No sooner had I hit ‘publish’ on my last post did I start to feel the swarm of unrest buzzing in my chest yet again. This particular unrest, which could also be named “discontent”, “unease”, “inadequacy”, or (not as poetic but equally telling) “not-good-enoughness”, was the precise feeling that I have been running from for months…months! I think that perhaps I believed that if I hid from it for a week and then up and left town that by the time I got home, the feelings would have gone elsewhere. And it worked for about a moment…and then they found me once again and rushed in like savages driven to claim my mental space as their own.
My mistake was in thinking that those feelings lived somewhere outside of me…that they were something I could somehow move away from or move beyond. They’re not. I’ve been doing a ton of soul searching lately (honestly you could argue that as a rule I drive myself crazy with soul searching) and I’ve really been trying to nail down where it is that these feelings stem from and how I have allowed them to grow so large in my life.
I could go into depth here about my upbringing, my tough teenage years, and my well developed lack of trust and sense of shame…but we all have our past and we all have our demons and truly it doesn’t matter what specifically happened…it only matters that I can name it and see what it has done to my view of the world. Naming my complete inability to trust (myself, others, my place in this world, the blessings before me, my unique vision, etc, etc, etc) has been a huge and eye opening revelation. I had kind of always thought of myself as too trusting! I think it was simply a manifestation of wanting to trust so badly that I placed my very little trust in very untrustworthy hands as if to prove myself right…no one and nothing could be trusted.
I’m slowly (slowly, slowly) coming to a place where I’m beginning to trust the ground beneath myself and the relationships that have graced my life. And one thing that I’m really beginning to feel is that I’m not going to be able to trust others and that which is around me if I cannot first trust myself.
I’m hoping that by developing a deeper trust of myself, that I can begin to feel okay with who I am and where I am…and feel that whatever it is, it is enough. It’s been lacking in big ways and I keep struggling to push myself to correct these issues and it’s the pushing (the not trusting) that’s making it worse instead of better.
I’ve made some very telling observations lately about trust and faith…and how when you trust and have faith, you don’t try to control every little situation. You stop trying to make everything perfect all the time. I have an extraordinary ability to notice when others are being controlling perfectionists…and just the other day the reflection of myself in this exact light almost took my breath away. That’s exactly who I’ve been and it’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Why am I sharing all this here? I’ve been asking myself that very question the entire time I’ve been typing this post. I think one of the most important reasons for sharing these thoughts publicly is that I need to own this. I can no longer keep trying to escape these very significant issues in my life. Trusting has to begin somewhere and I need to trust that all my thoughts…even these that don’t shroud me in a rose colored veil…are still beautiful. They are beautiful because they are true and real.
I don’t know how exactly to get from point A to point B in this situation. I think it involves a lot of journaling and a lot of art. And I truly believe it involves more of telling my story…really developing a sense of who I am, what my life is about, and what matters to me. I think it also involves simplifying and prioritizing and letting things go. And most importantly, I think it involves putting my own needs, my own desires, and my own dreams up there on the priority list with all of the others in my life for whom I care. I do not believe this is an A + B = C situation…but I do believe in first steps.
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