It’s been a hot minute since I have been awake at 7am for no reason.

In the past, there’s been a spin class. A work shift. Some sort of set plan.

I woke up this morning with an itch to get out of bed when only yesterday I could barely leave my bed at noon.

It’s the last day of May as I’m writing to you and all I can do is take a deep breath. This month rocked me to my core. I went through probably five existential crisis’ and countless internal debates questioning my every move. I went from enjoying my new lifestyle to starting to see the reality behind it.

I spent my late teen years acting like I was thirty. I had a management job, a normal sleep schedule,  ate relatively ‘healthy’, and from an outside perspective, this looks ideal. My ducks were all in a row yet if you met me during that time period, I was nothing but miserable and alone.

As of late, I spend more time acting my age. I’m only a restaurant server now. I hang around bars. My money isn’t solely focused on palo santo or self-help books, but experiences. It’s been eye-opening but there’s still a part of me that misses my productive self-care side.

The side that loved to wake up early, juice, go to spin classes, write in coffee shops, and read all the time. The girl I am now sleeps in until 10am, runs on coffee, has trouble finishing even one book, and is afraid to work out again.

However, I can’t fault myself for my lifestyle changes. I work in an industry that keeps me until the late hours of the night. If I woke up at 7am daily, I would be exhausted. And to be fair, I used to work at a coffee shop – running on caffeine actually isn’t anything new to me.

When it comes to finishing books, I’ve found it has less to do with my attention span, but more so because the material doesn’t resonate anymore. I have a library of self-help books in my closet yet about 80% of them don’t feel honest.

2016 was the year I fell in to this field and I realize now that positive-focus books are only the beginning of a self-help journey. I actually want to find a better word to use than self-help. I don’t see what I write or the knowledge I spread as self-help, but more so self-acceptance.

I think in the beginning I was looking to help myself. I needed those books to give me solid ground, a base to tell me I’m not as messed up as I think I am. I wanted re-assurance and that’s exactly what I got.

As the past two years have gone by though, I am no longer looking to sugar coat. I want to see every part of me, ‘good’ and ‘bad.’

I don’t want to be told I was born perfect and I make no mistakes. I don’t need steps on how to let go of my negative emotions. I don’t want to push them away. I want to feel those emotions. I want to sit there and let them happen, so I can better understand them.

If I’ve learned anything on my journey to self-acceptance, it is the fact that negative emotion will never cease to exist. We can’t avoid it. There is no set point we reach where we’re happy all of the time and we’re not looking to grow anymore.

The very purpose of being human in this reality is to grow, to expand. We were designed to crave new desires. Have you ever noticed that no matter how many goals you reach, your mind can easily create a new one? It’s a never-ending journey of expansion and we ruin it by believing once we reach a certain goal, we’ll be content forever.

We don’t exist to find contentment. We are all a part of the same collective consciousness, but for our expansion, we have individual identities. We’re here to embrace those identities, discover what we want to learn from them, and enjoy the process.

 

It’s when we get caught up in this idea that we only exist to be productive and live a successful life that we miss the point altogether.

 

Moving on, another part of my life that’s been bothering me recently is my lack of exercise. I mentioned a few months back that I stopped working out due to my toxic reasoning behind it. I wanted to feel comfortable in my body as it was and after almost four months, I don’t know how much closer I am to getting there.

It felt really good in the beginning to not worry about exercise. It was a weight that I carried for three years that needed to be lifted. However, I’ve found myself feeling especially insecure lately.

My body hasn’t changed that drastically and I know that no matter how clean I eat, not much will change about my body unless I move it as well. I’ve been incorporating some flow yoga in to my morning which has been more so for stretching and less for exercise. It’s been good for my mental health, however, I’ve felt a calling to actually throw myself back in to working out.

I mentioned last week that a spin studio is coming to my town which has me stoked, but also worried. I’m scared that I’ll get obsessive again. I’m scared that the girl who used to shut the world out and focus solely on food/exercise will come back. I’m scared that I’ll go back to spending all of my time trying to create this perfect life rather than living my life.

That’s actually been my main struggle all of May – finding the balance between taking care of myself physically/mentally on my own and experiencing the outside world.

I spent most of April and May saying yes to every social encounter. Now that I’ve been feeling more exhausted and burnt out, I found myself saying no a few times this past week. The one time I said yes when I really wanted to say no, I felt terrible for all of it.

It scares me because I don’t want to turn in to someone who doesn’t socialize. I don’t want to be the girl who can’t let loose because she wants to go to spin the morning or really wants to get some sleep.

A lot of the time, I think about what my life would be like if I actually acted my age. If I had gone through the college experience. If I went through the phase of drinking too many tequila shots and eating bad pizza at 3am. If I didn’t care so much about what went in my body and felt okay with one night stands. I’ll be 22 in a matter of weeks and I can’t help but feel like I’m in the wrong decade.

