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Cutting It All Away - AND REVEALING MY TRUEST SELF

How Losing It All Helped Me Find Everything That Matters

By Melody RossPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
176

These last years, I found myself in a complete mental and emotional breakdown — a place I never thought I would or could ever be. I was always the happy one. The optimistic one. The resilient one.

I crashed when life crashed. And….my scissors and my craft knife saved me. They are still saving me. I took some advice from Bruce Lee, he knows what’s up:

"It is not daily increase but daily decrease, hack away the unessential. “ Bruce Lee

I didn’t think I was going to make it through the last few years. The depression, the shame, the overwhelm just about swallowed me up while I was living through what I feared most - what I was perceiving at the time as COMPLETE AND TOTAL RUIN. And, from the outside, it could look like that was the case. Financial ruin, emotional ruin, mental ruin.

But almost every morning, I designed my day through a process I call “cut and paste journaling.” It’s all about editing things down to only the essential, to get to the center of the center of the center of the center of what matters to me. And . . . I’ve had to decide that in a big way. Because there were very few things I could keep when the storms of life came to annihilate life as I knew it.

You see, I now live in a 27 foot RV — after living my entire adult life in the standard Pinterest-worthy 4 bedroom house, complete with the garage and closets packed to the rafters with stuff. I mean, it was beautiful stuff . . . but stuff all the same.

LIVING IN MY RV

Two years ago, we “lost everything,” as the saying goes. After a life-altering brain injury, and then the cascade of events that followed (including a global pandemic!). . . we got a head start on the HACKING AWAY — so we decided the finish the job ourselves. We did the unthinkable and decided to see what life would be like without a permanent home and without the things that are supposed to define success in our culture. We left our beautiful ranch, along with all of the belongings we’d gathered, collected and exchanged life-blood for over decades — and we hit the road to start over. First step though, we had to hack away the unessential, just like Bruce Lee said.

The word “hack away” is pretty accurate. It felt brutal, just the way a word like “hack” sounds. It felt bloody and messy and unsurvivable most days.

Let me be clear — this wasn’t some noble enlightenment experience where we self-actualized to the point of needing nothing. This was a decision we had to make because there were very few other choices. So…it was devastating. It was humiliating. It felt cruel and unfair. It stung.

But it was also liberating. And lifesaving, (although I really thought I was going to die during parts of it.) Like most people, “losing everything” was my worst fear, and I was living it.

But . . . my scissors and my craft knife saved me through it all. These tools are saving me to this day. They are the pruning shears of my soul.

I learned to scour every piece of clothing that I had clinged so tightly to, every book, every scrap, every memento; for the little piece of it that mattered most. I tore out my favorite pages of books. I cut out the beautiful embroidered pieces of my clothing. I sliced words out of magazines and manuals and junk mail. I identified the parts that felt the most like me . . . and I cut away everything else. It’s what had to be done. We could only keep enough to fit into a little RV.

In the process, I learned who I am. I learned what’s important to me. I learned what I love, and what I’d love to create more of. AND, I learned what was not me; what I didn’t want to have as part of my life anymore.

I just kept cutting and cutting and saving the beauty and the truth and the treasure. I didn’t even know why. It just helped.

I put these scraps in a box while I mourned my old life and my old self. And then over the months of this new lifestyle, that box of edited treasure became the medicine that pulled me up and out of the hole I was living in, mentally.

My great transformation came from assembling all of those “best pieces” into brand new creations, and messages, and a map to my soul’s next destination. I literally built myself back up scrap by scrap, piece by piece, fragment by fragment . . . creating something that didn’t exist until I took these pieces and re-purposed them. When I hacked away all that was unnecessary, it miraculously left behind the raw materials that I am building a new life out of. I assemble the sacred remains into the storybook of my own life. I leave space for new fragments to make their way into this new creation. I design my own life, I get to decide what pieces to keep and what pieces to let go of as my own story lives forward, day by day. I will be the one writing those chapters — not chance.

You see, sometimes life brings you to a place where survival means cutting away everything but the essential. And you have to decide what will remain, because you just can’t hold so much any longer without staying stuck right where you are.

But what do you keep, and what do you let go of?

What do you release, and what do you hold on to?

What stays and what has to move on?

What can you live without?

And who are you after so much of what constructed your identity has to be cut away?

Well, you are free.

Yes, my scissors and craft knife set me free. They do it just about every day. I look at the larger part of what I am experiencing. . . where there is so much, often way TOO much. And I examine it for the smaller part that matters most, and the even smaller part inside of that part.

And I cut and slice and edit. And cut some more. And then some more.

Until all that is left is the TRUTH. The essential. The uncovered. The real. The raw. And then I am not smothered. I can breathe. I can move. I can fly.

The best part? I now teach others to take their scissors and their craft knife to do the same. Who knew that hacking away the non-essential would lead me to my life’s purpose?

In a society that suffocates us with a message of MORE MORE MORE, it is a gloriously rebellious act to HACK HACK HACK away what is covering up the essence of who you are . . . cutting away every layer of every single thing . . . until you find the greatest discovery you could every imagine underneath it all — YOURSELF.

self help
176

About the Creator

Melody Ross

I am a nomad. I live on the road. I am an artist, a writer and a life-experiencer. I have been lots of things, built lots of things, and learned lots of things — losing it all has been my greatest teacher and the road to my truest self.

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