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Soooo… it’s been a while…244 days to be exact.
Welcome back to Your silence will not save you.
I’m in two minds about how long and deep this “I’m back” post should be. I recently told my therapist that the spirit of constantly needing to be understood and, therefore, constantly explaining myself has had me in a chokehold for much of my adult life. And because communication and authentic self-expression are generally very important skills and a practice for me, my emotions have sometimes cleverly cloaked and conflated this constant need to be understood with my wanting to be better and clearer communicator. However, my Observer-Self also knows that I don’t need to explain myself, my thinking, my motivations etc in every situation or to everyone. So I very often have an internal conflict going on about how much to share and when to resign myself to silence.
I do think that it is important for me to say something about my absence before I start blogging again. It would be weird to disappear for over half a year and then just randomly start posting like nothing happened. So, here’s the short of it:
After kicking off the year with a world of enthusiasm and a plan for Q1, it felt like the weapons started prospering. I’m not all too sure where things took a turn but very early into Q1 something felt…off. I felt kind of displaced (for lack of a better word) in my own life, …I just didn’t feel like myself. This then led to more feelings of being awkward in my own experience, starting to get distant from others and what I can only describe as shrinking. I felt small and self-conscious and I didn’t understand why that was happening. That was my Thinking/Feeling-Self experience. My Observer-Self caught onto this quickly and then the overthinking started ramping up…and what started off as a soft “argghh…it’s just my brain lying to me, I’m alright” gradually calcified into “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, so how do I even fix it?”. And even how I got to that point felt very confusing; there was no big, upsetting argument that left me feeling sour or a big failure to point my finger to when I look back at the first few months of the year, so it was hard to describe what went wrong. The best I’ve come up with to explain all this is that I faced a couple of small disappointments, that, when looked upon in isolation were manageable but when put all together became too heavy…so more like a death by a thousand cuts situation.
My most notable experience of this unshakable “something feels off” feeling was around my 30th birthday; my birthday is always such a joyous and love-filled day and while I still had all that this time around, I also couldn’t shake the underlying feelings of awkwardness that had started to settle in. I’d be remiss to attribute that to anything other than my own feelings because my friends, family, Mo, my acquaintances and colleagues all made my celebrations really special. That’s the power of community. It was beautiful. So that fact that I had all of that and there was still a part of me slipping into obscurity felt quite unsettling. And unfortunately, that feeling only grew stronger and stronger as the months progressed, leading to more withdrawal, more shrinking, less talking, less contact initiated…just less of me.
To make things even more awkward, objectively, looking at my life, things were going well. I’m living in some of my answered prayers and my efforts in multiple aspects of life were paying off. What the hell was wrong with me, then?
So, in addition to feeling lost and small, I started to feel ungrateful and self-critical. I’ve gone through difficulty in my life, genuine life challenges and this wasn’t that. So what was all this about???
So… yeah, it’s been a couple of hectic months….and I’ve been toiling through difficult emotions and questions, I’ve gone back to therapy and a more consistent workout regimen to keep my head above water, and most importantly, I’m regaining compassion for myself. Regaining perspective.
I’ve gotten to a point now where I’m no longer resisting whatever this season of my life is trying to teach or show me. I’m no longer catastrophising it either. I’m just holding space for it…discomfort and all. I’m not all the way through, and I’m not sure what that will look like. I’m just co-operating with life the best way I can. And just like the thousand cuts that led me into those lows, getting out of that rut has been a gradual process. So my coming back to the blog isn’t off the back of a big Come-to-Jesus moment or anything grand and final in terms of sorting things out, I’ve just been taking it one day at a time. Keeping my head held high.
One discernible strategy I learned a year or two ago was assessing the quality of my life or living it according to the SHIELD maxim as a bare minimum. Like any other typical millennial, I came across this idea on social media (IG in this case) but it was actually developed by neuroscientist Rudolph Tanzi, co-director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital:
Looking at these categories left me with a feeling of at least knowing which levers to pull to take care of myself on a foundational level. If all else fails and I still feel like I’m diminishing, I can at least try at get enough sleep, talk to people that I love and care for, honour my therapy commitment, break a sweat at the gym, read something interesting and eat well.
So I’d say I’m getting there, staying buoyant. And I’ve also regained sufficient energy and confidence to return to this space. Like I said earlier, the skill and practice of communication is very important to me. A big part of the last couple of months has been talking through the confusion and trying hard to describe these feelings with a few trusted people and just a few days when I started writing this piece it dawned on me…I think the last couple months would’ve been more hectic and isolating if I had resigned myself to silence and tried to “fix this” all by myself. Then it came back to me…
…your silence will not save you.
So vulnerable! Welcome back, we’ve missed you ❤️
Great to be back❤️💪🏾
So beautifully written, I admire how you’re able to reconcile your emotional life to your intellectual/conscious understanding of it. Defs will also start co-operating with life . Welcome back!
Ahhh thanks lady! I’m so happy to see this comment, makes me feel like what I’m aiming to do with the platform is landing in people’s hearts and minds as intended❤️ Thanks for reading the post and leaving a comment!