Healing is a never-ending process and there’s no way to turn back once you start.
So I get why people are scared to start. It’s intentional self-work, knowing you’re about to emotionally and mentally hurt yourself over and over again until all the pieces start coming together and making sense. Processing one issue unravels another, and suddenly you’re trapped. Imprisoned to new thoughts and feelings where the only options out are either sinking or swimming.
I think it was Theodore Roosevelt who said, “Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” More than one hundred years later and good ‘ole Teddy’s words still ring true. If the options were there though, how many people could you bet would want to choose effort, pain and difficulty over an easy life?
I stumbled upon my own self-development journey at 17 years old. I say self-development because that’s truly how it all started. I read Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” after high school and it helped frame the basis of my college career. For three and a half years, I decided I’d fuck it and do all the things that scared me, because what did I have to lose? This included solo traveling, taking public speaking courses (As an introvert, I hated myself for this choice) and becoming so involved in my school’s adPR programs that you’d start to get sick seeing my face posted everywhere. For three and a half years, I made the most of my young independence.
And by the end of my college career, I found that I had achieved so much. I ended up finding work in New York, filling my passport up with new stamps, and becoming slightly better at faking confidence in front of a crowd. Most importantly though, I gained back the confidence I didn’t realize I had lost in my teens.
And so life continued. By the end of 23 and with the help of starting therapy, I learned healthier ways of coping with familial trauma. No one ever shows you the ‘right’ way of living, not even your family. Plus, it’s not like you’re conscious of the way you grew up until one day, you are.
They say your frontal lobe finishes developing by the mid-20s and by the time mine was fully there, I noticed a few shifts in thought. These are a few of the ones I’d like to share.
One, there’s so much importance in getting to know yourself and what you stand for. The more you know what makes you feel good, the more you pursue people and experiences that give you just that. If you don’t know what makes you feel good, you’ll live your entire life riding the wave on what people TELL you, resulting in passive living and a terrifying mid-life crisis.
Two, the quicker you accept the way your life is, the wrongs you felt growing up, the regrets of decisions from yourself, friends, family or romantic partners, the happier you’ll be. It’s normal to wallow in sadness or in regret, but there’s no use in staying in that headspace for too long. The best thing is to learn from all those experiences and do your best to not repeat them in the future.
Three, your feelings from any situation are valid but your reaction in those situations, aren’t. Part of the human experience is suffering a range of emotions. It’s easy to exist in society when you’re happy. It’s not as easy to exist when you’re not. Big reminder that people can forget what you did but will never truly be able to forget how you made them feel.
Four, communication and setting boundaries is key. It’s not easy to do if you’ve grown up as a people pleaser. Truly, it’s pretty disappointing to realize many people will hate to see you sticking up for yourself. Maybe that’s why we lose friends as we grow older.
Lastly, isolation is the easiest part of adult healing. The pro to is you begin to LOVE being alone. You recognize it’s better to be with a smaller, good quality group of people than in a crowd of strangers who don’t care for your well-being. But, you’re not a chemistry experiment and you can’t control your environment. As easy as it would be to avoid being triggered, you are unfortunately a part of a social society.
The real test of knowing how much you’ve healed is putting yourself out there again and remember, you can control yourself but you can’t control people. Everyone is always going through their own stuff and we’re not the center of their worlds.
Life is about change. Some people were born ready, others learn to adapt and the ones who can’t keep up unfortunately must succumb to natural selection. Charles Darwin really popped off with his theory of evolution.
Not to inquire for too much but I hope reading this sparked a civil war within you. Whatever you choose to do with your revolutionary thoughts, just remember the world will keep on turning. Plus, what do I know — I’m just a girl writing from a cafe in New York, sharing her thoughts.
Thanks for reading 🙂
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