Reconciliation

I’ve been thinking a lot about the psychological idea of integration, or the process of bringing different parts of ourselves into a more coherent whole. Lately, though, I find myself drawn to a different word: reconciling.

I feel like I am in a major period of reconciliation right now. I am working on reconciling my heritage and spirituality by attending Mass again. I am reconciling the younger version of myself with the person I am becoming as I prepare to enter the counseling profession. I am also working to bring together grief, old wounds, and past trauma with new insights, inherited beliefs, and chosen values.

In many ways, I feel as though I am reconciling all of my identities. The queer self and the spiritual self. The skeptic and the seeker. The liberal who values change and the person who finds meaning in tradition. My Sicilian heritage, my years as a teacher, my future as a counselor, and the writer, poet, and artist who has always been searching for language to make sense of it all. Rather than asking which of these identities is the “real” me, I find myself asking how they have shaped me and what it might mean to allow them to coexist.

In counseling, I have also been doing deeper work around grief. I completed a grief timeline focused on a significant experience and how it has shaped me over time. That process has made it clearer to me that reconciliation is not only about identity, but also about grief. About learning how to carry experiences that have shaped me without letting them define me in a single, fixed story.

Carl Jung described this process as individuation, the lifelong movement toward becoming more whole by recognizing and integrating the different parts of ourselves, especially the ones we tend to ignore or keep separate. I do not experience this as becoming someone new. I experience it more as learning to live alongside myself more honestly, without needing to resolve every contradiction into something simple.

The more I reflect on that idea, the more I wonder if growth is less about becoming someone new and more about reconciling with who I have been all along. Not erasing contradictions, but learning to hold them. Not choosing between identities, beliefs, or experiences, but allowing them to exist within the same life. Wholeness, for me, is starting to feel less like resolution and more like relationship, learning how all these parts of me speak to each other over time, even when they do not fully agree.

The Two Fridas (1939), Frida Kahlo