Can You Really Sit With Yourself?
Life would be so much easier if things were black and white, just think of how much bullshit we could cut through. Life would be less mentally exhausting and painful. Unfortunately life is far from black and white, it is complicated. It is a range of highs and lows, a mix of emotions and a spectrum of colour.
When we feel hurt, we want to ease that pain and discomfort. We want that pain to be over and that is our natural response. We can reach a point where anything at all to take the pain away is an option. At one of my lowest points, I thought about suicide. I never wanted to die, but I wanted the pain to be over — it was too much.
There are many different things in life which can lead us to feeling hurt. Maybe something that happens in our family which causes a rift between each other. We lose someone who we love to death as they pass on. We lose someone we thought we could trust, we lose a friend. Loss can be a big source of that emotional pain we experience. Or we experience something which is psychologically or physically traumatic — or maybe something which is both!
It’s fucked up. It’s like a vacuum just sucking the energy of life from you. That is a dark place to find yourself in and it feels like there is no escape. There were so many times when I felt like there was no way out and I would be stuck in that negative depressing state forever. You’re convinced you need to solve a problem and find a fix. You’re desperate. You think you are never going to feel okay again.
You’re wrong.
What is emotion? Well if we look up the definition : “Emotion is a strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.”
Okay great…but in simpler terms…emotions are feelings. Emotions are products of our brain. It is a subjective state of mind and can be reactions to internal stimuli, like memories, or external stimuli, like what is happening in the world around us.
Emotions are feelings such as happiness, love, fear, anger or even hate. They are caused by the situation you are in or the people you are with. They aren’t there to be forcibly changed by you. You aren’t meant to try and fix anything so that you experience certain emotions over others. So what the fuck are you meant to do?
You feel it. You let it pass by. You sit in it.
Yes, that is so easy to say but much harder to do. However, I am someone who has been there and who has done it. I’m not just saying it — I have sat in the shit and felt it. It hurts, it is really hard and sometimes it feels unbearable.
But it will always pass.
You don’t need to hide from it, you don’t need to run from it. So many of us preoccupy ourselves with work or with other things in our life because we tell ourselves we like being busy and run off our feet. However the reality is many of those people just can’t sit with their shit. And that isn’t a “bad” thing!
What I am describing is something that is really hard to do. It is really painful and the easier option is to run from it. Many of us run from our shit, I ran from my shit for years!!!
You are in control of that pain.
Yes it is there, yes it hurts, yes you want it to be over. But you are in control. Even if it doesn’t feel like you are in control, I promise you are. If you sit with it and you embrace it. If you own it and say to yourself — “this is how I feel and those feelings are valid”. If you can do that, you will be a stronger more authentic version of you than you ever have been before.
‘Mark! What are you actually saying in real terms? How do you sit with yourself?…For real!’
Over the last number of years I have gone through periods of being a mess, a total shit show and a wreck of a person. Eventually I realised I needed to change my entire attitude to life. I needed a real fresh start. I started to dig through myself and started to slowly heal.
I can sit here now and confidently say I have worked through the shit I let pile up for years. When life throws more shit at me, I will be better placed to deal with it in the future. Because newsflash, life throws unexpected shit at us. When we deal with that shit there will be something else which comes our way in the future for us to deal with again.
When I was learning to sit with myself, there were lots of difficult emotions hijacking my thoughts day to day. I learned not to impulsively act on them. I learned not to drink alcohol to numb the pain a little bit. I learned how to stop reaching out to people for attention and caring words to make me feel better. I learned how to walk away from the mistakes I made in the past and not come back to the source of pain to try amend something which had already happened. I learned not to send texts which would be useless and ultimately make me feel worse.
Instead of looking for support and comfort from the outside, I looked at myself. I looked at my insecurities and fears, I embraced them as a part of me. Those insecurities and fears are part of being human, we all have that shit! Some of us can hide it better than others. I really learned what was hurting me and learned how to stop hurting myself further (emotionally).
Being alone is one of our biggest fears.
Straight up facts. Who the fuck wants to be alone? Like really alone? Nobody. But having the ability to sit with yourself alone in these moments is life changing.
I reached a point where I had to sit with myself and be with myself because running wasn’t an option anymore.
What have I learned?
I’ve learned that substances like alcohol cloud my judgement and make me feel like I’m less of a person. I have learned that sometimes love is not enough. Although I don’t like the phrase — you have to love yourself before loving someone else.
I have learned that the pain and the negative emotions don’t last. They hurt and they can be suffocating. Those negative emotions can make you feel sick…physically sick…but we have to allow ourselves time to feel it. I had to learn to sit in those feelings and in some ways, soak those feelings up — pretty sick right!
We are always going to have things to figure out and questions to answer for ourselves in life. Nobody has their shit together. I still have things to figure out, emotions and self confidence issues to sit in even more than I have. I still have questions to answer around life expectations and motivations — we all have that to some degree.
You need you.
Sit with yourself because there are going to be times in life where the only person who can help you is you. You need to remember you are strong and you need to be there for you.
Trust yourself. Take care of yourself. Tell yourself things are okay, because they are. Feel it.
This too will pass.
