Welcome to the Ugly Beautiful. If you are reading this you are probably wondering what that title is all about. What is the ugly beautiful?
For me, it is the current and future journey of life. Life is messy. Sometimes it is really messy. In the midst of our lives we all experience some messy times. Divorce, trauma, tragedy, loss, abuse, addiction, shame, guilt, rejection, depression, isolation, and the list goes on and on. The question is not if these things will find us, but when they will find us.
Spoiler Alert…life is coming for you. Most likely when you least expect it, it will find you. It has found me and I have learned that wishing and hoping for life to be perfect without the ugliness is both a lie and very foolish. None of us are exempt from the complexities of life, relationship, and hardship. Life happens…period.
The question then becomes how are we going to deal with it when it comes? There are two options. You can take the ugly and compound it into something worse through different coping mechanisms like avoidance, busyness, or suppressing your feelings and pain to the point where you no longer feel, all of which make the ugly even uglier and usually end up in addiction, loneliness, or depression, which make for quite a miserable experience and quite frankly a miserable existence. Or, you can try something different. You can face life pain and suffering head on. Instead of avoidance you can choose to dive right into the middle of the pain, sit in the suffering, and take the hard yet rewarding road of self discovery.
Make no mistake, it is HARD work. Self discovery and dealing with the hands we’ve been dealt is really hard work. It is the narrow road, the road less traveled. It is much easier to avoid our pain and suffering than it is to face it head on and choose to not let your circumstances control you any longer.
However, by choosing this road and by doing the work a mysterious thing begins to occur. The ugly becomes beautiful. Life can be both simultaneously. By choosing the hard work of facing life’s difficulties head on we discover that joy can be experienced in the midst of great sorrow. That healing can come the way of suffering. That peace can be known in the midst of chaos. If we will allow it, our pain can become more than what defines us, it can become our greatest teacher leading to a life full of hope.
How do I know this to be true? Because I am experiencing this to be true in my own life. I have traveled life’s darkest roads and lived to tell about it. I have known the misery of living and isolated life, dreading each morning, fighting through each minute, each hour, of each day. I have experienced a literal hell on earth. I have tried all the ways of dealing with these issues that I mentioned above. Nothing worked, nothing. Then I discovered a better way. I am now on a road of recovery, a journey toward wholeness. I have stopped trying to fix myself and allowed myself for the first time to feel. To really feel the pain, to sit in the suffering, and to truly find myself in the middle of it. In doing so, I’m learning to dance again. To be free, to recognize the lies that have invaded and destroyed my life and replace them with the truth of who I am, and whose I am.
This is the ugly beautiful. This is real life. Real, messy, beautiful life. I hope you will join me on the journey toward wholeness. Together we can learn to dance again and rediscover the mystery and beauty that surrounds us and calls us to live a better story. The past does not have to define us. The story is not over, there are still chapters to be written, the ending is far from being told. The remaining pages are there waiting for us. We hold the pen and how we choose to engage the ugly will determine how much of the beautiful is written on those pages.
I don’t know about you but I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. Life doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to settle for the ugly, we can make it beautiful. Out of the ashes we can rise and truly live.
theuglybeautiful 