Waking to your 'yes'

After the final no, there comes a yes
And on that yes, the future world depends.
No was the night.
Yes is the present sun.
~Wallace Stevens

I'm always thrilled – but surprised – when a woman arrives on our shores, sad and perhaps unsure of next steps but certain about one thing: Her core worth.
On the one hand, hallelujah that she has that deep recognition that another's choice to betray a partner is about the betrayer, not the betrayed. But on the other...wow, huh? Cause far more often, I hear women berating themselves. How could I have been so stupid? What is wrong with me that he cheated? What does she have that I don't? 
For me, it went even deeper than that. I wasn't so much asking what was wrong with me but rather accepting that what I'd feared all along – I was deficient and undeserving of loyalty – was playing out. My deepest belief about myself had revealed itself to be true.
Except that it wasn't. I would come to learn that. But it would take time and a lot of work.
And so I had already spent so much of life telling myself 'no'. Perhaps you did too. 
No, you can't apply for that job. You aren't qualified enough.
No, you can't buy that outfit. You don't have the figure.
No, you shouldn't host that party. Nobody will come. 
The nos were endless.
There were times I over-rode them. Something deep inside, as I grew older and gentler with myself, would allow me to at least try. But, you know...life. Often things didn't work out the way I had hoped they would. I didn't get the assignment. The book didn't find a publisher. My mother-in-law didn't adore me. My sister-in-law often excluded me. Friends betrayed me.
And though life offered up many many yes's, I attributed those to luck. To fluke. To people giving me more credit than I deserved.
Crazy huh? No's were just proof that I was right. Yes's were proof that people were easily fooled.
And so, when my husband cheated, well, what did I expect? What did I think was going to happen?
That doesn't mean I was okay with it. Not at all. It brought me to my knees. I was barely functional. 
It stripped me to my core. And when all that was left was this core belief, I curled up and wanted to die.
I didn't, clearly. In fact, quite the opposite happened. 
I was reborn.
Reduced to little more than this core belief I held, I realized something. 
I was a mom by then. I had one, then two, then three children. Three children who sometimes made mistakes. Three children who weren't perfect. But three children that I had absolute conviction were worthy of love and worthy of saying 'yes' to themselves. Yes to trying for things they wanted. Yes to opportunities. Yes to showing up. 
I had a front-row seat for the times when the world nonetheless said no. But did I think them less deserving of a yes? Absolutely not. 
And, slowly, I began to believe myself equally worthy. If I could love my imperfect children with such whole-heartedness, maybe I could love myself the same way. Maybe I could shift that core belief that I was a no to a yes. Maybe.
It took time. It took therapy. It took more therapy. It took different therapy. 
It took revisiting a whole lot of painful events in my childhood. It took forgiving my parents for the ways in which they were unable to give me what I needed. It took forgiving myself for the ways in which I'd betrayed myself. And though it wasn't required, it helped that I had empathy for the ways in which my husband as a child had absorbed similar messages as I and responded differently. But the yes he was giving himself wasn't an affirmation of his own value or anyone else's. It was rather a distraction. A way of stepping outside his pain into a fantasy world. 
We two broken people put ourselves back together. And then we put our marriage back together. 
Which is why, though I would never ever wish infidelity on anyone, I am able to say that by being so shattered, so reduced to my core belief about my value, I learned to say yes to myself. To my value, to my worthiness, to my imperfection that is nonetheless somehow enough.
I hope you give yourself that yes too. 
No is the night. And there are lessons to be learned in the darkness.
Yes is the sun, where we are revealed, and discover that we are and have always been worthy of being truly seen.