What you bring with you
What matters and what doesn't
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This is a newsletter that I alluded to in last weeks. I’ve had it drafted for some time. It makes me wonder if my priority is shifting in the writing process. Maybe I’m more considered now, maybe my writing is evolving with me. That tracks.
That to say - it reads kind of messy. Regardless, I hope you enjoyyyy!
With everything I’ve been moving through in recent times, a question has been popping up more and more frequently. What am I bringing with me from my past life into this new one?
This is a question I didn’t expect from healing. I thought, naively, as a child would, that the end destination is..being healed. Slate clean. Absolved. Completely perfect. Unincumbered. Free of it all.
What this question shows me is that there’s so much more freedom in choice than I thought. Now that I’ve dug around my psyche for close to 4 years now, I have the most clear picture of myself than I ever have.
Since we literally all turn 30, what I’m saying isn’t revolutionary here. The first 30 years of my life I was kind of replaying what I didn’t know was my story. Over and over I tried to reenact the conditions I was created under in inapplicable situations. We all do it, we all learn from it.
My experience is prooooobably on the more extreme end of what could happen. I saw what was completely unhinged, inquired, and realized that pretty much everything I was doing was not mine, or for me at all.
Enmeshment is a mother fucker.
This gave me a wonderful opportunity, in addition to a timely solo move to an unknown place, to re-write the entire script. I chose to do that. There was a point of no return and I went for it. Not all people can do this. I luckily was 30, single with no children, and no career. What a blessing!
I’m not joking. I think it is a huge blessing to have this particular set of circumstances while healing. I’m getting a lot of hard work done before I’m choosing to start a family.
I’ve learned that the easiest way to heal is to sort out what was and was not mine and eliminate the voices that came from someone else.
Spoiler Alert: 95% wasn’t me, or wasn’t me in authentic expression.
So many parts of my life in my early adulthood(LOL girl, you’re a spry 32), felt like they were me but were just a couple of degrees shy of the mark. The direction I was going was mine, the voices guiding me there were not. I know a lot more about those voices and beliefs now, when I hear them it makes it so much easier to identify that they are not mine so I can get on with the damn thing(being myself).
Following those voices only brought me pain and made everything crazy hard. I have a very logical approach to this stuff. The second I know it doesn’t serve me it immediately goes into The “Thank God You’ll Never Have to Spend Anymore Time on This Shit Bucket.”
When it pops up again, which it will, and depending on how fresh it’s been in the bucket, I am quick to say “Whew, thank God I don’t have to spend any time on this shit anymore.”
Sometimes writing doesn’t work like how I say it out loud. Look at all those commas! I’m sure there’s editing there, do I care? Lol I’m a writer.
I’m starting to collect things to go in the “What I Take with Me” Pile.
What I take with me is… the people I am choosing to keep in my life in the capacity I have deemed them to be in. No more going to empty wells in my relationships, I now know who fills my bucket in what way and who depletes my supply. I act accordingly and so do they.
What I take with me is… all the traumas of my life(that are clear to me at this moment) and knowing exactly what ways I cope around them. When I cope I know I’m coping and why now. I am able to take care of myself and self-regulate.
What I take with me is… a scared little girl who genuinely believes she can’t take care of herself. Her voice is fading into the background but her screams still keep me up at night.
What I take with me is… the knowledge that the 95% of the things that didn’t feel good in my past life came from voices other than my own. I don’t take advice from people who refuse to see me, choose not to, or never did.
What I take with me is… a desire and trust that eventually I’ll regulate my eating and marijuana intake. What I experience with my vices are simply old habits that were built to protect myself, they can’t be rushed to completion. They are currently not destructive and I trust they will sort themselves out in due time.
As we know from the last newsy, last week was the due time.
What I take with me is… a deep compassion for myself. I know that none of this was mine. Sometimes, because I’m used to it, I take the bait. Sometimes I don’t.
What I take with me is… checking in with myself on a very regular basis, but not too much. Too much keeps me in my feels, I’m trying to alchemize them.
What I take with me is… knowing that I’ve hidden myself for too long but not knowing how I have. I’m excited to explore this in my new reality.
What I take with me is… even the act of wanting to know what I’m taking with me, is a coping mechanism. One of the ways I try to control myself to be “perfect”, and get the “full picture.” Intellectualizing brings more pain than embodiment. I haven’t learned this lesson deeply enough and know that this will cycle into my life until the end of my days.
What I take with me is… 70 more years of this freedom and a deep, deep dedication to expanding it and seeing how far it goes.
Freedom is knowing what is pulling me down and what is lifting me up and doing nothing about either of them. Freedom is opening my eyes to the full picture and walking away, duces in the air. Freedom is a friend finding me trustworthy based on my actions.
I’ve been going pretty hard on TikTok lately. One of the accounts I follow is a woman, Jericha Szlo, who is a mindset coach with a specialty in neuroscience. I’m a big fan of the neuroscience of healing, rewiring the brain, neural pathways, etc. This perspective gives me so much solace, knowing that retraining these things takes time and pointed effort for my anatomy to change with me. Anyway, she’s awesome and she talks about doing a Self Concept Audit.
Naturally, I purchased her worksheet to do a Self Concept Audit. What I learned from the exercise is the real importance of understanding your character in life. I also learned that I challenge my self concept as a daily practice at this point and to trust that whatever is happening is happening.
I chose to starve myself today, my stomach is audibly grumbling, and I now have a headache. What do I do with that information? Stop giving it power. It’s only information, it’s information to know where I’m at today. Apparently where I’m at with that particular habit is choosing not to eat because the decision felt hard to make. I didn’t have enough energy to choose energy, I’m probably depleted elsewhere, more to be revealed.
I ended up eating taco salad, it was delicious.
I’m so grateful that I choose to be honest to the best of my ability. I was going to tell the world this two weeks ago. Before I started to take my ED seriously. Rereading this gives me so much humility. I stopped giving it power when I wrote that, it put me in a position to actually look at my shit. Sit with it. Let it feel as shitty as possible. So that I am ultimately confronted with reality. The reality that I don’t deserve the pain anymore. I value myself more than to inflict this pain.
All of this to say, I’ve released a shit ton over the last couple of months. I’ve really been focused on getting a bunch of the energy sucks out of my life. Reality takes time to integrate, I’m here watching and having fun until then.
There are some things that I take with me that feel like ill-fitting clothing. The identifier “artist” comes to mind. I don’t know what all of this means for me, but I’m so curious to see what’s going to happen. This is the fun part of the growth process. When everything is on the table, once huge, important parts of ourselves are the same sized problem as whether or not I like the color orange. The seriousness of holding identity in such arbitrary ideas is fading away, leaving play.
If there’s one thing I’m definitely bringing with me is this innate sense of playfulness that I have. This dark shit sucks if you’re taking it so seriously. I’m learning that playfulness is something that I hid away from myself. I knew people saw it in me, I just wouldn’t allow myself to see it so I hardly expressed it. I’m expressing it all over the place! Watch out hahahaha
Next time, I’ll probably want to talk and explore hiding a little bit. Until then!
Thank you, you mean more to me than you know.
-Alex