It’s always been like this too. If it weren’t for the friends I had in high school, I wouldn’t have drank much at all. If it weren’t for other people taking me outside of my comfort zone, most of my teenage nights would’ve been spent scrolling through Tumblr, watching shitty movies, and chilling with my cat. A lot of those nights still happened, but if it weren’t for my friend group, it would’ve been my entire experience.

I never had the fake ID, the stories of getting blackout drunk in places I definitely shouldn’t have been.

At the same time though, I realize I’m romanticizing this whole idea of how growing up should look.

While we all have our sets of stories, I know that my own don’t need to match anyone else’s.

I go through this a lot in my head, but I’ve never really mentioned it here – I believe I was born to be an odd one out. It’s been a narrative since childhood and while I don’t know the reasoning quite yet, I do know this is how it was meant to be.

I was never meant to follow the set path laid out in this Universe. I was meant to divulge my own way.

We create our realities and with that knowledge in mind, I know that there is no yellow brick road that takes me to where I need to be. There is nowhere I need to be or an ideal I need to reach. My only purpose is to follow the calling inside of me that tells me where to go next.

It’s told me when to leave certain relationships. It’s told me when to drop out of school. It’s told me when to take a new job. It always knows where I am going even when my temporal self is unaware.

If I were never the odd one out, I doubt I would be so introspective. I don’t believe my writing would exist because I would’ve never felt a need to find my voice. I wouldn’t be so in touch with my emotions and interested in the semantics of the world we live in.

 

We’re always told being different isn’t a bad thing yet when you’re the different one, you can’t help but feel unseen by those around you. You constantly feel misunderstood. You put yourself in this repetitive mode of defense because you’re tired of being out of the group, you want to belong. If you can explain yourself away enough, maybe then you won’t seem so different.

 

It’s interesting to me that my logical mind spews me all these spiritual truths when I try separating myself from those around me. Right now, it is trying to tell me that I’m actually not that different at all. It’s the fact that I’m seeing myself as different that I’m attracting people in to my experience that appear different from me.

While I believe that to be true, I also know that feeding yourself spiritual truths when you’re trying to understand how you feel can be incredibly invalidating. Telling myself that my experience is my own doing does nothing but make me powerless to where I am. It makes me feel stuck in my patterns because I don’t know how to see myself as equal to other people.

It’s only when I let myself feel my emotions first and validate them that I can begin to accept those truths.

I have every right to feel like an outsider. I don’t even need a right to feel that, it is how I feel.

People talk of wanting to go back to childhood when things were simple and my flashbacks consist of extreme social anxiety in school, being pushed around by friends, and finding solace alone in my room. While I still have a plethora of good memories, I’ll never forget how disconnected I felt back then.

 

Those emotions were real.

That pattern following me through the first eighteen years of my life was real.

Trying to understand my social anxiety and beginning to stand up for myself now is also very real.

 

In the self-help field, most teachers try to get you out of a victim mindset. They tell you that playing the victim is absolutely the worst thing you can do for yourself. I say they’re wrong.

 

Sometimes, that very validation that you went through something traumatic and the allowance of being able to grieve from it is what helps you heal. We need to accept what we went through, not brush over it with spiritual truths and positive focus.

 

It’s only then that letting go of what happened feels like a viable option. We can tell ourselves we don’t care about what we experienced, but the longer you avoid something, the stronger it will return to you.

So, instead of trying to find ways to feel included in this world, I’m looking to accept my differences.

I already feel better having voiced that alone. Thing is, I may feel different, but I wasn’t created by accident. I wasn’t designed as someone to conform, I was created to be a curator of new ideas.

 

I don’t have to create a new narrative for myself. I can accept the one I’ve been given and use it to my advantage.

 

I mean, think about it – feeling anxiety in social situations has always been an issue for me. Internally this has been a detriment, but when it comes to how others feel, I am golden. I can read social situations like clockwork and know how to make people feel included. It’s easy for me to get along with an assortment of people because of it.

It’s the sole reason I believe I’m empathetic and I wouldn’t trade having empathy for the world, even if it bites me in the ass sometimes.

I don’t know where June is going to take me, but I’m glad to be turning the page on May.

I’m still a little lost when it comes to intertwining where I am with where I used to be, but in the grand scheme of it all, I don’t think I have to.

It’s okay to move away from who you used to be while still taking some of those bits and pieces along the way. While I love the feeling I get after a good spin class or having an early morning routine, I also don’t miss the distorted body image and exhaustion that came along with my past.

 

There’s always going to be a yin and yang to every aspect of our lives. I think the purpose is to find the yin and yangs we’re willing to put up with.

 

From there, I can only hope that the pieces begin to fall together for me. I’ve never done well in states of limbo, but maybe that’s the challenge. The idea that I need to be one vision of myself or another may actually be nothing more than my psyche trying to integrate the two.

None of us should strive for one ideal. We’re multi-faceted creatures that can offer so much more than the boxes we put ourselves in.

Break those boxes down.

With an entire world surrounding us, cardboard as our limit is nothing but humorous.