Broken. Shattered. Fragmented. Depleted. Defeated. Unworthy. Shameful. Alone.

This is what I sat with, just “me” and these feelings. I put the word me in quotations because, really, there was no “me” at that very moment.

I submerged myself in a tub of warm soothing water. In quiet. Something foreign to me. Just being. Sitting with the silence meant being with my thoughts, my emotions-with “me.”

How does one sit with self, if there feels to be no self inside?

I didn’t feel the warmth of the water. I felt a crawling sensation. I literally wanted to crawl out of my own skin and this body.

As I sat there, with no other choice, I could feel physical pain building in my throat . It was building and growing until I thought it may just rip right through my skin.

Then came a deep moan. My body wanted to let the pain out. It wanted to physically release these feelings, like toxins being released to save me from death. Sounds dramatic I know, but it was quite literally how it felt.

I had no control. The tears started rolling down my cheeks. I recall submerging my entire body and head under the water to stop it all.

Just as I had suppressed and submerged the pain for much of my life, I was giving it one more go at ignoring it all.

With the water covering my eyes, nose and mouth, submerged under the weight of the water, I attempted control one last time. I couldn’t feel the tears on my face, I couldn’t hear the moan, but I couldn’t breath (a metaphor for my life).

I jolted up out of the water, and the pain from my throat tore through into noise. It was like nothing I’d ever heard, or anything I could have imagined was inside me.

Crying. Uncontrollable crying.

It was the little Tanya who had yearned to be seen and heard. It was her unmet needs, her feelings of unworthiness and fear.

It was the adult Tanya who didn’t now where to go from here.

It was in that very moment in time, when I unraveled, I surrendered, and the unbecoming began. It was in this surrendering and unbecoming that I met myself.

I met “me.”

From that day forward, I started the process of peeling back the layers of false protection responses, old messages and default thinking. It was in the unbecoming that I found my truth, my worthiness and my life.