If I’m being honest, I tend to write these posts a few days in advance. I was never one of those students who did their best work hours before it was due – I liked the feeling of having all of the time in the world. This post is supposed to be up in a few hours.

When 2018 began, my main focus was to listen to my emotions and let them lead the way. If something doesn’t feel right in my gut, I know it isn’t and I’m up for changing course. The most surprising thing I’ve learned so far is that I hate being forced to do anything. If you’ve read any of my posts for the past two years, I can hear a unanimous ‘we already knew this, Kim‘ but it’s true. Some of the most substantial truths for us take a bit to actually sink in.

I’ve spent the majority of my life living according to what I’m supposed to be doing.

Rewind four years ago and I thought my body needed to look a certain way, so I followed the diet plans. I did the workouts. I felt it was the only way to create change in my body despite how miserable it made me.

Once my focus changed from food to spirituality, I did the same thing. I spent all of my days trying to plan, read, write, meditate, and only allowed 10% of the outside world in to my bubble. I became attached to this idea of living a perfect positive lifestyle that I really stopped living altogether. This continued up until a couple of months ago.

I would look to people who inspired me and implement absolutely everything they did in to my routine. No matter how burnt out I felt, I told myself that if Polina or Kalyn did it, I should be able to do the same. I held myself to a standard based on what others were doing and not where I actually wanted to put my energy.

I didn’t watch much television anymore. I disconnected from pop culture and if you said a Vine reference to me, I would have no idea what you were talking about. I felt completely out-of-place in conversation because while everyone else was experiencing life, I was in my room studying every aspect of how to live. So it’s no surprise that while the past two years have been some of the most transformative, they have also been some of the most lonely.

 

That is, up until I quit my job.

 

Since the middle of December, I have been unemployed. The only tasks on my plate were these posts, applying to jobs, and running mundane errands. Coming from a place where I spent entire days away from home to being able to just be with myself for hours was a strange transition at first. I had an existential crisis not even 48 hours after my last day – I wondered if I were truly making the right decision. It felt strange to be leaving a place I called home for the past three years to ‘find myself’ essentially.

I started the process with trying to fill up my time with exercise and turning my writing in to a marketable platform. All of the people I look up to work from home, so I tried to see if that would be a good lifestyle fit for me.

I took the morning workout classes, ate the quality breakfast, and tried to do something productive work-wise every single day. If I felt off, I tried not to shame myself, but I still tried to force myself through things I had to do.

 

This led to many days of laying in bed feeling beyond lost.

 

I didn’t want my writing to become a business. I didn’t want to turn it in to a place where I promote products, set up a bunch of ads, and change my writing style all to fit a certain marketable image. I just wanted to write. So soon enough, I tossed the idea of making writing anything more than a hobby. If down the line, the idea of selling it or writing a book interests me, so be it, but right now, I like having it as a therapeutic backbone.

Once I came to terms with that, I noticed my focus became strictly involved with exercise. I thought, ‘Well, since I have all of this free time, I might as well get in shape.’ While I should have known better, I can’t shame myself for what I didn’t know at the time. I really did think that working out a ton would feel good.

However, I know now that despite how much progress I have made with body image, the wound is still there. The thoughts of working out almost everyday being fun quickly turned into it not being a sustainable routine once I was employed. I hit this realization in the middle of a gym session one day and suddenly it all felt different. It was true.

When I had a job again, I wouldn’t be able to exercise all of the time. Flashbacks of trying to fit exercise in to a work schedule came back and I felt terrible. I thought, ‘What’s the point of doing this is if I know it won’t last? What’s the point if my body will just go back to how it is now?’

 

It’s at this moment that I hit an ‘aha!’ as Oprah would say.

 

Since my issues with my body began four years ago, I have never actively stopped trying to change my body. I may have stopped working out for a month or two, but only due to lack of motivation, never because I felt okay with where I was. The thought of working out always crossed my mind and the shame spell always followed for not being consistent.

