Keep Going
It can be so hard to keep going when you’ve been going for so long and it’s hard to see any changes in how you feel or what your life looks like on the outside.
It can be so easy to stay in those patterns of regret, of self-disrespect, of self-neglect. It can feel like no matter how hard you’re trying, nothing is working.
I have to remind myself sometimes that sure, I’ve been meditating and trying to guide my mind to be kinder to myself and more equanimous and less focused on self-pity since 2012 or so, but I was born in 1987 and I had a lot of programming as a child to feel damaged, to feel insignificant, to feel terrified of anyone but especially of myself.
I was a happy child until I wasn’t, and now I can show you pictures of myself when I was so small where my fists are clenched and there’s so much fear and sadness in my eyes that it’s hard for me to look at now.
Some days I’ll look through journal entries from a year or eight years or twelve years ago and it’ll say exactly the same thing that I feel today. It’s easy to want to give up on myself in those moments. How can I still feel the same? When will my big ascent to eternal happiness and success be?
But strength doesn’t measure itself by success; it isn’t impatient. Abandoning myself would be the surest way to find myself in this place again in a year, eight years, or twelve years from now.
It comes down to a simple choice at the end of the day. I can get frustrated and erupt into a spiral of self-destruction, or I can accept and love myself now in this moment and send myself love and acceptance to those moments in the past. Because if I use discernment I can also remind myself that in between those journal entries I have had moments of joy and exhilaration. I have believed in myself and felt content and held and seen little bits of magic, and maybe I just need to remind myself to spend more time writing those bits down.
Either way, these days I am determined to not self-destruct. I’m looking really honestly at myself and I’m sober now, and instead of feeling entitled to everything in my life magically working out just because of that fact I have to keep scooping myself up off the ground and giving thanks to my little bruised ego and my higher self for working together now. It doesn’t even matter if things will ever magically work out, although that would be really cool if they did. The magic is the ouroboros devouring its own tail, it’s in my ability to finally take care of and nourish myself.
And that process isn’t simple or all-at-once or that much fun, but I can fantasize about a future where all these changes cascade into some amazing versions of myself that can look back on these entries from years ago and think, “Wow, I haven’t felt that way for a really long time.” Even holding a little vision of that future self can send a little shiver of fear through me, but I want to believe in her more than the shadows of my past selves.
