And so it begins.

 

There’s nothing more terrifying than a blank document, especially after seven years away from what was once my life’s passion. When I fell out of love with writing, I took on a spiritual journey. I cut off friends, I changed my hair, I experienced a global pandemic... all the things one does when reconnecting with god. I dipped one toe at a time into beliefs that both the Christian and the agnostic versions of me would label as “untethered”, which was my polite way of saying anyone who believed in that shit was a total nut case. But this isn’t a story about my spiritual journey, and we’d be here for maybe a thousand pages if it were, so I’ll save the incoherent ramblings for another time.  

As I grew in my beliefs, I transformed myself. I learned how to let go of past pain and how to turn current struggles into points of power. I shed the passivity that had plagued my life, learned how to advocate for myself and, just as important, how to pick my battles. Every day held new revelations of who I once was and who I was becoming. The uncovering, the learning, the growth, the application, the whole process became so addicting. I loved to see myself transform; witnessing the betterment of myself in real time after a lifetime of feeling resigned and utterly powerless to circumstance ignited a flame within me that only grew bolder and brighter. So bright, in fact, that I was blinded to the truth that my addiction had become exactly that. 

Throughout my life and continuing on into this journey, I had this recurring pattern where, for a moment in time, I saw myself objectively. Or, as objectively as I could get. It was as if my brain had its own out-of-body experience, and I could see my thoughts playing out before me. And in those moments, I realized: I am SO fucking mean to myself. I criticized my every move, not in a, “You’re stupid and you should die,” teen angst sort of self-hatred way, but in a, “You could be so much better if you changed how you did everything in your life,” self-hatred disguised as self-improvement sort of way. But in these blissful moments of awareness, I’d see it for what it was, plain as day, and vow to be kinder to myself. I’d start to catch my negative thoughts and redirect them, immediately replacing words of criticism with words of affirmation, and put in work to have kinder thoughts towards others as well. After all, if I was criticizing them, it was only because they were doing something that I’d criticize in myself. These kinder times would last for a few days, maybe a few weeks, before I’d feel content in my effprts and move on to other self-improvement projects, slowly forgetting all about my vow to kindness and restarting the cycle all over again. 

The pursuit of growth is one I love for both myself and others. It brings me great joy to see someone who, when faced with hardship of any kind, decides to take fate into their own hands and turn things around for the better. In myself, it’s a high I chase. I crave it every moment of every day, and I often feel disappointed in myself during periods of stagnancy or rest, even if those periods last mere minutes. In the name of “bettering” myself, I began to take a hypercritical lens towards all my own actions. If it’s been a day and nothing’s changed, if I haven’t improved something small in my mindset, my shadow (a term for one’s own neglected pieces; they lurk in the shadow of the psyche, taking up more and more space the longer you try to keep them in the dark rather than facing them), my mood, or my external circumstances, then I was doing something terribly wrong with my life. 

In the time that I began my new spiritual journey, I developed a chronic illness, moved back in with my parents, and remained unemployed for years. And as spiritual as I was, as much as I tried to set myself free from society’s expectations for a person in their late 20s, I couldn’t help but to constantly look at these things and draw the same conclusion over and over: failure. Complete and utter failure. As an adult, as a spiritual being, as a child to my parents, as a friend to others. All I could see was some unwell loser that couldn’t hold down a job, could barely leave my bed on some days, couldn’t keep up with my friendships, couldn’t bring anything to the table for my parents to boast proudly to others about (nevermind the fact that I could say the same about them for me), and about 23 more things that rotated in and out of my brain on a daily basis. Every person in every piece of media I consumed, from vloggers on Youtube, to contestants on the reality shows I kept watching with glazed-over eyes, to my friends’ posts on Tumblr (yes, I still use Tumblr in the year 2026, and nothing you say can stop me), to goddamned fictional characters I read fanfiction about, showed me what I lacked. My immediate reaction to being in the presence (or pseudo-presence) of anyone was comparison. What they’ve got that I don’t, what they’re doing that I’m not, how they’ve succeeded while I tick closer to the big three-oh, still back in the same bedroom I grew up in. For all the growth, for all the ways I improved myself spiritually, elevating my soul to higher levels of consciousness and compassion for the world around me, the same questions always remained. What lesson am I not learning? What have I yet to integrate? What growth still needs to be done? For the love of god, what the hell am I still doing wrong?! 

I tried harder to do better, be better. To listen to my intuition and hone in on what I was still lacking. I had huge blind spots, but that didn’t stop me from searching for whatever piece I was missing. I was desperate to find it, whatever it was. It was the final piece, the key to the end of all my struggles. As soon as I could slot it into my life, everything would come together, the abundance flowing down into my life like the waters of a mountain river, coursing and irreversible; all of the anguish it took to get here would be washed away in an instant. At least, that’s how I saw it. Always one step away from nothing bad ever happening to me again because I was now free, enlightened, and above it all. 

In the back of my mind, I knew that that wasn’t how it worked. I knew that the moment I started thinking like that, I was back in the wrong. But it had been a hard a few years, preceded by an equally hard early adulthood and teenagehood, and I was desperate to believe in the idea that if I worked hard enough right now to transform myself, then I’d never have to struggle again. Not even because hardship would never come my way; I knew well enough that life is a series of hardships and overcomings. But I had the belief that I could make myself strong enough to handle anything in a graceful and effortless way. I believed I could build myself up to be untouchable, never again phased by any horrors life may continue to sling at me. 

