It’s felt really good to set aside blog time again.
I was scrolling through my Instagram archive last night and I can clearly see the moment I stopped.
I didn’t realize at the time how down I was. I didn’t used to care if anyone read or not, I just wrote. I loved the outlet and it gave me a creative sense of self. I went in to this mindset of ‘no one is reading so what’s the point’ when I never did it for other people. It was a cop out to avoid the things I loved doing. It’s true though that when you’re going through a rough patch, you stop doing all the things that bring you joy.
When you read about depression and other mental illness, you see the symptoms laid out for you, but you hardly relate them back to yourself. It’s easy to see when other people are going through it, but when it comes to you, you always want to tell yourself you’re not as bad as you think.
My depression has been around for as long as I can remember, so my mental state seems normal to me now. When I start acting in different ways, I don’t really notice. Not writing anymore never really hit me as I was doing worse, but more so that I had too much going on in my life to keep up with it.
While part of that is true, my life was busier, the other truth lies in that you make time for the things you’re passionate about.
When I first started writing, I wrote daily for months. I loved the shit out of it. Even in 2017, I wrote one or two posts a month no problem. It healed me in a way.
2018 still was filled with posts. Less, but at least once a month.
It wasn’t until 2019/2020 that I seemed to give up. I let the months pass by without checking in with myself. My journals remained empty. I hardly read. I stopped meditating. I gave up on all of the things that kept me grounded.
I worked a lot those years and I had a relationship, but clearly something was off for me to not even entertain the idea of posting anymore. I went silent on social media unless I was randomly recording myself at a bar.
I know there’s so much more to life than our social media, but for me, mine was so intertwined with my blog. I loved posting little motivational captions on my photos or sharing my life on my media stories.
It feels dumb to some, but that’s how you connect with people you’re not around anymore. You post a story and someone you don’t talk to often reaches out over it. You share a blog post and someone messages you saying they enjoyed it. It’s these little social interactions that made it fun for me.
So, losing that as a part of my life changed how I felt more than I realized.
I’ve only been doing this five years, but when you’re only twenty four, that’s a long time. It’s almost all of my adult years.
Coming back to it now feels like a breath of fresh air.
It’s a commitment that doesn’t feel so far off now.
I tell myself at times that there’s nothing to write about, but in a world where we’re all feeling a little lost, it feels nice to hear others’ perspectives.
We hear our own thoughts and live in our bodies daily. We’re used to how we are, but others aren’t.
Everyone has their own story even with the similarities we all share.
It’s weird having so much time for all of these things again.
I was used to working daily and feeling exhausted and now, I get sleep and have days to myself. It feels very reminiscent of my early writing days.
The difference now is that I went through my crazy phase with everything. I’m not buying every book and looking to add every routine to my life anymore. I’m not doing things to fit an idea of what I should be doing, I’m doing them because they make me happy. It feels like an addition to my life rather than something that must be done.
I was a lot lonelier last time around.
I didn’t really have anyone I connected with, so writing was all I had.
I have people in my life now that care about me as much as my depression wants to tell me otherwise. My thoughts get warped some weeks, as we saw in my last post.
It’s hard to fall back in to things you loved when you remember the sad parts about it. I know how lonely I was then, so trying to incorporate those things back in to my life triggers the part of me that remembers how alone I felt.
I’m in a different season of life though.
I’m not the same person I was back then.
The part of my brain that wants to focus on the bad times tries to trick the other part of me that wants to improve my life.
I went through a lonely period, but it wasn’t because of these habits. It wasn’t because I wrote often. It wasn’t because I journaled and meditated. It wasn’t because I exercised.
I felt lonely completely outside of those things, but because those things filled my life then, I built this negative connotation around them. I built up this wall that tells me I’ll only be lonely again if I work on myself again.
It sounds silly typing that out, but that’s where my mind goes on those bad weeks.
Instead of pushing through doing the things that make me feel better, I focus more on past emotions.
No one wants to feel alone in this world.
We’re built to form human connections.
There’s a quote I read once that goes suffering comes from feeling separate from something and joy comes from feeling connected to something.
When we feel separate from something, we feel all of those bad emotions we want to avoid.
Lonely.
Misunderstood.
Rejected.
When we’re in a state of connection, everything feels like it fell in to place.
We like where we are in life.
We feel bonded with the people around us.
We’re excited for the future.
It’s all night and day.
When we break it down, of course none of us want to do anything that’s ever brought on a feeling of separation. It’s completely against our nature as humans.
We have to understand the difference between something being the cause of feeling separate to our thoughts drowning away any positive aspect of that thing.
Sometimes we have to look deeper at where our emotions stemmed from in the first place.
For me, I was already feeling lonely back then before I added those things to my life.
I hardly knew anyone and felt completely lost in where my life was headed.
Writing gave me clarity on more days than not, but that negative emotion I felt already became attached to that habit.
I’m only now starting to unlearn that thought I created.
It’s hard to question the things in our heads because everything feels so rational at the time. We feel a certain way about a thought so it must be true.
Thing is, our thoughts only have power when we believe them.
Without belief, they have no reign over us.
We can watch it pass us by rather than grasping it and making it true.
Don’t get me wrong, our thoughts don’t ever mean to hurt us. They try their best to make sense of the world around us.
