This week’s sentence came up inspired from my EQ workshop with Tito Zapala, an incredible freediver, a natural teacher, and a beautiful new friend from my time here in Dahab.

The five-day workshop with him went back to basics. At first, it might have felt unnecessary, and the ego says “I already know this” but taking a few steps backward will always give you more inertia to take a big jump forward. And it has. In the water, I was able to finally understand what my body does to equalize. My attention and focus were just there. My monkey brain couldn’t be bothered with other thoughts during my dive or before. I was just aware.

But awareness for me hasn’t just stayed on the physical side. I had a groundbreaking moment of awareness yesterday. I had a very vivid dream, and it wasn’t a good one. I was dreaming that I was in my bed and being assaulted by someone…and although inside I was screaming for them to stop, I wasn’t able to move or even wake up. I knew it was a dream and was trying to wake up so much that when I did I just gasped for air. This happened more than once during the night, to the point I had to sit up and focus on my breath to calm myself down.

In the morning I woke up still troubled from these dreams, and a memory came to me. I was in the bed with someone I was intimate with (I would use the term dating but nowadays who knows what the right term should be). In the middle of the night, as I slept, he woke me up and started kissing me. We had sex. It was short and intense. He fell asleep in a few minutes, and I remember thinking “Wtf just happened?” The next day I even jokingly said I felt like I was just a “hole.” The relationship with this person ended up making me feel unworthy, unlovable, and disposable. Disposable. What a horrible word to identify with. Disposable. It’s lived in my mind for years and occasionally -after some disastrous encounter with men that I shouldn’t be involved with- it comes up again and retakes power. But not anymore.

That connection I made to that moment -to that event that I lived- and being able to see how it was the moment that the seed of “disposable” was implanted in me gave me so much power. Awareness is key. I became aware that I am no longer that girl, I have clarity in who I am, what I am worth, and that I am not a hole to be played with, nor an object to be disposed of. I can make my own decisions, have the strength and determination to speak up for myself and set boundaries.

Just like the awareness of my muscles has and will allow me to go deeper in my freediving, the awareness of what happened and what it meant will allow me to move forward with confidence in myself, knowing my worth and cutting from the root that plant of “disposable.”