But here’s the thing about awareness. You can pray and meditate and do breathwork and shadow work and inner child healing and everything else to gain awareness of the self, of others, of god, of the interconnectedness of us all, but that doesn’t change your human nature. At the end of the day, I am in this human body having this human experience, and I will always have parts of myself that I cannot see unless someone else brings them to my attention, or unless something in my life changes in a way that sheds light on them. So even though I had some level of conscious awareness of the cycles I was stuck in, the cycles themselves were too ingrained at that point; they would beat out the awareness by a long shot every single time. That was, until this year. 

Every once in a while, I become deeply overwhelmed by the clutter in my life. Having all of my earthly possessions packed tight into my childhood bedroom does get a little suffocating, but this also applies to my digital space as well. My phone’s photo gallery is backed up with tons of nature shots, reference photos, and saved memes that I swear will come in handy in just the right conversation (that I never seem to remember to use even when the opportunity presents itself). The same goes for my “notes” app. I may not have written in seven years, but I am still an avid user of my notes. I jot down every little thing that I want to remember in the main notes section, then sort them into categories, subcategories, or simply delete them if I realize I won’t need them at a later date. I have well over 1,000 saved in combination on the phone itself and on the cloud. In short: there’s a lot going on there, and it’s cluttering my brain just as much as it is my digital space. 

I’ve wanted to go through both and clear them out for a while now, but for whatever reason, it’s easier for my brain to read note after note (even if my eyes are past the point of taking the words in) than it is to look through photo after photo, so I started with the notes. In doing so, I saw a pattern that helped bring the cycles I was stuck in not to an end, but to a screeching halt. I found note after note in every single category and subcategory telling myself how to improve, what needs to change, what still needs work, what needs to be let go of, what needs to be moved on from, what should be embraced, and on and on. Mind you, some of these categories shouldn’t even be applicable to that sort of criticism and analysis, like “recipes” or “reference”. But sure enough, open them up and you’d find long lists of recipes to improve my health or lose weight, reference documents on how to improve my organizational skills or beat executive dysfunction with a stick. Not a single section in there was safe from my harsh self-scrutiny. 

I think, beyond the eeriness of seeing all of it at once, the consistency of the phrasing is what really struck me. It wasn’t just the same formula applied to different areas of life, but oftentimes, it was the exact same laundry list of things to work on that I forgot I had already written, spaced out weeks or months apart. It’s easy to see why I’d never be content with myself as I am when I ceaselessly tried to force the same self-improvements month after month, year after year. I found myself feeling disheartened at the unrelenting way I pushed for change and fell short of my own expectations to be better, but what really broke my heart is how unwilling I was to accept these things the way they were, like the only way to be whole was to achieve perfection in every piece of myself. Once I completed these things, then I could finally be a human worth loving, despite the fact that that wouldn’t be very human of me at all if I somehow found a way to fix every perceived flaw. 

Now, as I mentioned earlier, simply having the awareness isn’t enough to change things. I took a break from writing this while I was going through a rough spot with my mental health, and in that time, I found all the same patterns I abhorred repeating themselves with fervence, as if they were aware that I now saw them and was trying to get rid of them. A desperate attempt by my nervous system to preserve what I’ve done for years, screaming at me that I needed them, that I wouldn’t know how to function without them. And that’s partially true; at this current point in time, I’m not exactly sure what to do. What positive thinking patterns do I develop to replace the obsessive ones, and how do I truly learn to accept who I am without giving in to stagnancy? How would I spend my time without the constant thinking, chasing, obsessing, and spiraling? Is there even any substance at my core when I take all of these pieces away from myself? 

Regardless of how lost I feel, I don’t see that as an excuse not to try. I may not know exactly what to do or how to fix things, but I will figure it out. With time, through trial and error, journaling and introspection, I will learn how to accept not only the parts of me that I cannot change, but also the parts that do not need to change. Take my insomnia as an example. I’ve had it for nearly half my life now, yet I’m still here and functioning just fine. What actually disrupts my daily life more than my insomnia is all the time I spend trying to correct or combat it. The days where I stay up through the next day instead of just letting myself go to sleep at whatever god-awful hour it is are the days where my brain is too sluggish to function, my limbs heavy and my energy close to zero. I’d spend that day distracting myself from the exhaustion with mindless, low energy activities until it was an “appropriate” hour to head to bed, only to be faced with my usual sleeplessness the very next night. Whereas when I’m not trying to combat it, I have both the phsyical and mental energy to carry out the day’s demands. I’m currently writing this at 6am, still having not slept, and I spent the past few hours before this getting done some much needed cleaning and organizing. I think the “getting it done” of it all matters much more than the hour at which I do it, so after 14 years of sleepless nights, I’ve finally learned to accept that this is just how my body operates. 

My personal life philosophies are to not intentionally hurt myself or others; anything outside of that is nitpicking. Expecting myself to sleep and wake at a “decent” hour because that’s how the majority of others function is a deep disservice to myself and my capabilities. I often say that I need to work with myself rather than against myself, but I see now just how seldom I tend to follow through on that. Well, consider this my awakening. Or rather, my actioning. Because I have been awakened; I have seen through myself. The difference now is the courage to try. To try not to work on myself in the sense of molding myself to better fit the expectations of what I “should” be or what an “ideal” me would look like, but to work on myself in the way that shows me love, kindness, compassion, and understanding. To tackle the root of the problem in the patterns of thought rather than all the branches of perceived issues I’ve made up for myself to distract from what’s really going on. That’s the kind of work on myself I truly want to do, and I’m so grateful to have had my eyes opened to it. 

If you’re on a similar journey, or have had similar revelations recently, come talk to me about it in the comments. I’d love to go through this together with you, hand in loving hand. We are strong, we are capable, and we can do whatever we set out to do.