The Fullness Of Life, For You
By. Becca Carucci
This is the fifth and final essay from a collection called “Rightful Places: Stories of Coming Home to Myself.” I haven’t always felt at home in my existence, my body or my life and have spent a lot of time looking externally for a place of belonging. I have come to learn that we must begin the journey to peace by looking within, examining our souls and discovering what exists there. Somewhere between the bravery to dive deep, the grief of the losses we face and the freedom there after, within the mundane and the extraordinary we will discover soon that we have indeed found our rightful place. My deepest hope is that between and within the lines of these five essays you become a step closer to a true home within, the place we are all longing for. Yours, Becca.
In Rightful Places, we’ve looked at why’s, the relationship between home and body, trusting our soul by letting go of the word should, and lastly the gift of impermanence. Each of these pieces are key to understanding your soul’s needs and stepping closer to a sense of belonging in your life. For me, they’ve happened across many different periods of time. For this last essay, I want to share with you what has happened most recently for me: the process of building and creating a full life out of love and respect for myself.
When I graduated college in 2018, I went through a difficult time adjusting to the new norms of adulthood. It felt like all at once the structures that had held me in place crumbled. It turns out I had unknowingly been held together by the support of organized environments, the main one being college. My life was planned out for me, I was reminded daily what and who I should be following, and I always had somewhere to be. When I walked across the stage and took my diploma, the sense of security I had was taken away. There’s no type of preparation for that, no slow decline of being held; it is abrupt. I struggled to understand how to build a life that was for me, when so much security and structure had done that for me. In the last two years I have stumbled my way onto the path of learning what it means to create a life that is full of love, based on the love I’ve offered myself. When we’ve walked the road of getting honest about who we are, our needs and desires, we often arrive at a place where we discover our life doesn’t have a lot of those things because we have been spending our time appeasing the world around us and neglecting ourselves in the process.
A big part of these two years out of college have been spending time thinking about meaning and purpose and how I want to create those in my life (because turns out, it just doesn’t show up to your door, you’ve got to make it!). For many in their twenties, this unruly time of transitioning into adulthood leads us to the end of our rope. When you’ve grown up in communities that offer a sense of truth on your behalf, it can be difficult to develop your own sense of agency. Further, it is often taught in such communities that that type of development is foolish and selfish. Our lives can feel scary when we begin to wake up to the realness of the world we live in once we move out of those sheltered places. The biggest wake up call for me was how much I had kept in my life that only existed because someone else had taught it to me or offered it to me as an absolute. In my natural tendency to want to please others, I neglected to examine the content of my life and seek what was meant for me; what was true and honest for me.
In his book, Honoring the Self, Nathaniel Branden charges his reader with this: “To honor the self is to be willing to know not only what we think but also what we feel, what we want, need, desire, suffer over are frightened or angered by ---and to accept our right to experience such feelings. The opposite of this attitude is denial, disowning, repression, self repudiation...We need to love ourselves and make a commitment to ourselves...The love we give and receive will be enhanced by the love we give ourselves.” When I first read this quote it brought me to tears. Do you go through your days experiencing a gap, small or large, between where you want to be and the actuality of your reality? Is there a chance you are missing an opportunity to honor yourself that is camouflaged somewhere as care, love or high regard for others?
The gap between where you are and where you want to be is the space of neglect, the space where the fullness of life and love is waiting to break through. Honoring yourself in the ways that Branden talks about is difficult work that takes grit. In my own life, I’ve had to work on reclaiming what it means to be selfish. I grew up believing this was a negative word, thinking that if I wasn’t offering myself for the good of others, I wasn’t living a virtuous life. But there are actually numerous areas of our lives where it is good and right to be “selfish.” Here's what I mean by that practically: sometimes it is a gift to offer time to myself, rather than going out with friends and offering my time to them. I honor myself when I begin my morning with meditation and prayer rather than jumping into a to do list of work that will leave me tired and empty. I choose the self’s highest good when I say no to things that lower my mental health and well being even though these things often look alluring! By choosing myself in these situations, the very reclaiming of the word selfish, I am better equipped to love and provide for the people in my life who have earned those things from me. Our culture has taught us that the formula for a moral life is to give and give, but the formula is missing something massive. We need to offer that back to ourselves. Our experiences are enriched when we have prioritized our health, wellness, and peace. In the last two years of my life, this has been the lesson I have had to repeatedly learn. The power of peace has only been ushered into my life when I realized that the deficit of the very thing I wanted was because I had neglected getting to know myself, caring for myself and honoring myself.
I know that this proverbial road home may seem airy and far from possibility, especially as we walk this road of a worldwide pandemic. I’m the first to admit there have been many moments over the last several moments of writing these essays where I’ve begun to feel like a fraud, when the overwhelming loudness of my life led me to places far, far away from where I wanted to be. But that has motivated me all the more to share these parts of my story with you. Our rightful place will take on many forms throughout our life, and our ability to fully lean into this place may waver and fluctuate with different seasons of life. Years ago a mentor told me that my health and growth was never going to be linear, but more like a spiral with ups and downs but ever moving forward. I hope this truth can bring you peace in all of this, especially if you have begun any sort of journey that involves healing parts of your story. I believe that making the brave choice of diving deep into all that we are will be honored in our life and the greatest gift of this journey will be in Branden’s words, “an enhanced love,” because we have offered ourselves the gift of coming home, of arriving at our rightful place.
Becca Carucci works as a therapeutic specialist at a mental health clinic in Southern California and is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Organizational Psychology. Her passion for people having a deeper understanding of their stories began in 2013 when she moved to Ethiopia to work with women and children who had been victims of human trafficking. Since then her life has brought her on a journey of self discovery that has only deepened the desire to partner alongside people as they uncover more about themselves in order to live fuller and more meaningful lives. She enjoys writing and can be found most often holding an americano in one hand, a book in the other with The National playing in her headphones. Instagram: beccacarucci .