only evidence that a soul existed at all. I have been a carcass much of my life, although no one could have known that. I learned very early on to disown myself, and to simultaneously smile on cue.

The journey you are about to take, you do so as my companion. I write as the observer now, observing what has been through the jagged peephole of my self-awareness, contentedly unconcerned with the judgments of those who choose to come along for the ride. It is uneasy to remember, as well as to not be able to recall some of what has been. For these reasons I am thankful for the gentle shoulders of wisdom, as spirit urges me to allow uninhibited truths to be told. You will take this stroll down memory lane on the battered bricks that have laid my lifes path, and discover how, in the most subtle of interactions, psyches surrender to fantasies and to the silent wills of others, for reasons unknown.

In memorys reflection, it feels as if I have been murdered many times, and -- far more horrifying -- as if my suffering never mattered. Psychological invisibility poisoned my thought process, as it invalidated my experiences large and small. Life was a balancing act. I tiptoed across a thin thread that was strung from one side of my mind to the other, as fate went about its merry way beneath me. Often I wondered if I were real at all.

It is not possible to recover from your own souls death without regurgitating the bitterness of what has been. A souls death is the result of invalidation, and the only way to heal is by way of unearthing the ugliness that has been tucked away in the crevices of ones being. A survivor at heart, bizarre coping mechanisms kept me afloat in the cesspools of toxic emotions that flowed through my veins. Ashamed once, I am no more, as the tenderness of self-love blankets me with humble understanding.

I am washed. I am made anew, and it is my deepest desire to help others get clean too. I am not, nor have I ever been worthless. And in spite of all the detours that have been, I have found the road back to me. May you be touched by what you read, for it is this authors most honest recollection. You will experience not only the death of my soul, but the birthing of it as well. Welcome to my heart.