Are you where you should be?

Are you where you should be?

Nine years ago, in August 2015, I was supposed to travel to Poland, in the province of Krakow, to attend a wedding on my Polish paternal family's side. I didn't know most of the guests, but I was happy to discover the country and take part in such a joyous event. Poland, to me, evoked memories of my father, who tragically passed away when I was 25, and my grandmother, whom I loved deeply, but who didn't survive the loss of her son.

Instead, in August 2015, I found myself confined to a hospital bed, wrapped in bandages, suffering from third-degree burns. A simple lunch at a restaurant on an idyllic beach in the South of France had turned into a nightmare due to an explosion, of which I was the only victim.

The heat in the non-air-conditioned hospital room was stifling, making the suffocating feeling from my bandages even more unbearable. Between dressing changes and skin grafts, one thought kept coming back to me: "This isn't where I should be, suffering in torment while others continue to celebrate summer on the beach where mine came to a halt... This is not where I should be... Unable to move, trapped, mummified... This is not where I should be..."

But I was unaware of something.

I didn’t know that this was exactly where I was meant to be.

I didn’t know that what I was experiencing was exactly what I should be experiencing. Because I was living it.

By booking plane tickets, sending confirmations for this or that visit, and buying a gift for the newlyweds, I thought I had built this future and that it couldn’t slip away from me and had no right to evade me. In fact, it didn’t “slip away,” it had been STOLEN from me, I thought.

But nothing had been stolen from me.

I hadn’t built anything at all.

The future owed me nothing.

A construction only becomes a construction once it’s completed. It’s only once it’s done that we can look back and talk about what was built. Until then, it’s just a series of actions guided by an idea we want to bring to fruition.

We make plans, we work on this hypothetical future as if it were a reality, and this is necessary for us to take action.

However, the mistake we make is to use this hypothetical future, which has done us good up to now, to harm ourselves.

I used this hypothetical future to hurt myself. Of course, I wasn’t aware of it, but I didn’t need this extra suffering.

Are you hurting yourself?

You are exactly where you should be. You shouldn’t be anywhere else or doing anything else.

When you plan something and it doesn’t turn out the way you imagined, it simply means that you were mistaken in believing that everything would go a certain way. Your projection was wrong. And in essence, any projection, any anticipation, is an illusion since it hasn’t happened yet.

You thought Scenario A would happen, you had set everything up for it, but in the end, it's another, totally unexpected situation that unfolds.

Don’t use Scenario A against yourself. Be fully present in this new situation, because you need yourself, the most loving part of yourself.

You are where you should be.

You are living what you were meant to live.

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Method

To support yourself and not add suffering to the situation by resisting it, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• How can you support yourself? How can you be the most caring person you can be for yourself?

• What would you like to be told? What would you like to hear? Tell it to yourself.

• What does this situation show you that’s good in yourself and good in others?

And remember:

What’s important is never what we do, but how we do it, in other words, who we are at any given moment and what attitude we adopt.

We always have a choice: to be in a position of openness, curiosity, and acceptance, or to place ourselves in resistance, refusal, and blame.

By choosing openness and curiosity, we allow ourselves to learn and grow.

Stephanie Romeo

If you want support through difficult times, book a call with me. Visit my website stephanieromeo.com

How do you call on your most loving part? I invite you to read the blog post "When life turns upside down"

https://www.stephanieromeo.com/blog/life-turns-upside-down