Falling With Grace

At the age of four I stepped onto the ice for the very first time; without hesitation, I began skating backwards with “a confident grace” as my mom describes it. I remember my very first group lesson just one week later where the day's lesson was learning how to fall properly; 

AKA- falling with grace and quickly bring myself up as though nothing happened at all.

My college admissions essay was titled Learning to Fall.

Six years ago this concept seemed so obviously smart: life is about falling down and finding strength to get back up. In fact, I let this be my mantra for years, telling myself that if I had the courage to simply pick myself up, I was building strength. In my eyes strength came from the ability to overcome obstacles and not necessarily the courage it takes to deal with and be with difficult emotions. It was always about finding a way out; a way to move on quickly and with grace. 
Wrong. 

Fast forward six years and here I am, contemplating this idea of falling, specifically hitting “rock bottom.” Typically I’d do everything in my power to find a solution for quickly picking myself up and moving on. While I see this as crucial in moving through life I also see this as a complete defense mechanism to avoid everything surrounding that initial fall; being so quick to get up, find answers and fixes that I don’t feel the fall at all.

In Learning to Fall, I wrote, “there is no shame in losing balance if I have the courage to regain it.” I still fully believe this statement to be true but six years wiser, I see the complexities surrounding it. What if the real courage lies in being with the messy-ness (if that’s even a word) of a fall or in life’s case, a loss? What if feeling, processing and actually grieving are what build the strength to actually move forward and up? The building blocks to healing actually involve a surrender to grace and an embrace of raw emotion.

Pulling myself up off the ice like it was nothing may have won me medals in the world of sparkling dresses and cutthroat competition but in the world of life, the falls and the losses require a sincere willingness to face the pain, let tears stream and to give ourselves the permission to process and to feel before any real healing can occur. 

I thought I had experienced “rock bottom” before, but nothing quite compares to the last few months dominated by uncertainty, anxiety, fear, regret and an overwhelming sadness I couldn’t describe if I tried.  I missed laughing. I missed smiling without force. I missed it so much that I had no choice but to face my sadness and confront it head on, without necessarily trying to “pick myself up” in order to do so. I needed to cry indefinitely in order for my laugh to surface again. I needed to lay on the cold ice and feel the shiver of sadness crawl its way through my body in order to find the strength to slowly pull myself up, ice crystals slowly melting.  I had to be with my pain before moving away from it. It’s been anything but quick and graceful. In fact, I’m still in the midst of messy-- and I’m finding it to be building more grace and strength than I could have imagined.

The second part of Learning to Fall was titled: Getting Back Up.

Getting back up, regaining balance, pulling myself out of the “funk”-- it doesn’t need to be within a mili-second. I’m finding that the true courage is not so much in the act of “getting back up” as it is in the process of dealing with the fall; the journey of experiencing true emotion and working through it rather than skipping around it. I don’t believe there is a such thing as learning to fall. However, I know there is a such thing as getting back up. It’s in the process of facing the falls, feeling the pain, the sadness and sometimes even the scars that allows us to find our way back; or better yet, our way forward.

After all, the only way out is through.

*See a version of this post published on Elephant Journal.