Honoring myself

When I look back at my time in graduate school, I will remember the biggest lessons I learned were about the value of self-awareness and honoring who I am. I’m naturally an introspective person, but I have a tendency to ignore my feelings out of a perceived obligation to others. During my time here, I realized the value of being introspective and being myself so I can create a life I look back on with pride.

We live in a society where we can avoid being alone with our own thoughts, but we all need to have time to be introspective and reflect on our lives. I don’t even want to walk my dog without something to entertain me as I have plenty of podcasts to listen to and enjoy. Though I like to distract myself from my thoughts and feelings I realized some of the best ideas and realizations I’ve had were when I was quiet and alone. One of the biggest decisions I made this year was to get intentional with self-awareness in order to understand who I am and who I hope to be. Self-awareness exists on a spectrum and something that takes deliberate action to cultivate. The ways that I’ve cultivated self-awareness is through having alone time in order to ask myself questions, journal, and pray. I needed to take action because I was experiencing a lot of regret about past decisions and I wanted to alleviate those feelings and make better decisions in the future.

Self-awareness is important because we all need to know what we want, think, and believe outside of the influence of other people or society. If I know who I am I can make better decisions about our life, decisions that can impact my happiness. I’ve realized how important self-awareness is and how the absence of it can lead to an internal conflict because I made a decision that doesn’t align with who I am. What does that internal conflict feel like? For me the feeling can manifest in different ways, but sometimes I begin to feel discomfort within my body and mind because I’ve chosen to ignore me. When I know what I know and I ignore that feeling, that realization that I should have made another choice can be difficult to acknowledge and accept. For a long time, I struggled with anxiety, so much so that I couldn’t sleep at night. I realized some of the causes of my anxiety were because the choices I made didn’t align with myself and that I made choices in order to please or impress other people. Initially I was mad at myself and spent a long time wishing I could take it back. I spent so much time stuck in regret and anger, constantly talking about and dwelling on my problems. After a while, I decided I had to move on and look at my future not the past. After I accepted that I have a pattern of ignoring me, I decided I wasn’t going to continue the pattern and I would be honest with myself and others to live a more complete and healthy life.

When I look at my life I see how I’ve benefited from being self-aware and how I’ve suffered from a lack of self-awareness. I’ve benefited because I can be honest with myself about what I value and honestly look at my abilities, likes and dislikes to help make decisions easier. If I know myself, when “great” opportunities present themselves that don’t align with my life goals, I have an easier time saying “no thank you.” For example, I know that I love living in the south and living in smaller cities. This knowledge made it easy to tell recruiters that I didn’t want to live in Washington D.C. or New York because “it’s not for me.” Self-awareness has helped me decrease one of my biggest foes, comparison. I can accept that some things are weaknesses and I will not be good at, such as dancing. I’ve tried to dance and have injured people in the process, so I’ve decided to leave dancing to people with a little more coordination. A few years ago I would think that acknowledging a weakness meant that I was weak, that I “gave up” or was a “quitter,” but now I realize that is not the case. Just as there are things that I cannot do, there are things I can do such as crochet and provide encouragement to others. I can and do take the time to cultivate my strengths which fills me with joy.

The freedom of realizing and acknowledging my values is something I don’t take for granted. I know what I need to be happy and successful and I’m making decisions that will allow me to experience happiness. One of the biggest realizations I had this year was that I will not betray myself again because I refuse to take on someone else’s dreams for my life when those dreams aren’t mine. As I’ve become more self-aware, I have a freedom because I know who I are and who I’m not. I can accept my weaknesses and strengths and rather than being ashamed, I can own it, laugh and move on with my life. I can now make better decisions and I don’t feel bad because I’d rather feel the pain of potentially disappointing someone else than look at myself and my life with regret, knowing that I didn’t want the life I’ve chosen, but that I chose it out of obligation to someone or something else.