War Inside my Mind

It seems that whenever I want to put a thought or an idea into action, into physicality, I hold myself back. I hold myself back and as a result, it remains trapped inside of myself, incomplete and unfinished. I've asked myself over the years, as I've become more and more aware of what I am doing, why it is that I do this and when I finally get past the years of verbal abuse I have conditioned myself to believe, I am faced with the truths and the battles I have yet to win. If I am being honest with myself, which is always my intention no matter the ugly truth, I hold myself back out of fear. It's funny because when I say that, I am always brought back to the scene in Donnie Darko, when the health teacher is explaining the "Fear-Love Spectrum"; Donnie immediately shuts her down and at the time that I first saw this movie, I agreed with him, that not everything can be reduced to fear and love because there is so much more in between, but as I continue to get older and the deeper I get into my own self reflection, it seems that so much can simply be reduced to fear and love; the two opposite ends of the spectrum, the highest and the lowest of vibrations. If you think about any negative human behaviour, they are all a product of fear, which makes sense when you consider that by nature we are animals, we are programmed by  design to survive and react to danger, i.e. our fear. But when the threats of the world our Homo sapien ancestors once knew, no longer exist, what is left is thousands of years of evolution in the human brain, thousands of years of instinctual fear that alters and manifests itself to serve our current circumstance. That circumstance being, our personal growth and awakening. So because we are dealing with ancient survivalist monkey brains combined with divine intelligence, or a conscience if you will, we are now forced to battle our deepest and darkest fears that reside within ourselves, collected over lifetimes and subsequently, over the years and experiences our current life has presented us with. All of which are designed to guide us to our best selves, the version of ourselves that operate solely out of love; love for ourselves, for our planet, for our fellow human, and for the microcosm that makes up life.

Over the course of my life so far, I have come to realize the common thread in every situation, big or small, that I felt I did not live up to my fullest potential was as a result of my subconscious decision to stand in my own way. This idea that I am solely to blame for the outcomes I am unhappy with has been and continues to be one of the most difficult and torturous pills to swallow. I ask myself, when I am at my lowest of lows, feeling absolutely defeated, worthless, hopeless, sorry for myself, why it is that I would ever choose to feel like this?! No way this is my fault!! For many years, the inner monologue had been, "why is this happening to me? why couldn't I do this or be this? Why can't I be happy like other people? Why can't I look like her? Why can't I be like them?" to which I would tell myself, "It's because I am not and never will be as beautiful, as confident, or as good enough as I need to be to do this. I deserve to feel like this. I always will feel like this and there's nothing I can do about it unless something miraculous were to happen, but it won't. I'm ugly, I'm fat, I'm not outgoing enough, nobody likes me, I don't even like me. I am nothing." Writing out the words that I spent so many years ingraining into my mind, burning into my perception of myself, is painful. It is painful because I know how detailed and gruesome I could be to myself in the moments that I truly just needed to be my own friend. I spent so much of my time and mental power convincing myself that I was not good enough. Sure, there were outside forces influencing this like society and social media, both of which amplified my fears and sent me into a sort of self deprecating frenzy during my high school years, that it's very possible would not have been as concentrated and intensified had these things not existed, but after years of whittling my problems down to their core, the issue remained the same, the constant variable was and is my fear of not being good enough.

This realization that all of my unhappiness, all of my insecurities, all of that which stands in my way is as a result of my own fears of not being good enough was like seeing clearly for the first time. I had identified the problem, the thing that had been eating away at me my whole life and with this I found a sense of relief. I was being honest with myself and I now knew what I needed to work on in order to transcend. I don't believe that I had never had the thought before, that's impossible, but identifying and believing it to be the root and cause of all major challenges I face, that was the eye opener. Not good enough for what though? Over the years my response would have been something along the lines of, "I'm not good enough to be friends with these people, to be asked out by this boy, to get into this school, to wear this outfit, to be happy like that", but as I've spent time chipping away at these surface fears, my response now is, "I am not good enough for myself." This is the true battle I have been waging. The battle to feel loved, to feel accepted, to feel understood by the most important person I will ever know; myself.

It seems like everything should be better now, right? I have identified the problem and I truly understand what it is that I have been doing to myself for so long, so now I can just fix it, right? No, not quite. I almost feel like this is where my true work has begun. I believe this personal transformation of mine had been building my entire life, leading me to a new beginning that was marked by the solar eclipse we all experienced in August of 2017, something I was able to physically see for myself in Oregon with people I had never met before, at a Gathering I attended out of my own sure will; it sparked a tremendous energetic shift in not only myself, but in the lives of so many others I have spoken with. For myself, over the course of the last eight months, I have been shedding so much stored emotional trauma, deep sadnesses that I have kept trapped in my heart for who knows how long. I have been releasing prior notions of who I thought I was and who I thought I wanted to be, so that I can begin to build up the person that I truly am. I have felt everything on the spectrum when it comes to this healing process from anger and denial to sadness and even pure excitement. I have always been a very emotional person, feeling things deeply and holding onto them longer than it seems many others do, but the newfound struggle between my old, negative pattern of thought and the positive mental warrior of light that I have just recently discovered in myself has made for some emotionally exhausting mental battles. Lately it feels like I have an argument going on inside of my head every time I am faced with something emotionally triggering, which seems to be almost everything; my relationships, my goals and aspirations, financial obligations, any obligation really. It all seems to be so overwhelming, so when I take a few steps back to reason with myself and remind myself that there really is not anything happening that I can't handle, I start to feel like I am going insane. 

On the verge of insanity is where I am at right now. Wether or not it is the type of insanity that is going to put me away for good, I don't know, but if I had to guess, given everything that I have been faced with lately, I'd say it is the type of insanity that prompted me to quit my job at Starbucks, to dread my already crazy hair, to stop wearing makeup everyday after years of feeling like it was the only way I looked genuinely beautiful, to stop feeling like I constantly had to shop the sadness away, to declutter my life of material things, as well as rid myself of so many obligatory feelings to post and be active on social media. It is the type of insanity that has caused me to make the decision that come this Summer, when my car is fixed and I have nowhere that I have to be anymore, I am packing up everything I need and I'm driving up the coast alone. Just me, my camera, my laptop, my art supplies, and some books. If this is where my insanity is taking me, then I am trusting it, because nothing has sounded like such a good idea to me like being in my cozy car, having nothing but time and space to finally connect with the person I have spent so much time neglecting and hating.

When I began writing this entry, I hadn't yet come to this decision of leaving on my own like this, in fact, I intended on remaining in Arizona and working for the hell hot Summer, while my boyfriend makes his way up the coast on a similar path to self discovery, but it took another moment of intense, overwhelming sadness and feelings of insanity for me to realize and say to myself, "nobody will ever understand me the way I need them to and the only way I will ever make peace with that is if I find it in myself." So with that, nothing else made sense than to be alone in places I have never been, on beaches that I could think and be freely on, working on and toward my best self.

April 2018