Discover Your Sweetness – Value, That is To Say.
This historical post above is what I will start tonight with when we meet at NAMI.
The blooming sense of value that comes when we pause to appreciate our imperfect selves, our abused selves, diseased, pecked at, and unrighteous selves, this we can trust more than the who believes she serves altruistically.
I remember the Scarlet Letter by, Hawthorne, and wonderful dirtied Hester.
But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too. And, …people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. …with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,—came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, …at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.
Once we value ourselves, much of stigma disappears. There is a coming together of that which is “perfect” with that which is imperfect, flawed, “unvalued and unsought,” and we can see the disease in others and not demand perfection in them either.
Everything starts and ends with Me.
Questions: How has stigma touched you? How have you, do you, deal with it? What helps you? Please tell us your story.
Self-Care Tip: Let the imperfect come together with the perfect in you, to deal with stigma in others.
Love this quote from Scarlet Letter! What a great correlation to our own process of owning and accepting our struggles as potential strengths…..
Thank you Marlo! “our own process of owning and accepting our struggles as potential strengths”. Say it!
I’ve learned that God can turn our messes into messages-if we allow. I don’t shout from the mountaintops that I live with mental illness. But if a situation can be made better by the sharing of some of my life experiences, challenges, failures and successes, then I’m glad to help.
oh u r a word smith – messes into messages! love that. thank u. keep on.
For me it was never stigma. It was the pain of undeserved and inaccurate characterizations of me based on rumor and gossip. OK, I admit some of it true. But if I committed 1% of all the vile things attributed to me when I ran for public office in the mid 80’s, I’d be 700 years old.
Carl, this always wows me. w/o u telling me again and again, i forget this part of your story. i don’t like that. i want to remember. reminds me of “unless they see the scars in your hands…” and think on our limitations in what i understand presence and humanity to be by our own brains. i hope that although i don’t remember or believe at all the right times, that presence w u my community is more than this.
just some wandering thoughts :). thanks for speaking out. keep on.
Stigma defines it well. We are leapors to most.
Blessed r the lepors