We embark on our spiritual journey or path as soon as we are born, but this life has its way of keeping us busy. We don’t seek to become more self-aware or to focus on ourselves to learn more about who we really are and what we are here to do right away. We become what our parents tell us or want us to be–what society wants us to be. We learn that focusing on ourselves is selfish, so we become something we were never meant to be.

An internal fight begins within ourselves at the moment we realize we are being something other than our true selves–that we have become what our parents, family, friends, boss, wife and children are expecting us to be. This causes us to show signs of anxiety, depression, anger, resentment and frustration just to name a few. It’s how it all began and this small, subtle voice wants to guide me to stand up for myself, to be a little rebel…

For me, like for many others, that realization happened several times in my journey. Fear, insecurity, lack of self worth and self-confidence drove me to keep pretending to be somebody that I was not, so I could feel accepted, so I could fit in, so I would feel loved.

When I found myself being a mother I felt a shift within. Questions started to pop up. What kind of mother was I going to be? Was I going to be like my biological mother, and give my child up for adoption, or my adopted mother, who did her best, but her own childhood wounds were too deep to know how to raise a child or how to treat one? What kind of mother did I want to be? And would I be capable of noticing the type of mother they were needing me to be? Wow, this was all on me, my responsibility, my choice.

I am an adopted child, my abandonment wound brought me to a series of reflections. I was not going to follow my birth or my adopted mother’s steps. I really didn’t know how a mother was supposed to be or act. I just knew, since when I was five or six-years-old, that a mother’s love could not be what I was witnessing.

So, I made an inventory of the women in my life. I started to observe how they treat their children, how and what they would say to them. I battled, for many years, with severe anxiety, depression, anger and so much frustration…darkness overtook me (you know…from The Lord of The Rings. LOL). Little M.E. never understood why she was going through so much pain. She was only a child, What wrong could she have done?

Almost 20 years ago, this is what drove me to consciously work on my own healing. If I were not what friends, family or society wanted me to be, who was I? Who Am I? So this is how my journey to self discovery started. It became my job to do all I could to be my most authentic, best version of myself for me and my children.