I’ve touched on this before, but the state of our bodies physically is a manifestation of how we feel internally. Despite how much exercise I’ve partaken in over the years, my body has hardly changed. If anything at all, my size has gone up.

I’d eat all the ‘right’ foods, do all of the ‘right’ exercises, and nothing. I continued to look in the mirror and see no progress. This always lead to the repeat cycle of discouragement to ‘this’ll be the time where I actually find something that works.’

 

So, after that day at the gym, I came home and really thought about this.

 

I’ve spent the past four years trying to change my body and nothing has come of it. I’m grateful it put me on a plant-based lifestyle and opened my eyes to the self-help world, but nonetheless, trying to change my body continues to have an insane amount of triggers around it.

I thought to myself, ‘What would happen if I tried to love my body where it is now? If I tried to fully accept where I am and be okay with how I look? If I stopped exercising and ate exactly what I wanted?’

For some, this seems like a such a simple ideology but if you’ve ever experienced a body disorder, you know how hard it is to accept where you are. You feel like any time not spent on working towards your ‘body goals’ is progress lost.

Even after letting myself expand my food horizons, I finally understood how toxic exercise has been for me. The only exercise I truly enjoy is spinning but even then, I still use it as a way to feel like I am losing weight. It’s been over a month since I’ve last exercised and I’m planning on keeping it this way for a while. I want to get to place with my body where I am completely in love with where I am.

 

The only way to manifest any real change in your body is to come from a good place.

 

When you force yourself through all these exterior methods, nothing will change if your interior world needs work. The law of attraction makes it so. Plus, if you’re okay with where you are, you usually end up losing weight anyway because you’re no longer grasping so tightly to an ideal image; you loosen your resistance to weight loss. You don’t care if the weight comes off anymore because you love where you are.

That’s been a life-changing mindset shift since the year began and I couldn’t be feeling better about my body. The better it gets, the better it gets.

So, without exercise and a need to be the next billionaire blogger, I was drowning in free time. I began waking up an hour or two later than my ‘planner’ mindset used to make me do. I got up when it felt good to do so. I stopped forcing myself through the same old morning routine. Instead of going through the motions of a three-page journal entry, I let myself write until I felt like stopping. It could be one page, it could be four. It didn’t matter.

 

The premise of my life slowly shifted from what I had to do to what I wanted to do.

 

I found myself spending a lot of days engulfed in YouTube.

I watched countless celebrity interviews and press tours and remembered how much I used to love pop culture as a kid. I was a girl who was obsessed with the E! network from a young age and loved diving in to celebrities’ lives. True Hollywood Story was my crack.

It’s not in the sense that I care what they ate or who they’re dating but to understand their background and where they came from. I love researching the crap out of the media I consume. With every television show I watch, I stalk the Wikipedia page immediately after watching the series finale. I love knowing everything that went on behind the scenes.

On another note, I used to love true crime shows. My mom and I watched a ton of Cold Case Files and American Justice growing up and in my teenage years, I loved watching ID shows – particularly Disappeared. There’s something so fascinating about unsolved cases and trying to piece together what might have happened. It’s even more satisfying learning about a case and doing research on my own afterwards. If we can’t tell yet, my laptop and I are inseparable.

 

I’m forever grateful I grew up in the era of Google.

 

Moving on, true crime has become insanely more popular over the years, particularly the past two (a.k.a. the time I spent being socially inept.)

A lot of YouTube channels now cover true crime cases so I found myself binging the crap out of so many channels. It’s been a great time. I’m actually rewarding myself with a true crime video as soon as I’m done writing this post.

A year ago, I would have never let myself become so involved in this kind of media. I lived a strict life of reading before bed, staying off social media often, and ignoring my phone most of the time. I took every ‘positive living’ practice to such an extreme and blamed myself for feeling so out of it.

 

In actuality, I was suppressing a lot of the things I truly enjoyed.

