the cost of finding yourself
where do I go from here?
I’m not sure where to take this piece. Or even what it is to be. Prone to writing with a point and a purpose, this is an exercise in humility and meeting myself where I am.
This year has been a reaping of all that I have sown in my efforts to grow.
2 years ago, I decided it was long past time to confront the anxiety that had so long muddled my perception and my capacity to live & love. It didn’t exist in a vacuum; I knew the theory and the unprocessed incidents that had so tangled inside of me.
Of course, at the time of setting this resolution, it came with external actions and conditions that I was certain could force me into nervous system alignment.
Waking up at 7AM every day to walk on my treadmill or outside for an hour.
Stop drinking and eating processed foods.
Take my vitamins.
Meditate every night.
Sunshine, journaling, water, and all of those things that the wellness system is certainly right about being good for you, but that have no capacity on their own to really heal a person.
Well, I failed constantly. My body likes to sleep; I share a food system with another human who had no such resolutions about eliminating toxins from the fridge and pantry. My vitamins made me sick, meditation felt forced, the treadmill was unendingly boring…
And my anxiety grew. Why can’t I do such simple things? Why must I be doomed to fail and fail and fail?
It took a long time for the light to find me, however it did, that of course my body and mind did not need one more bit of forced perfectionism. Because how could piling on further to the root of my anxiety spiral cause anything other than total and utter burnout?
None of those things helped me. At all. I still don’t do them, though I have found pockets of balance that allow them. But I think my openness and willingness to not hate myself one second longer showed me that I could walk my path blind. Not knowing where it went or what I would meet along the way. One step in front of another. And it fundamentally changed me.
It severed friendships.
It moved me across the country.
It unearthed long overdue boundaries.
It changed my job (including a period of unemployment I would never have been able to tolerate previously).
It showed me new interests.
It revealed new opportunities.
It altered relationships.
It brought me back to life.
And it was expensive. Not altogether financially… but I paid the price of my awakening. In years of backlogged pain that I am still unearthing. In doubt, so much doubt. In resistance from those who liked me small.
But I gained so much in return. I found myself for the first time in 28 years. It came on fast and heavy; I opened myself to the universe of things, and they found me. Generally, I am a cynic, but I’ve started to wonder if that worked against me for longer than it needed to. If all of the angst to control, the only peace I have ever felt has been in the last 6 months of learning to let the fuck go.
Resigning to the unpredictability of life has set my nervous system on fire and yet allowed it to find solace at the same time. I find myself grasping at how to explain it to others, but likely more so for myself. How wholly the earth has shifted before my eyes and how I have no tools with which to make sense of any of it. Life looks different. I am different. I feel, and that alone is a significant difference.
The consequences are not insignificant. I built a life on insecurity and falsehoods that felt safer than the unknowable truth. I built relationships with people who reflected back to me the love I understood myself to deserve, that wasn’t really love at all. But the thing is, I still want these people and this picture. I just wish it was not so predicated on my lack of identity. Because now she’s here and there’s no going back and I didn’t create space for her and the growing pains hurt and we’re squished into boxes we no longer need and no one recognizes us but we’re no longer explaining ourselves to anyone.
I don’t want to fight. I want empathy to heal us all. Because though these people may not understand the powerful truth of unconditional love or believe they deserve it, I find that I do love them this way. Unfair as it may feel to me, I do, and I have compassion for their worries and their flaws and the human plight we all are living collectively: suffering.
But if we could just suffer together, holding one another, it would be so much better. The world would be kinder. I can’t imagine what purpose we’d need war for, or why any one person would need a billion dollars. We’d understand that we have so much to give and receive from this life. That our purpose is to do exactly this, to give and give and give and be blessed in return by the giving of others.
It’s all so convoluted now. The people I love most hate themselves and are, at the same time, some of the kindest and most empathetic souls you’ll meet. What is that? I hurt for their hurt. If they could see what I see, they would know that they are enough even when all they can do is just be in their pain. I wish for them the self-compassion to not figure it out right now. But to take a step down the blind path too, and we can walk it together, hand in hand.
But instead, I feel…
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