Me VS Me

Everything has changed. 

What a fitting start. 

I have had so many moments of awareness lately. 

I find myself being surprised during these moments often. 

The hard moments highlighted the areas that weren’t aligned in my life. These moments of awareness led me to understanding that I was searching for answers externally that could only be found internally. 

I never knew that connecting with myself was going to change every single relationship around me. I decided to treat myself the way I treat the ones I love. 

I love hard and I love to my fullest capacity, and just when I think that I have reached the ultimate level of love, I find a deeper understanding of the word. Suddenly, I understand new feelings and I am able to view artwork, characters, movies, songs, and so many forms of creativity differently. Things that used to make me roll my eyes, now make sense. 

That was my sign that I was afraid to feel. I was locked up tight. It’s not that I didn’t feel anything, because believe me I did. I just felt them all by myself. I wrote to myself and we cried it out and listened to the same sad songs over and over again. I felt the pain and torture of the hardest moments, by myself. 

Sure I fell apart sometimes in front of others, but I was always quick to get it out and pull it back together, wave it all off as if to say, “See, I’m fine. It’s all fine. There is no need to worry about me.” 

That was my sign that I was a people pleaser and that I put everyone before myself. 

I had to face the hard truth that I was creating all of this chaos. I was creating these feelings in my brain and body. Nobody was making me do any of this. Communication was lacking and I was assuming a lot. I wasn’t taking care of myself.  I was always choosing someone else over myself. That was all  from within. 

There is so much power in that moment. 

I truly understood from that moment on that I was choosing everything and I couldn’t unsee it. 

I was terrified to say what I really needed to say, because I always kept that stuff inside. I had no idea what would actually happen if I said these things out loud. All I knew was what I had built inside my head and my survival mode always found something to be afraid of. 

I saw a lot of examples of what I didn’t want to happen, and I didn’t give much power to the things that I did want to happen. They felt easy and good. I didn’t have to expend any energy into them because my survival mode didn’t need to hold onto those. They were safe. I was always looking for what I needed protection from. My experiences told me that was smart. I didn’t have any reason to change that, but it was actually what was keeping me stuck in survival mode – and-  sending me deeper into living in survival mode. 

I often found myself obsessing about the past. Like if I could find THEE moment that things started going wrong and heal it, everything would be fixed like there was a magic moment in the past that held all the answers.  Every time I thought I found it, I also found something else that had hurt me and changed my course. It felt never ending and often hopeless. 

I was getting stuck in the past. 

While I needed to understand everything I did by going backwards, I was starting to feel like I was wasting time and preventing myself from going forward. 

I had to face the facts. 

If I wanted to move forward, I had to let go. 

If I wanted something different than I had experienced, I had to find gratitude for where I had been and all the lessons that made it possible for me to switch modes from survival to living. 

I needed to start living. 

I needed to lean into the understanding that things would still be challenging. Things would happen that would catch me off guard. Nothing would ever be perfect all the time. I had to understand that there is beauty in that too. 

I was going to fail my way forward.

How I react, how well I accept things, how deeply I trust in myself and this journey reflects how much I will enjoy it. 

It is all up to me how I respond and what I do with what life has in store for me. 

Holding onto what hurt me, didn’t change what had happened. It was holding me back. Feeling it all the way through and then letting it go- saved me. It set me free.