No One Wakes Up Alone

Life is not a vacuum. We may feel alone—or be the only one in the room—but the truth is, we’re never separate from the people and experiences that shaped us. The minute we leave that room, people are there. They always have been.

We grew up around people. They gave us experiences—some welcome, some not. They gave us feelings, memories, ideas, and beliefs. Some handed us truths. Some lied because they didn’t have a truth to give.

Awakening happens because of those people. It happens within those relationships, within the tension they carry. We wake up with others, through others, even when we think we're doing it alone. Without those people, we’d have no need to awaken. There would be nothing to awaken from and nothing to awaken for.

If you ask, I’ll tell you I healed by myself. Why? Because I wasn’t relying on anyone to help me through it. I traveled that road alone. But I didn’t give myself the experiences, the friction, or the pain I would eventually use to heal. That came through relationship. I healed in relationship—even if I healed away from it.

Often, somewhere in the spiritual awakening process, we want to go live in a cave. The urge to run is strong. What we’re really seeking is connection with ourselves—and that’s hard to find in a crowded room. It’s also the thing we’ve often tried to substitute with external relationships.

What we learn quickly is this: our connection to ourselves is what stabilizes our connection to others. It helps us find the truth of what we want or need in our relationships. It shows us our role in them. We can learn a lot about ourselves just by being in relationship with other people.

I had my awakening because of pain in my relationships. I was a people-pleaser. I was insecure. Those pain points came through connection, but they weren’t anyone’s fault. There’s no blame here. They were the result of how I believed I had to be in relationship.

I thought if I didn’t spend all my energy making everyone else happy, I’d be left alone. That story wasn’t true. But I lived by it, and it shaped my entire life. That story is the reason I can write this today. None of it happened in a bubble. None of it happened alone. Everything happened as a result of my connection to others.

Relationships are mirrors, but the reflection has nothing to do with the other person. They show us who we are and who we aren’t.

Healthy relationships happen when both people are willing to look into their own mirrors, find their own truth, and do the work to clear up the reflection. Dysfunction begins when we start pointing at the other person’s mirror and blaming them for the cracks in our own.

Here are some hard truths about relationships. We are not responsible for the other person’s mirror. It is not ours to fix. They do not cause the cracks in our mirror.

What relationships do really well is show us where the cracks in our mirror are. It’s only when we’re truly willing to see them and heal them that relationships work.

For most of my life, I blamed others for the cracks in my mirror. I thought other people were the problem and didn’t recognize my own insecurity, my people-pleasing behavior. Every suggestion someone made, every time they told me they didn’t like something I was doing, I would change it.

The problem wasn’t in their suggestions or advice. The problem was in what I did with it. Because I took it on instead of just saying no, I ended up building a life I didn’t want. I ended up in highly dysfunctional, sometimes volatile relationships because the only form of self-defense I had was to yell and scream.

When I started paying attention to the cracks in my own mirror, I realized I was the problem. Over the years, I’ve learned how to stand my ground without picking a fight.

This is where I had to learn about the power of choice. Relationships are a series of choices. You make a choice, I make a choice, you make a choice, I make a choice, and so on. I’m not in control of your choices, and you’re not in control of mine. That means when I make a choice and stand firm in it, you get to do whatever you want—but that doesn’t mean I have to change my mind.

I can’t tell you how to respond, react, think, or feel about my choice. The only thing I can do is make it and wait for you to figure it out. That’s it. At the end of the day, it meant recognizing that the relationship itself was also a choice. No matter how much I cared about someone, I couldn’t make them stay in a relationship they didn’t want. Contorting myself so they wouldn’t leave only hurt me.

I learned how to stand in my choices and then wait for people to catch up. The more I shifted how I showed up in the relationship, the more choices I was confronted with—the more times I risked the relationship because I wasn’t willing to go backwards.

There comes a time when we have to decide for ourselves whether the relationship is worth keeping. We can change how we show up, we can try to improve the connection, but if the other person stays stuck, the ball ends up back in our court. Sometimes that means making the hard choice to leave the relationship ourselves. Not because we don’t love the other person, but because we love ourselves more and we understand that we need relationships that honour who we are in the present, not who we were in the past.

For some, fixing the cracks in their own mirrors is a little too much truth. They aren’t willing to confront it for themselves yet, and the consequence is that they dig into the dysfunction even deeper. When that happens, the relationship can become intolerable. That sets us up for a confronting choice. Do I accept where this person is and stay in the relationship anyway—or do I leave or limit the relationship to honour myself?

We can’t change the other person. We have to respect where they are, even if that means they’re in a world of pain. Fighting for the relationship by trying to get them to change solves nothing. We can ask, but if they say no, we have to respect that and make a choice for ourselves.

These are the experiences that offer awakening. Caring about people we can’t stay in relationship with is one of the most heart-wrenching things we’ll ever do. But when we step back and acknowledge that we honoured both ourselves and them in the choice—when we can recognize that we did the best we could—we begin to see what those gut-wrenching decisions gave us.

For all the pain they bring, there is also wisdom. There is clarity. There is gratitude.

Thank you for showing me the cracks in my mirror. Thank you for showing me who I became and who I was. Thank you most of all for giving me the wisdom to recognize the choice I needed to make and the strength to make it.

Healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is in relationship, and through relationship, that we learn more about ourselves than the four walls we live within could ever teach us.

Love to all,

Della