I Have Been Avoiding My Feelings Lately and Living in the In-Between
And it’s been strangely freeing
My pushing-myself-out-of-a-comfort-zone story is not one of success. After all, my 30-article challenge has only earned me ten dollars so far. But, it is one about exploring the unknown and learning things about myself by looking where I dare not have looked before.
For the purposes of clarity, let me borrow a metaphor from Freud. Imagine an iceberg, with layers and layers and large parts unseen.
As we’ve all watched Titanic, we know the devastating effects of what lies beneath the surface. Some people try to avoid peeping underwater for most of their lives, and I envy them. In contrast, I’ve learned to embrace the murkier parts of my mind.
What lies down there is a large part of me, and to be candid, I never had to try to look beneath the curtain. For most of my life, as far as I can remember, stuff has been floating up quite frequently, automatically.
Growing up was far from a cakewalk, and my transition to adulthood was hellish as I lacked the tools to manage my mental health.
However, somewhere amidst my twenties, I slowly started moving from blaming myself for everything I wasn’t to acknowledging the not-pretty parts of me. Accepting all of…
