Today I am feeling really grateful. It’s not exactly a rare occurrence, but I want to write it down because I feel like on my bad days I lose sight of how good life really is.
This pandemic has brought a lot up. While being super boring, stressful and lonely, it has given me the opportunity to really explore and get to know myself on a new level. For my therapy homework, I had to write a letter to someone in my life. The purpose of the letter was to self-validate and learn about setting boundaries. However, I was really surprised by how well I felt that the letter reflected me as a person. If I had to write a three-page summary of my character, I would copy and paste that letter word-for-word.
I know that I will change in the coming days, months and years. I have honestly experienced so much change and so much growth even in the past eight weeks. To be honest, I have never really been comfortable being alone… and I’m still not. I am a human, we are social creatures, and I will probably always crave that sense of belonging. However, I am now at a point where the craving of that sense of belonging won’t cause me to sacrifice the foundational principles that I have built my very identity upon.
I realize now that my helper tendencies often drive me into identity crises. I derive so much worth from the people around me that I forget that I have intrinsic value as an individual. When those people are taken away, I feel lost and worthless. That’s happened time and time again in my life with past friends, lovers, etc., but this time it is government mandated and I am forced to face the facts. I have been my own worst enemy on my journey towards greater self-esteem. I am doing much better now and making significant progress, but the relationship patterns that I have been experiencing have been self-perpetuated.
As tough as it has been to go through this transitional time alone, I think it has helped me form better relationships with the people I love. I realize now that dependency does not equal intimacy, but really makes me susceptible to feelings of insecurity and helpless vulnerability. By deriving so much of my worth from the people around me, I have defined my value by what I can do for other people. The reality of the situation is that this means I stick my nose in places it doesn’t belong, try to fix people, and seek out codependency in order to feel more secure in my relationships. Not only does this lead to self-esteem and self-efficacy issues for myself, but it also pushes away the very people that I need in my life most, the ones who can serve as role models for self-acceptance and self-compassion.
I cannot get rid of this part of myself, the tendency to give. It is a huge part of who I am and I truly do feel that my calling is to serve others. That being said, I cannot truly serve others as a lesser version of myself. The best thing that I can do for other people is to invest time, energy and compassion into understanding myself, deriving an intrinsic sense of self-worth, and using the love and energy that overflows to help the people that I care about most. To summarize, in order to help others I must help myself first. I also have to realize that in some sense, my helping of others in the past has been selfish. While not explicitly so, I tend to help in order to develop a sense of worth. When I don’t elicit feelings of dependency from the people that I help then I feel hypersensitive and insecure. These feelings cause me to push harder and harder to try to “help”, and ultimately I end up pushing people further and further away, or actually damaging the people that I care about by lowering their own sense of self-efficacy.
I’m getting a puppy, and honestly I think that it may help curb my care-taking tendencies. I will finally have something that actually needs my help, requires psychoanalysis to be successful, and will love me for doing all of that. I think it will be a really interesting outlet and I am very excited to see how it goes.
Beyond that, I have found myself feeling thankful for things that at one point in time I would find very mundane. I am thankful for the ability to move my body, to nourish my body with healthy foods and to have clean water to drink. A tea in the morning paired with some Netflix feels like the perfect start to any day. A walk outside feels absolutely freeing. The sun feels rejuvenating and the opportunity to explore what feels like untouched areas of the world is so unique. I have always craved travel and adventure, and have now found ways to fulfill that craving in my own backyard.
I get to spend a few hours a week with a puppy, Maverick. I walk him while his owner is at work. Although he can be a bit crazy sometimes, I get an overwhelming sense of joy just from being with him. He runs with me, plays with me and gives me all the love that I could ever want during the time that we spend together. He is receptive to corrections and feedback, and since we have started seeing each other his leash behaviour is better than ever–less pulling, learning to sit and wait at intersections, more attentive to my presence. He is growing, and the improvement that I am seeing in him makes me confident saying that I will be a great dog mama.
The people that I have in my life are imperfect, as am I. The ability to accept these imperfections as a small component of a larger picture is really important. I think I used to fixate on these because other people’s flaws genuinely influenced me so much. This was because I was over-involved and didn’t have the ability to recognize that these imperfections didn’t need to be fixed, and if they did it wasn’t my job to fix them. The ability to set up boundaries with the people that I care about has been hugely helpful. Obviously it is a skill that I need to further develop–I’m not perfect and honestly setting boundaries makes me feel very anxious. Because I derive so much of my self-worth from others I worry that setting boundaries will cause me to lose people I care about. Honestly, it might. But I have to really reflect on whether the grief I may experience is proportional to the value that the relationship added to my life–do I really want dozens of relationships that are conditional and transactional? In the grand scheme of things, probably not.
Quarantine has brought to light a lot of self-revelation. I think my focus moving forward should be continued self-actualization, defined and guided by the realizations that I recently have had. While my view is forward focused, I think that in order to move forward it is necessary to reflect heavily on my past, where I have come from and how I have defined myself in the past. As far as I can see, I want to be in constant pursuit of a better version of myself. The perception of time plays some really important roles in this, and I think they can be divided into three primary categorizations:
1. Past. The past allows us to learn from past mistakes, reinforce good decisions/choices and to derive a sense of progress by looking at who we used to be and how far we have already come. While offering insight (“hindsight is 20/20”), it also offers the opportunity to recognize past success-further motivating us to pursue more.
2. Future. Thinking of the future has obvious benefits. When we reflect on the future, I think it is important to explore not so much where we would like to be with regard to money, status, social standing, etc., but more important to focus on who we want to be. Focusing on the future can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Spending too much time focusing on the future can mean that we neglect to appreciate the present moment. That’s where the next facet comes into play.
3. Present. The present is where the past and the future meet; it is where we implement actions that reflect past lessons and influence future outcomes. The integration of the past, present and future is especially important in the pursuit of future growth. When we meet a challenge in the present, the ideal situation is that we are guided by past lessons to make choices that favour the development of our future selves. We will not always be successful at doing that, so exercising self-compassion along the way is integral.
Overall, the most important component of time seems to me to be the past. The past acts as a source of reflection, a source of self-understanding and exploration, and also is integral to developing our vision of our “ideal selves” by offering insight on who we don’t want to be.
That being said, reflecting on the past is especially challenging. It is easy to place blame on ourselves and the people around us. However, that blame is misdirected and self-destructive. Instead of looking at our past choices as an “I should have done _______.” It is much more advantageous to exercise self-compassion, and look back on the past with a framework of “That wasn’t the best choice/reaction, but looking at reasons x, y, z, I understand why I chose/reacted the way that I did. This is how I would do it differently in the future…”
It is so tough to do this. I don’t want to minimize the challenges that this presents. It is why I have sought and continue to seek professional help. I, while capable of making changes in my own life, need help exercising self-compassion and self-validation. Self-reflection gives lots of insight, but without the ability to forgive past mistakes can perpetuate a really negative internal state.
I have done a lot of thinking about this, and have reached some really amazing insight into my own self-schema. That being said, improving myself and learning to move past previous traumas and mistakes is (and will always be) an ongoing process. I am always learning and always changing. My progress is not linear, and there will be days that I act as a lesser version of myself because it is more familiar and comfortable… but that is okay, and there is a supreme power in the knowledge that regression isn’t perpetual, only temporary.