 

Now, I have a tv in my room (I took it out two years ago) and find myself curled up in bed with movies all the time. I love adding things to my watch list and even have Hulu and Amazon Prime along with the typical Netflix subscription.

You’d think I was twelve years old again but thing is, my life has become such a fun time. I wake up each day not knowing what I’m going to do because I flow with what I feel like doing. Some days, all I want to do is watch movies. Others, I break out my notebook and study the crap out of the spiritual things I still love.

That’s the thing too – I still enjoy learning and educating myself on why I am the way I am. I am fully committed to my own healing process but that doesn’t mean our entire lives have to be lived in the shadow.

 

The main point for existing in the physical realm is for us to not only heal, but to enjoy ourselves. It’s for us to follow the things that feel good which until recently, I didn’t realize was different for everyone.

 

When I would take inspiration from others and end up hating what they preached, I failed to realize that what’s true for someone else may not be true for me. I can look at what others do and implement things that seem exciting to me, but if I find they don’t feel good in the end, I don’t have to stick with it. It’s all trial and error.

I used to tell myself I had to be asleep by a certain hour. I completely shamed my teenage night owl self and got upset if I were ever awake past midnight.

 

In January, I don’t remember if I ever mentioned this or not, but I had an immense amount of trouble sleeping.

 

I’d lay down at nine, be awake until midnight, and wake up every hour in hot sweats. After some shadow work, I realized it was due to being anxious about when something would manifest in my life, but also because I had resistance to being awake late.

Thing is, if you’re up late and can’t fall asleep, the best thing you can do in that moment is to stay up. Laying there and being mad about not being asleep only makes it worse because you think there’s something wrong with you. You wonder why others can sleep perfectly fine and you’re awake surrounded by negative thoughts.

There is no set bedtime for anyone, there is only what works for you. Fall asleep when you’re tired, plain and simple.

I used to avoid all electronics before bed because it was the ‘right’ thing to do according to self-help books, but I actually find I sleep better if I fall asleep to a movie or show. I’m telling you, we as a society believe there are so many rules to follow when it’s really only a matter of what’s true for us.

There is no right or wrong, there is only what does or doesn’t feel good to do.

 

Taking these two months off has been an absolute breath of fresh air. It’s funny that after reconnecting to things I loved as a kid, I feel like myself again. I feel like my own person.

I learned that we don’t have to make time for a spiritual practice, but to make our lives a spiritual practice.

Laying in bed watching a movie can actually be a form of meditation; you’re off your phone and completely in the present moment with that movie. Or, you’re with other people laughing about it and truly enjoying each other’s company.

 

I know I needed to go through every process of force to understand what it feels like to be in the flow, so I regret nothing. The process is always our biggest teacher and makes the end result that much more sweet.

 

So, I’m 99% sure I will continue to stick with Sunday posts, but since implementing this new way of life, I no longer want to feel forced to do anything. I was actually really in the mood to write today so the schedule worked out, but know if I’m gone randomly, writing a post wasn’t in the cards that week. It didn’t feel right.

Actually listen to this, if you check for a post on Sunday and there isn’t one there, let that be a reminder to you to live out the flow of your own life. The fact there isn’t a post means I’m listening to my own internal voice and not writing when it doesn’t feel authentic to do so. Either way, I’ll still be with you.

I start a new job in roughly a week, so I really just wanted to reflect on what this mini-vacation taught me. It was a break I didn’t know I needed until it was here. It didn’t make sense fully at the time but my gut was right, so if you’re feeling the same as I did, please listen to it.

Things always find a way of working themselves out and I found a job that couldn’t be more perfect for the life I’m living now. I’m going to be surrounded by tons of people, close to home, and making more money than I ever have. You can never foresee exactly how your life will unfold, but if you live according to how to feel, the cards will line up perfectly.

And as always, the better it gets, the better it gets.

Take care of yourselves, friends.