4/1/22

Looking Around, Not Up






So much time has passed and although I have written a few posts that remain unpublished, this blog has mostly been resigned to sitting in a dark corner of my brain and collecting dust.

I wasn’t planning on publishing another post. I think that season has come and gone now. These days, I have little to say about my internal world, not because nothing is happening, but because so much is. And somehow all the work I’ve been putting in for the last two years in therapy seems to be paying off – my brain is better at recognizing intrusive thoughts. Better at soothing my nervous system. Better at leaning into pain and fear. And so, I don’t find myself requiring as much external processing. Maybe I don’t need others to hear me out so much anymore because I’ve learned to hear myself.

But today, I felt compelled to write about my reflections on the past year and what it reminded me that I already knew but had forgotten.

2021, you were tough and I cried a lot. Went out of my mind at so many points and often felt lost, disappointed in myself and defeated. You were also the year that I: Fell in love. Fell out of love. Ended projects. Picked up new skills. Gained a new job. Made new connections. Left the ones that weren’t in alignment. Moved into a new space. Fell off my one-hundred-and-something day streak of learning French. Learned to choose myself. Abandoned my modest reading goal. Sent out 0 Christmas cards. Grew exponentially in ways I never would’ve imagined this time last year. All things in equanimity, right?

All of life is a spiral. You always just keep circling back to lessons and truths that you think you’ve learnt and integrated way before. The good thing about it is that each time you encounter the same roadblock, it gets easier to untangle these knots because somewhere deep within there lies a database of wisdom that you’ve accumulated from your past selves.

Three more reminders from 2021:

1.       Gut feelings are guardian angels
2.       No goal is worth my soul
3.       I am a verb, not a noun

TL;DR It’s been a weird, transitory, anxiety-ridden year (I feel like I’ve said this about the last 2 years), but in the midst of it all, I got smacked in the face by unadulterated gratitude and gained a profound appreciation for this humble human experience. Some of my favourite memories were made this year and if you played a part in any of them – I love you, thank you.