Warrior Girl
Unlacing the armor of a lifetime – By Stacey Huget
Have you ever noticed a side of yourself you once appreciated and suddenly recognized it for what it is: a relic of the past, a way of showing up that no longer serves you? We sometimes grow into the stories we tell ourselves about who we need to be – but the stories are not always true, and no longer helpful.
What matters is the idea you have of yourself, for it blocks you, warned Hindu guru Nisargadatta, Give it up.
Warrior Girl – that’s the side of me I’m giving up. Unlacing the armor of a lifetime.
Like so many of the sides of ourselves we later choose to give up, Warrior Girl was conceived in a time of emotional pain, of trauma. She grew up in a story I told myself about desperately needing to be safe.
My childhood was a hostile place, of rage and alcohol and bullying disapproval, of broken trusts and dark reflections of an ugly, vulnerable girl – inadequate, unlovable, and altogether out of place. In those years, safety was a slippery and elusive slope. Just as I’d sink my toes in it, someone or something would yank it away, sending me crashing onto the jagged rocks of my own broken heart – bruised and alone.
Warrior Girl rose up as a fierce protector and defender, my valiant knight of hypervigilance – vowing to keep me safe, to fight our way to solid ground. Armor gleaming, shield up, spear at the ready, the world was a battle she was ready to fight.
With Warrior Girl at my side, no one would deceive or betray or hurt me again. You want to f*#k with me? she’d snarl at every imagined threat, Then, let’s go – ’cause I’ll be the last one standing. It was our inner mantra, and I dared to believe it.
Ironically, in her quest to find my solid ground, she made a quicksand of my every experience. Expecting the world to be a shifty place, she drew me to its fault lines. Convinced other people were un-trustworthy, she brought me their betrayals. Suspicious that every truth had an underbelly of deceit, she taught me to question everything – including myself.
All of which was further evidence I needed Warrior Girl – my stunning, self-fulfilling prophecy.
In her quest to find my solid ground, she made a quicksand of my every experience. Expecting the world to be a shifty place, she drew me to its fault lines. Convinced other people were un-trustworthy, she brought me their betrayals. Suspicious that every truth had an underbelly of deceit, she taught me to question everything – including myself.
Over the years, she honed her heroic service in the guise of keeping me safe, but all she really did was keep me clenched – a full body clench that made my muscles tense and my mind alert to danger. She held me in the grip of second-guessing every move, every utterance, every potential truth, every rush of feeling. Even my own joy and love and wonder were but seductive illusions. I lived in sinewy dread – of what, I wasn’t sure.
And there was anger in all that tension, a simmering rage. At being so afraid. At having been hurt deeply enough to ever learn such fear. At having somehow deserved such sadness.
These emotions needed release, but Warrior Girl kept me clenched. Her every act of fierce due diligence, her endless search for the shoe about to drop, wary that we might be screwed over at any moment, white-knuckling every punishing expectation – it all kept me locked in my anger and my fear and my hurt. Hers were the bars I looked out at the world through, my own little prison of the past.
I rattled those bars for decades, fighting desperately to escape – in all the ways that kept me trapped.
But we are not made to be prisoners.
It was with surrender that those bars finally loosened. Love and joy and wonder began wafting in from without – and up from within, like a fresh breeze of me, like life itself.
Warrior Girl was still there, waiting and watching – always watching. I’d hear the shuffle of her chain mail, catch the glimmer of her breast-plate from somewhere in the distance. Reassuring, but only faintly. And ever so slightly inappropriate.
It isn’t to defeat that I surrendered, but to the truth. I came to understand that safety is just a thought – and thinking we’re trapped is just something we tell ourselves when we’ve lost sight of the alternatives or have chosen not to embrace them.
I am choosing to be free, to ride that breeze, that life force.
I am unlacing her armor and laying aside those dark expectations and behaviors that so restrained me. I am opening myself up fully to the world and other people, experiencing all of my emotions as they arise, and enjoying the more expansive ease and peace to which we are all of us entitled.
And that means letting her go, completely.
Because the thing is, I am no longer that young girl in despair, nor am I the Warrior Girl who grew into womanhood alongside her. I am just me, now, in this moment – with all my coiling energies and colors and dimensions. And what I crave more than protection is growth and freedom and love.
It is not easy to give her up.
There is a grief that occurs when who you thought you were starts to disappear. Yes, Ram Dass – exactly that.
But still.
I am unlacing her armor and laying aside those dark expectations and behaviors that so restrained me. I am opening myself up fully to the world and other people, experiencing all of my emotions as they arise, and enjoying the more expansive ease and peace to which we are all of us entitled.
I have become vulnerable again – because that’s what it takes to live life fully.
Without Warrior Girl, I am certain to experience hurt and pain and grief, but not so often as I once feared. And when those feelings arise, I will meet them with curiosity, compassion, acceptance, and resilience.
Because I can.
Let me fall if I must, said Baal Shem Tov. The one I will become will catch me.
Yes, despite her brave efforts to defend and protect me, my Warrior Girl shielded me from the one truth on which we all can count: that the most breathtakingly beautiful terra firma is that which resides within.
