I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all likely experienced a time (multiples really) in our lives where we had to go through the process of grieving, dredging through discomfort and healing. In that time it can often feel lonely, scary and as though we lack a sense of direction of our true path to know what direction we are headed. This month’s guest contributor goes deep into that space, otherwise known as the “hallway of hell”.

This incredibly vulnerable space that we venture into hoping to come out whole again. It’s not only incredibly relatable, but her honesty permeates through her expression and reaches the core of our true selves, where we can find understanding. When I first met Heather Wellman I had no idea that she was a writer, nor did I know of her adventurous spirit and the strength of her inner desire to love people wholeheartedly. I not only admire her way with words (more on her blog and Instagram), but I am drawn to her insatiable desire to live her life despite fear, ambiguity and the time spent in the hallway. I am without proper words to do justice to how honored I am that she is sharing with you all in this space, so I will let her do the rest.

 

 

I rolled towards her, my hair falling forward, into my face, a few strands dancing in the space between our mouths. She reached up, sliding them behind my ear, clearing the path from her lips to my own. I moaned quietly as her fingertips swept back and forth over the soft skin of my inner thighs… And then my own hand abruptly met hers, holding it still, near my knee. I pulled back, and looked at her… “I can’t,” I said. “I feel like my dad can see us now, which I know sounds ridiculous but it’s true. It’s just weird for me. I need some more time.” My girlfriend stared back at me blankly for a few seconds, and then dropped her hand from my body back to our mattress…

That’s how it was in those days… in the first few months after my father passed away. I was twenty-one years old, unsure of how to do much anymore… have sex, hold down a job, breathe… There are days, even now, where I stand in the tub, dripping with water, a soft, dry towel against my face, and I can remember the exhaustion in my body; remember when it felt like too much to shower, not because of the showering itself but because the act of drying my body was simply too much; a burden.

 

I eventually married that woman, and then divorced her. And then married another woman, and divorced her too. Having a sick parent from the age of fourteen to twenty-one will completely rock your sense of stability… will make you seek it wherever you can… I sought it in the arms of two wonderful, incredibly risk-averse human beings who kept me feeling safe when I needed it most. Eventually that safety felt oppressive and I fled.

When I was separating from my second wife, I went to therapy once per week. Those regular sessions were everything in those days—keeping me grounded, and providing me with an opportunity to process everything in my current life, and finally begin (for the first time) digging in on the myriad of factors that landed me there. As you might imagine, I would show up week after week exhausted and drained in every way possible. And yet, I remained eager to learn more about myself, my past and how to heal. I approached this experience like school, where I’d always excelled… as though if I studied hard enough and did well on the exam, I would win the prize: relief, a sense of inner peace, perhaps a presidential pardon for my long list of transgressions.

 

Unbelievably overwhelmed by the mountain of shit that my life had become, I was quick to tears and spent a lot of time in my therapist’s office crying. I wanted to be full of hope, I wanted to know that it would all work out, I wanted to believe that I could eventually find someone who made me feel more alive, but my track record would suggest that I had no idea what I was doing and I had little faith in myself anymore.

 

One afternoon we sat in her cottage-like office, discussing the idea that “when one door closes another one opens.” Having always been good at running away and immediately digging in on whatever was next, I was fixated on how to properly prepare myself for that next big thing. And yet, I couldn’t ignore the immense weight I was constantly carrying around, despite my focus on the future… Somewhere deep inside, while desperate to know the final outcome of this gut-wrenching screenplay, I knew I had more work to do, I just didn’t know how to maintain hope and stamina in the meantime…

We talked about that a lot… my exhaustion and growing disdain for this process… I just didn’t understand why this had to be so. damn. hard. “Here’s the thing, Heather,” my therapist said one day, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees, “everyone says “when one door closes another one opens” but no one talks about the hallway between those two doors… And that hallway, is Hell. You are in the hallway, my friend, and you may be in there for a very long while to come.”

Woah. Just sit with the weight and the brilliance of that analogy for a moment…  She was so right…

 

Here’s the thing… the struggle with being in the hallway is that we want to avoid pain and the unknown at any cost, so we try to get in and out of that place as quickly as we possibly can; it’s essentially the Emotional DMV. And while we’re in there, we numb ourselves whenever possible with food, drugs, work, exercise, and the beds of strangers… And for good reason—we are conditioned to fear anything that might hurt us, which could very well live behind a number of those doors…

 

We imagine rooms full of dragons, and monsters, heartbreak and abandonment. And all the other scary things that lurk in the dark so even the tiniest bit of light… of seeming goodness, makes our heart double in size with hope. Quite often we latch onto whatever that thing is—a new job, a new relationship, a new city—as tightly as we can without much thought other than “this feels so much better than pain and uncertainty!” Many times though, in our desperate need to escape the hallway, we make poor choices, or repeat cycles, and find ourselves in another hallway and another until our life becomes a long series of intricately designed corridors that connect our fears, our denial, our codependency, and a million other things that tend not to serve us well. I lived in one of those castle basements for over a decade. It was cold and lonely down there…
Like many of you, I have done a tremendous amount of healing over the past few years; and part of that work has included embracing my time in the hallway… I still worry about making poor choices, but I like to trust now that some of the doors are hiding beautiful things behind them too: new friendships, or an incredible trip, a job opportunity I would absolutely kill for… Maybe my future husband is even behind one of them, holding a bag of Doritos in one hand, and a green smoothie in the other, ready and eager to fall madly in love with the living, breathing juxtaposition that I am? Who knows…

 

But there’s hope again. And there’s the energy to shower and the ability to breathe. And that all comes down to my choice to stay in the hallway and do the work that needed doing.  It all came from learning that the hallway may be Hell but living in fear and constantly running towards the next greatest thing, and never finding it is something far, far worse…

 

Try to get really comfortable with being incredibly uncomfortable; to fight your urge to flee or numb your feelings. Choose to get still; to stay a while… Discover a strength you never knew you had with every handle you grasp and have the courage to turn; with every subsequent opportunity you consider… Whatever lies behind those doors, my friends, can’t compete with the beauty that already lives inside you. There is nothing to fear.

 

 

Heather is a writer, curating a blog called Warrior Pigeon where she offers readers a chance to reflect, consider a new perspective, and ultimately find the courage to pursue and live the lives they truly want and deserve. When she’s not writing for Warrior Pigeon, Heather is usually working on her first book, exploring the great outdoors, planning her next adventure, or running her consulting company where she helps people develop into stronger leaders of themselves and others.