Hello Friends,
The theme of this week has been a need for more clarity. The week has just felt like so much all the time. In full transparency, even writing this blog post has been a convoluted mess. I feel that there is so much to work through, and I still need to sort it all out entirely. I have been writing and rewriting this post all day, working through everything that happened this week. This post has been tough to write. But, if you are reading it, it got sorted out enough to post, so Hooray!
The best place to start this is from the last time we talked, last Friday night. Well, on Saturday, I woke up with my stomach in knots, crippled by anxiety. I didn’t know it at the time, but this anxiety was due to the realization that my blog and all the writing I had done for it were now out for the world to pass judgment on. You see, before making an Instagram post to announce the launch of my blog, only my immediate family knew about it. One thing about me is I am a private person regarding my projects. Not because I am afraid of judgment (although I often am) but because I like to make up my mind about things before I get anyone else’s opinion or reaction.
I have been working on being happy with my work on my own accord. AKA without needing validation from others, and this is exactly what I did with my blog. I created it and wrote the first four posts before showing it to anyone. Even once it passed my standards, only my immediate family read and reviewed it. So you can imagine the shock I went into when it hit me that the whole world now had access to it. Thus, why all heck broke loose in my mind.
It was like posting the announcement opened the floodgates that had been holding every possible worry about my blog. So all night Friday night, I tossed and turned, mulling over everything that could go wrong. I was concerned about what everyone else could be thinking of me and my blog. I had every worst-case scenario running through my head. However, when I finally got onto social media on Saturday, I was overwhelmed by the love and support my blog received. I am so grateful to everyone who reached out and supported me and my blog in any way!
This brings me to lesson #1 of the week. Many of my worries aren’t actually based on evidence; they are instead based on assumptions I make. I spent the first 12 hours after my blog launched driving myself up the wall over the possibility that I could fail or someone out there would judge me instead of focusing on and celebrating the very positive fact that I had just taken a massive step toward my dreams and goals. This lesson is not to say that all my worries have no validity. Still, in this case, I spent hours worrying about something that may or may not have happened when a solid, very positive fact was sitting right before me.
Lesson #2 of this week is that I need to learn to sit in and feel my feelings.
I am a very positive person. I always force myself to look at the positive in every situation and never get stuck in bad feelings. This is a great skill, but I now realize that this is one way I avoid bad feelings at all costs. The other is through doing everything to fight them off. I will distract myself from them, physically release them through exercise, and basically do anything to get them out. Don’t get me wrong; this is another crucial and great skill. However, it has become a way of avoiding feeling my emotions.
Now that I think of it, I am genuinely afraid of feeling the bad feelings. I am scared of getting stuck in them. (Remember in the first paragraph where I said I am still figuring this out. Here I am still figuring it out) At the first sight of feelings, I automatically go to releasing them or grappling to the positive without giving myself any time to acknowledge, digest and process what I am feeling. By the time Friday rolled around this week, my feelings were so heavy I was at a loss of what to do. All week, I had been fighting the anxiety and low feelings with every method in the book, and yet I couldn’t kick them. Through journaling, I realized that nothing was the only thing I hadn’t done and now needed to do. That’s right, absolutely nothing was the only answer I could come up with. I needed to sit in my feelings and allow myself to feel and process them. So I did, and let me tell you, it sucked.
I cried, I fought demons in my head and generally felt horrible, but I was actually feeling something. I have felt so numb for so long and am just now beginning to process so many feelings from the past. No wonder I have been so overwhelmed recently; I don’t know how to deal with actually feeling these emotions. Don’t get me wrong, I am very emotional and feel very deeply. However, I have put up a protective wall with certain emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, self-doubt, excitement, imposter syndrome, etc, because of ways in which I have been hurt in the past. I have been taught that these aren’t safe feelings to feel and, thus, have learned to avoid them at all costs. I have been taught they are a waste of time and energy to dwell on, so I decided it was better to avoid them altogether. But now I am starting to feel them again!
Although it is a very hard and confusing one, this is a big breakthrough in my healing journey, and I am looking forward to continuing to dig through it! This week was filled with highs and lows, but all of it led to this big win, and that is what I will carry with me as I continue to learn, grow, and heal this coming week.
Thanks for joining me for the second instalment of Healing in Progress: A New Chapter! Leave a comment down below to let me know how this week of your healing journey went!
Until next week, My Friends.
P.S. I’m proud of you 😉