Necessary Pains
a million little pieces of me, each part and parcel of the whole i am meant to be
As is customary in any long meeting I have to sit through, I found myself flitting in and out of conscious awareness this evening as my colleagues and I discussed issues and concerns arising in our work. In between these moments, I’d find my mind wandering to and fro the present, the past and everywhere in between. Suddenly, however, a colleague of mine said something that that snapped me back to conscious thought: these were but necessary pains.
Those words struck a chord loud and clear in me and shook me out of my inattention for a bit as it got me to thinking about conversations (either with myself or with the special few who get to see me beyond my masks) and moments not too long ago when I had struggled to make amends with my own times of discontent and little moments of regret. I remembered those times that I felt caught in a riptide, set adrift in a current of uncertainty and fear. For a brief moment, I felt myself taken back to days of my childhood where I would bear burdens that were not mine to begin with, teetering back and forth, feeling overwhelmed by a world much bigger than myself.
I thought back too, to my dark starless nights when all I wished for was to never wake up again, at least not in the world that I was living in. And yes, much as I tried to ignore it, I thought about he-who-broke-my-heart-into-a-million-itty-bitty-pieces-and-left-me-broken-and-damaged.
Necessary Pains.
Yes, tonight I was reminded that all those moments were all but necessary pains in getting me to where I am today.
I realized that while in that moment of necessary pain, and at times, even the simple memory of little things that take me to those moments, the pain would be almost unbearable. At times almost unfathomable and all consuming, so much so that many times in those moments of Necessary Pain, I would find myself literally physically debilitated, either by terrible, blinding migraines or bouts of terrible asthma attacks that would leave me breathless and struggling.
So when I got home this evening, I made it a point to take pause and remember fully the most difficult period in my life, not too long ago. During that dark night of my soul, I felt like I had lost everything I knew, and to some degree, it felt like losing all sense of who I was. As part of my healing journey, as I dealt with that Necessary Pain, I found true comfort in what I called back then as doodling. It was the only comfort I knew because at that time, the Dark Night snatched from me the most important thing I ever had: my gift of words. Without words to express my feelings, I was drowning in an abyss of the unknown.
And so armed with a pencil and a sheet of paper, while trying hard to hold back tears, I started doodling. A circular pattern was born from that doodle. It wasn’t something I had thought about or even “designed”. It was just instinct.
One day my wise old sage told me that those “doodles” were more than just that: it was my soul coming out from the ruins, guiding me as I found a sense of balance. These are mandalas, she had said. I had heard of mandalas in the past, but I never imagined that that was what I was doing. More so, I never knew how powerful these were. So from then on, whenever I felt unsettled, I would find my center with the birth of another mandala.
So from that dark night, that period of necessary pain, I received one of the most precious gifts I could have ever gotten: the gift of my art. With this gift, I was able to get in touch with the creative and free spirit that lived inside of me, the one who was told to hold back as she lived in a very cognitive, logical world.
And so tonight, I was reminded of how the Necessary Pains we go through in life — be these mistakes we’ve made, regrets that haunt us, opportunities wasted and let go of, hurts we’ve caused others or caused to us by others — are but essential in making us who we are. In many ways, these are the little pit stops in our lives that may not make sense at the here and now, but somewhere down the line, no matter how long it may take, will make perfect, perfect sense.
About the Mandala:
This is perhaps one of the few mandalas I am brave enough to share. I called this “A Million Little Pieces of Me”. I drew this in a very special place where I felt reborn and for whatever it’s worth, this mandala is truly symbolic of my own rebirth. It marked the culmination of a years worth of soulworking, necessary pain and finding my way out of the darkness that once consumed me. Towards the end of 2007, I came across a call for art works for a very special project to recognize Filipino artists called Art in Site, wherein 3,000 original art pieces were made covers for the Art in Site Magazine. It felt very right to submit this piece for that project, and while my art is still a very private side of me, I think this deserves to be out there for many to see. I pray that in my own small way, whoever this ended up with my piece finds their own million little pieces that makes their own beautiful wholes, just like this mandala.
