One thing I’ve learned about shame in my healing journey is that its main message to us is:

“I cannot tell/live my truth, and still be loved. I cannot tell/live my truth, and still belong. Because at the core, there is something wrong with my truth.” 

And love and belonging are our two biggest human needs. So to our minds, the idea of losing them literally feels like death. So when we feel ashamed, the idea of living or telling our truth out loud in public feels equal to the idea of dying itself. 

So in order to protect ourselves from that perceived death, we hide. We hide that part of our truth that we believe will make us lose love and belonging, somehow. 

One thing I’ve been hiding is THE DIALYSIS CATHETER in my right leg. 

It’s what they use during dialysis to clean my blood. I’ve had it there now for two years. 

I’ve taken many pictures and shared them with me in my underwear (like the picture on the left), but I’ve always strategically hidden the catheter from the pictures. 

And I FINALLY realized while attending a retreat last week exactly what I was doing, and why. And how doing so had kept me from truly living my truth, and experiencing the freedom that only living our truth can bring. 

SO TO FREE MYSELF, I am sharing my truth.  
I am showing you publicly what I actually look like (and doing so while my hands and knees are shaking while writing this, by the way). 

The reason I hid the catheter in my leg was for two reasons:

1) I didn’t want to be seen as unattractive. 

To be honest, this catheter made me feel ugly and unwanted. In the midst of doing some recent healing inner work on myself, I discovered that the subconscious message underneath this action was: “If they see this, they won’t love me anymore. They will think I’m unattractive. And they will leave me alone. And I don’t want to be left alone.” 

Which goes right back to my original emotional wound/trauma of feeling unwanted and unattractive. 

2) I didn’t want people to know I was still healing. 

There was a part of me that felt like if people knew I was still in my own healing process, they wouldn’t listen to me anymore, nor think my sharings/teachings were valid. When I truly look at this message, it’s bullshit. But shame never tells the truth.

Again, shame telling me that I will lose everything if people find out my truth. And in this case, the truth that my body is not fully healed yet. 

And so, to protect myself I hid this part of my truth. 

But hiding doesn’t actually protect us, like we think it does. I know this for myself. In reality, it hurts us. It bonds us. It keeps us in the prison of hiding and suppressing ourselves, never truly being ourselves, or experiencing the freedom and relaxation that being ourselves brings (it takes a lot of energy to hide and suppress aspects of ourselves). 

So this is me freeing and healing myself.  
This is me taking the risk of losing everything (my followers, clients, friends, etc), if it means gaining all of myself. 

And I couldn’t’ be happier that I’m finally doing it.

Remember, in this tribe, we heal together.  
I go first.  
Then, you follow. 

Much ❤️ , Jerome.