The Lantern Bearer & Choosing Oneself

Sometimes healing isn't about finding the answers. Sometimes it's about finding someone who has already walked through the darkness and can remind you to keep going.

In this voice note, I reflect on voice notes with a friend who I will call The Lantern Bearer, whom I have named Praevia— [Latin] "the one who has gone before"- whose hard-earned wisdom has become a source of hope when I can't yet see what's waiting on the other side of this process. I also explore what it really means to choose yourself, especially when that choice feels lonely, uncertain, or at odds with the life you've always known.

This is a conversation about trusting the process, honoring your own becoming, and remembering that growth rarely feels like growth while you're living it. 

If you're in the middle of rebuilding your life and wondering whether the work is worth it, this voice note is for you.

If this voice note found you when you needed it, I'm glad it did.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

So I have a friend who I gosh when I think about how long I've known this person. It's it's been a while. Um I think I've known them since somewhere between twenty ten and twenty twelve. In order to protect um people and keep people's identities anonymous, I decided that I'm gonna come up with a naming system. And also in keeping with Jungian archetypes, they will also represent certain figures. I've decided to call this particular person Prevaya. Prevaya is a Latin-derived name that literally means she who goes before. And also the reason why I chose She Who Goes Before, um, because she's a lantern bearer. She's someone in my life who when all of everything started to turn upside down, um, and I sent her a voice note one day, and she told me how her life had gotten turned upside down um last year, and how she had to walk this path, this very dark night of the soul path, and do the shadow work and go into the depths of her own shadow and start the process of excavating that inner subconscious realm so that she can begin the process of integrating lost parts of herself. Um, she's told me that she's walked this stretch of road already, and as a lantern bearer, every so often she turns around and turns around just long enough to remind me that the path does continue. There is light at the end of this dark tunnel. So, with that being said, I introduce you all to Pravea, the lantern bearer. So, yesterday, as I was walking around the park crying, um, sending voice notes to another one of my close friends who she will get a name later. Um, but I also was sending voice notes to Pravea, the lantern bearer. And um, once I had recorded yesterday's episode, uploaded it, and boom, hit share, I woke up to a voice note from her this morning where she was saying, Wow, you know, that's very, very vulnerable. And I've also gotten into um using voice notes as a form of journaling, and she talked about how she's recently discovered that her throat chakra was blocked, and that speaking is something that she needs to engage in to unblock that. Because again, going with this process, going with this theme of learning to choose yourself, learning to stop abandoning yourself, me learning to stop abandoning myself, a part of that self-abandonment is around not speaking your truth. Um, yeah, and that's and that's something that I have struggled with as well. And um as she was replying to my voice note, replying to my um first episode, one of the things that she said struck me, which was, well, you know, I don't think that you would have any trouble finding someone who will choose you. However, I am making the choice to choose myself first, so that when it comes time to choose, be chosen, I have already chosen myself first. And I had to, I sat with that and I thought about that because yesterday was just really about catharsis, right? It was really about just me getting it out, getting it recorded, doing the thing, and pushing the button and saying it's sent. But I want to double back to the part in yesterday's note where I was crying, and it's like, I just want somebody to love me. I just want somebody to choose me. It doesn't mean that I want somebody to choose me in the same fashion that I have been pursuing relationships, jobs, friendships. It means that I want someone to choose me because for the first time in my life, I can honestly say I'm walking the path of learning how to choose me first. So when the lantern bearer was returning my voice note and saying, hey, well, this is what how I'm going about it, I replied with that same statement saying, No, no, no, we're thinking about this the same way. We want the same things. It's just that in my voice note yesterday, tearful, crying, and just allowing things to flow. Be raw, be honest, be vulnerable in the moment, and allow things to flow. Because that was me being very, very vulnerable and very, very raw, and speaking from that place, that place of deep desire, deep longing, deep need that I think is an intrinsic human need, and is an intrinsic part of how we've managed to survive as a species on this planet, the need to be chosen. Because as most of us know, I hope most of us know, is that babies don't survive without being picked up, cared for, loved on, and touched. They don't, and we as adults, you know, we are social creatures and we want to belong to our tribes, you know, we want to find