Finding the good in the shit: 2022
So, this year has been a rough one, if you couldn’t already tell from my lack of writing inspiration. (I just looked at my last story and realized it’s been OVER a year since I had a story to tell, jeez.)
I took this year to work on a lot. Me: the hardest and most emotionally intense undertaking I could ever sign up for. Believe me when I say it has indeed been a doozy of an experience. At this point of my journey, I can say I am a lot more self-aware than I was before. I say that because there has always been a large part of me that was very aware of the fact that a lot of my actions were being directed by my subconscious and I was often operating out of a place of emotional PTSD, for lack of a better phrase. (Note: I have not been diagnosed with PTSD, but I can admit that there are definitely some things that could have led to me being this way. Am I being blasé about using such a significant term? No. I am using it because at this point, I don’t exactly have a more in-depth explanation to use.)
2022 has been a wild 9 months of wins, loses, new experiences and knowledge.
What seemed like a promising start to the year ended possibly one of the best relationships I had ever had the joy to be a part of by the time summer came around. I made the decision to leave a job that I genuinely enjoyed because I felt stagnant and was slowly (or rapidly) beginning to feel my mental health decline. I still absolutely made impulsive, implosive decisions that have of course started compounding the consequences and are currently headed my way on a speeding bullet train with no brakes.
I guess I wrote this to document my current state of existence and to remind myself of a few things.
This isn’t the end of the world. Healing, living and thriving are not any sort of linear journey and sometimes choosing to do the hard work results in old habits trying to keep you in that place of comfort simply because it would “be” easier to stay the same. (Sidenote: it’s not easy. It’s just as hard to stay in a zone of comfort as it is to step out of your comfort zone.)
Everything is hard: Living your life is about choosing what kind of hard you want to deal with. Either choose the hard option of not connecting with others, yourself and finding your purpose or choose the hard option of actually living and thriving in this one life that we don’t get a repeat or do over on.
Finding yourself means you are going to be mad about stuff. Often. I can’t think of any moments that when I realized, accepted and acknowledged a habit, pattern of thought/action or boundary I held onto did nothing good for me (besides development of a wickedly terrible sense of humor) and I wasn’t outright angry about it. I also have been reminding myself that I didn’t know what I didn’t know and the only I can do from this point is operate with the new knowledge.
So, I don’t know what others have been doing with their time (I’m assuming a large portion of the world has been doing whatever it is they do every day), I however decided to take on an internal renovation project and let's just say, I’ve got good bones for some great things to come.
