The Hardest Thing I've Overcome
When I was two, my mother ran away from her home in Saint Petersburg, Russia (the USSR at the time) and took me with her. We came to the States where her aunt had recently immigrated, and planned on staying only a few months until food was back in stores and life was not so hard. Turns out, life in the US seemed better than anything my mom could hope for back home, so we stayed. Where is this story going? You may ask. Typical immigrant kid. Parent comes for a better life, child gets raised in the States, goes to school, gets a degree, becomes a regular unappreciative Millennial with social media and undying wanderlust. Same page, different face.
No. That's not where this story goes. One of the least talked about things in the stories of my people- MY people, being the kids who got out of their country's bad situations, the kids whose parents gave up nearly everything for them to have a better life- is that of deep, ancestral Trauma. It's the trauma that follows bloodlines and breeds insecurities and even deeper fears of failure. It's the mindset of the Great Depression passed down through generations. It's the hard, cold, visceral reality of survival that cannot be washed away even when the bathroom has been remodeled.
Though it might make no sense, one of the hardest things I have had to overcome- and am still working daily to overcome- is that Fear of poverty and failure. In a world today where everything feels instant and attainable, we ignore the deeper causes of our blocks and fears. I once had a healer tell me that I had severe trauma on the side of the women in my family, going back several generations. I was quite surprised, and forgot about this for months until I was ready to process it. You can take a person out of a country, but you can't take that country and it's energetic history out of that person. It is in their DNA, in the way they have been raised- even if they're raised in suburban USA. It's in the things our parents teach and our grandparents preach.
They came here to make a better life for us, yet they are so afraid that we will struggle just as they did that they seem to think the only way for us to succeed is to do what they did. This usually means to pick a well-rounded career which guarantees a comfortable life, or to find a successful partner who can manage the bank. It also usually means living in the same state of fear of poverty and death that they lived in for generations.
Perhaps this is not the struggle so typically portrayed by the rising artist who escapes the ghetto and makes a new life despite society's stereotypes and roadblocks. But this is a truth that needs to be heard. Many immigrant children struggle with feelings, emotions and traumas that are not inherently theirs, and don't understand why. They feel manic, stuck, unheard. They go through life feeling as though they are a sail against a massive wind- spinning their gears yet getting nowhere. They understand the concept of freedom, and grew up among their American peers but somewhere deep within is the built in energy of struggle. Of the need to just survive, forget thrive.
Over the past couple of years I have realized more and more the need to dig deeper and understand these things within myself. I have realized that before I achieve any credibility or success along my path, I need to release these deep energetic ties to my past and acknowledge - with all due respect- the things that truly are no longer serving our bloodline as we evolve. Fear of failure keeps us closer to failure, as we pour energy into that fear. What we create with our minds and our hearts is what we create in the physical realm, and this has been the hardest lesson to learn. It isn't a drug addiction or alcoholism against all odds I have overcome. It's a battle of myself with myself. The part that connects with, belongs to, and respects my ancestry, and the part that knows in order to thrive in this new world I need to let the sh*t parts go.