If something confuses us or makes us feel a certain way, we want to make sense of it.
We want the world to align with us. Everything feels scary when we don’t have understanding.
So, we try to connect everything.
We look for the triggers that arise when we’re sad and move towards eradication.
We cut out anything that’s ever made us feel that way.
It could be people, environments, habits, etc.
We look for all the times we felt hindered and use our minds to find solutions.
I felt lonely so I completely immersed myself with other people when I had the chance. I was out all the time. I formed relationships with others. I made that my entire life because I never wanted to feel the way I once felt.
Now, coming out of a relationship and essentially having all this alone time again, I’m left with two paths.
Either focus my energy solely on friendships and make that my priority or go inward to myself again. Fall back in to the things that made me happy when I was in one of my darkest periods.
For some reason, my mind tells me I can only take one path.
I can only choose relationships or only self-care. I want to see no in-between because I’m not used to having both as options.
When I have a good self-care week, part of me almost gets nervous for when I have to be around others again. I can’t explain it. The part of me that sits here to write and does all of these things for myself feels madly different from the girl who gets drinks with friends.
It feels like I have to pick the person I want to be when both sides are me. I’m not limited to one side of myself just as you aren’t either.
We’re all made up of multiple sides of ourselves. We’re not the same person with our parents as we are with our friends. We aren’t the same person with our boss as we with our co-workers.
That could be relative depending on your life circumstance, but the point I’m trying to make is that we don’t behave the same around everyone. We pull out different aspects of our personality around certain people without even realizing.
The side we present at a job interview is different than we’d behave around people we know.
How big or small that line is depends on each person. Some find it easier to mold each interaction, but there’s always a small aspect we keep to ourselves around certain people or situations.
I spent a lot of my time hiding my spiritual/writing aspect in my daily life when I started out. It felt like my own little secret even though it was completely public. Starting it off that way especially when I was in lonely place only adds clarity to why I behave the way I do now.
I believe I have to pick a side of myself to be because I did it in the past.
Thing is, I can have both. I can be completely involved in my self-care while having other people in my life too. It doesn’t have to be my own little secret anymore.
I kept it that way due to my own insecurities around it. I grew up feeling very isolated from everyone but the friends I made. It was hard for me to be the life of the party in groups of people or open up. I hated classroom icebreakers and any group project. I kept to my circle because I was a quiet girl growing up who never really broke out of her shell.
Going in to my teenage years, I stuck with my group because I felt safe there. They knew who I was and I didn’t have to wonder if I’d be accepted or not.
I see now how that all translated to my adult life.
I treated my self-care side like a secret because I remember kids not understanding me when I was younger. I have no problem talking about writing to people who know me, but back when I started, I hardly had friends. I didn’t want to share anything that might make me not feel accepted. It was a direct correlation to my childhood.
It’s definitely been a process trying to break that wall now, but I’m trying to feel better about it. I know writing weekly will only help me work on those barriers.
We’re so much more than we give ourselves credit for.
Every single part of us is worth sharing even when we feel a sense of uncertainty about it.
Like I said earlier, we stray away from anything that made us feel separate in the past.
It’s like a child touching a hot stove. They do it once, feel the pain, and create a mental reminder to never do it again.
We live our lives based on the pain we once felt. We live to avoid and ignore anything that might trigger us when sometimes, the things that hurt us fully existed in our heads.
We get our heart broken and decide to stop opening ourselves up to romantic relationships. We never want to feel that pain again because we remember how terrible it made us feel.
There’s a difference between the hot stove and love though.
With the stove, it will hurt us every single time.
No matter how many times we try to touch it, the pain will occur.
With love, there’s a layer or uncertainty.
There’s no telling what the people entering our lives will make us feel.
Even if we’re heartbroken multiple times, each person breaks our heart in a different way.
Humans can’t be broken down to a hot stove.
There’s no telling what each interaction with them will bring us.
We’ll have times where our mind tries it’s hardest to keep others out, but somehow, someone will make their way in. They’re different with you.
They show the patience someone else never did.
They love you regardless of the things others told you were unlovable.
It’s a gamble, no doubt, but no certainty lies there.
Shutting yourself down from things that hurt you that don’t retain the same certainty of a hot stove is only closing yourself to future experiences.
That’s where our thoughts need to be challenged.
Just because something hurt you once doesn’t mean it will happen again.
Just because I wrote when I was lonely doesn’t mean that writing will make me feel lonely again. It’s a mind game solely based on past experiences, not future potential.
So, this week I challenge you to look at your thoughts.
Look at where you’ve cut yourself off in life due to your past. Is the future of this experience a certainty or an unknown?
The unknown is where possibilities are born.
That’s where things change for us.
Never act like you know the future.
None of us do.
We’re full of evidence in our heads of what’s to come, but it hardly plays out the way we expect.
Think about it.
In a murder case, evidence may lead you to answers, but if there’s any chance of reasonable doubt, the suspect comes back not guilty.
Wherever you’ve felt stuck in life and closed yourself off, look at the reasonable doubt.
That’s where you know you’ve stopped yourself from trying again.
None of us deserve a shut and closed case on the things that matter to us.
We owe it to ourselves to re-open the parts we know need a second chance.
It’s time to let that second chance find you.
Love your writing ❤️