The Pits We Crawl Out Of

I used to ask myself what my life would have been like had I not been a teenage mom.

Also, isn't it weird that it only dawned on me recently that I am, in fact, a teenage mom?

I was seventeen when I had my son. I could have been on one of those reality TV shows.

I’ve had a lot of experiences that I can only properly name now. I never thought of myself as a teenage mom even though I was one. Just as I never thought of myself as someone coming from an unusual family background or someone with financial difficulties.

When these things were happening, they seemed so normal. It's only in retrospect that the extraordinariness of the situations become clear.

Anyway, if you asked me what shaped me most, I'd not name my teenage pregnancy or my dysfunctional patchwork family. I would not tell you about my forever away father or the time I didn't know how to pay for the train tickets back to boarding school because my mom had forgotten to send the money along with my sister who I was meeting for a weekend in Berlin.

Instead, I'd tell you about how I've been in music school since fifth grade. I'd tell you about my choir teacher whose vocal coaching still influences my singing today. I would tell you about the German teacher I had from fifth to eighth grade without whom I would not be able to write a straight sentence.

I would tell you about my mother who taught me how to write poetry because she wanted to entertain me one day when I was sick. Perhaps, I'd tell you about going fishing with my grandfather.

I’d tell you about my exchange year in Chile. The parts about being in a theatre group and discovering new music. I would not tell you about the evangelical cult I was part of or the teen pregnancy situation that I acquired abroad.

I’d certainly talk very little about the ten years that followed.

I would tell you about the good and extraordinary things that happened to me and I would insist that those have shaped me more than anything else.

Of course, telling you all the positives and skipping over the really shitty bits would barely give you half of the picture.

It's only with the distance of years and years that I can look at myself and see how all the pits I crawled out of shaped me much more than the heights I flew to. I can see how the wounds I have healed made me more into who I am today than the blessings I got along the way.

It almost seems like the wisdom I have only ever came by way of the pit of despair.

Even when the wisdom is connected to something good, like the patience I learned when going fishing with my gramps, I only noticed it when I went looking for how to alleviate my stress when juggling life, raising a son, leading a guild in an online game, and working a full-time job stressed me out so much I didn’t know what to do about it.

Sititng on my sofa and breathing deeply, trying to focus and let the clattering jumble in my mind fall away.

That's when I noticed that I'd been meditating since way before I knew it was a thing.

Out on the lake. Waiting for the fish.