Offering my rawest self

Comparison is truly the thief of joy. I’ve spent too much time in 2022 ruminating on what I should look like as a mother and how my relationship with my husband should be. I let fear of other peoples issues infiltrate my own life take up space in my head and heart.

I’ve never been too concerned with how other people conduct their lives and yet, after having a baby and hitting a rough patch in my marriage, I let the noise in.

I’ve had stretches of intrusive thought anxiety and run myself in circles trying to find the source. I fall into the trap. The trap of arguing with the thoughts. The “what if’s..” that begin each conversation.

The intrusive thoughts are particularly cruel, because they leverage my deepest fears. They know the most vulnerable parts of me and conspire to work against me. They tell me lies and make me believe they could be true.

The cycle of arguing with the thoughts and then hating myself for it is complete.

I feel out of control and somehow unsafe in myself. The rise of emotion and fight or flight hormones kick in – and it feels like I’m unable to stop it. The wave crests and folds, while I stand underneath, waiting for it to hit me and wash me away.

I know the steps. I know how this works now. There’s no fighting back. There’s only surrender to it or I will surely drown. But every part me instinctively wants to fight.

Our biological wiring to survive often feels obsolete in this modern world. We wage war in our own heads, over scenarios that will never eventuate.

I pray for peace in myself. I feel such guilt and shame for the intrusive, ugliness of my own mind.

The gift of self awareness and empathy is a heavy one to hold, because it is one that deeply connects me to others and yet packs me into a tiny box inside myself.

I hold others in a way that I can never really be held. It’s both beautiful and lonely. And something I’d never trade.

If our fear is a mechanism to keep us safe, then I can soundly say, I do not completely understand mine. It is powerful, yet constructed of cryptic and non sensical chatter.

What I have learned from observing it, is you cannot turn away. It will not let you. It will hunt you down and eat you alive. The only option you have is to turn toward it and scream in it face. To let it consume you completely in one breath and then sit in its awful afterglow.

The human mind wants to find words. It wants to find labels. It wants reasons. But the body just wants to absorb the flood of its feeling. The body needs to process the feeling… it doesn’t have words or names.

We can’t accept that a terrible, hard feeling is trapped within us. It hurts in a way the mind can never comprehend and yet, it doesn’t kill us. It doesn’t destroy us. It just floats away… leaving us exhausted from the fight we waged against it.

We fight the war inside ourselves, Because that is the only one there ever really is. I can’t find compassion for myself in the ugliness of the fight within myself.

I come up short of the person I need to be. The person I idealise. How can someone champion good in the world if they see darkness in themselves?

How can I be a being of light when I feel chased by shadows?

Perhaps we are a culmination of our choices and it’s only what we do that matters. But surely, the feeling inside us needs to align with those choices.

Why is it we can only touch joy for a moment, before the murkiness of our own destructiveness seeps back in?

How do you love yourself when you feel like all you can see is the worst parts of who you are?

I feel like I’m on a constant quest to unravel the journey of forgiving the most human parts of myself. Of understanding how those things lurk in the shadows of all of us and yet feel so wrong to me. Like they shouldn’t exist in my being.

Sometimes I feel like I build a cage around my true self. I hide in there and so it becomes a guilded cage. One where I equate safety, but it becomes my prison.