our tribe and have a membership somewhere. We want to be chosen deeply because our survival has always hinged upon that. We might not be on the African savannas anymore with spears and tall grass uh that hides multiple dangers and saber-toothed tigers and lions and whatnot, but we haven't evolved much further beyond that. And we were always safer as members of a group, a group that chose us and a group that we chose, so it's just something we're hardwired towards. But in modern society, as a modern human being, and as an evolving being, and I'll go more into my spiritual beliefs in later episodes, as an evolving being, we now have to understand in order to be your most authentic self, and in order to break these generational curses or heal these parts of self, these abandoned parts of self, and dive into the shadow and integrate, you have to choose you. You have to start asking your the self yourself the question every single day. And it's something that ever since I've started walking on this path, before I bought those shadow work cards, before I started any of the Yungian shadow work, blah blah blah, the first thing that I sat down and wrote one day on a piece of paper was when are you gonna choose you? And what are the ways in which you have been abandoning yourself? And from that point forward, when I wrote that down on a scrap piece of paper, with every single action, with every single email, with every single voice note, with every single moment I scroll social media, literally, it has become an all-consuming question. In this moment, are you abandoning yourself, Gabe? Are you abandoning yourself? Every time I sit and scroll hinge, every time I sit and scroll social media, every time I do a task and complete it, or every time I avoid a task. Are you abandoning yourself, Gabe? And then I don't judge it, I just simply answer the question yes or no, and if the answer is yes, then I move to the next question. What can you adjust so that you are showing up more authentically in this moment as the truest version of yourself that you are capable of being? That's always the next question, and then I explore that and I take it to its furthest conclusion, and then I act on it. That's it, that's my whole process because I had to start somewhere, because abandoning myself happens in small unobtrusive ways, it happens in quiet moments that I don't even realize, you know, by not going to the gym in the morning, I am abandoning myself. By not drinking enough water, I am abandoning myself. By not keeping promises, very small promises to myself, I am abandoning myself. So how can I trust myself with the bigger things? And so I set myself on a path of catching myself in small moments and asking myself, are you abandoning yourself? Yes or no? What can you adjust to show up more authentically for yourself in this moment? And I make the adjustment. Now, if it's something that I absolutely need to abandon, then I just simply abandon it. But I also make sure to communicate authentically that hey, this is not in alignment. Ugh, trigger buzzword. I hate how that has become a buzzword on social media, but it's a word that very accurately describes what's happening or not happening. Rather, I will speak truth to it, whether that's an email that needs to be sent, a voice note that needs to be sent, a text, a phone call, whatever, and I will say this is not currently in alignment with the path that I'm on, and this doesn't lend to the highest expression of myself and who I'm trying to be and show up as. So thank you, but no thank you, and that shit has been hard. Like, oh my god, I want to throw up money hard because I can reflect back on what I just went through. A breakup, and we'll get there because it's still raw, it's still hard to talk about. I'm still working on allowing myself or girding my cohortness to be able to start to put voice notes out about that. Um, but yeah, that anxiety, that stomach-churning anxiety when I needed to finally speak my truth. And boy, oh boy, oh boy, was it so fucking hard. Um, yeah, I realized that at very low levels with even smaller things, I would feel that. And that's where it's needed to start. I needed to learn to choose myself in every single moment, starting with the smallest of daily acts, moment to moment, hour to hour, choosing me and choosing to show up authentically for me, so that I could build trust in me and trust in my intuition because your intuition ultimately is never wrong. We just choose to ignore it. So to purvey the lantern bearer. This is dedicated to you. Thank you. Thank you for showing me that at the end of this road there is healing, that this dark night of the soul is not going to be my end, my destruction. In fact, it is yet another new beginning that I got this, that I've been through far much worse, much, much worse. And just as well as I have survived and evolved and become a better person year over year across my lifetime, through those events, I will survive this one as well. And I will come out of this event on the other side, wiser, stronger, and more forgiving, compassionate for myself. Again, the self matters. And that in choosing myself first, in stopping the abandonment of myself first, eventually, maybe someone else's path will intersect with my own. And they will choose me without abandoning themselves. And that maybe just maybe we can create a beautiful life, a beautiful experience together.