When you’re going through hell…

It’s a funny thing when you send out an email about not hanging out in your head with your inner critics and then about a week later, you end up there yourself feeling like you can’t seem to find your way out. Not funny ha ha. Like Alanis Morisette isn’t it ironic funny.

I spent the past week and a half feeling mostly awful. But when I really look at that time, I can tell you exactly why. Besides the fact that we’re in a major pandemic, our country is horribly divided and I can’t seem to figure out third grade math (never mind TEACH IT), the part that really made a difference is that fact that I didn’t do the things I KNOW I need to do to take care of myself. I went to bed at ungodly hours. I didn’t meditate. And most importantly, I forgot to slow down. And I didn’t slow down because I was overtired and I wasn’t breathing. Staying in a good mental space doesn’t just come to me. I have to work at it. After all these years of working on myself, I still have to work at it. Just like you can’t stop exercising and expect your body to stay in great shape, you can’t stop doing your mental exercise and expect your mind to stay in great shape.

So I went back and read that email for myself. So that I could have a reminder of the things that I know so well. And there’s something important that I left out of that email. When I tell you not to sit with the asshole in your head, I DO NOT mean avoid your feelings. Can you hear my dramatic raised voice there? It’s two different things. Sometimes the asshole in your head exists to keep us from feeling certain feelings that we don’t like: disappointment, grief, feeling out of control (that’s a BIG one right now), sadness, anger. Often, we think that if we work on ourselves hard enough, if we are “happy” enough, we don’t have to feel that stuff anymore. Nope. Doesn’t work that way.

Life is messy and wonderful and horrible and ever changing. It’s confusing and uplifting and disappointing and frustrating. It’s risky and it’s challenging and part of all of that is the realization that there’s no amount of work you can do to get away from the rainbow of fruit flavors of feelings we all have. Sometimes, you need to feel dark and sad and angry so that you can rise up and fight.

Sometimes you need to grieve the loss of something - whether it’s a relationship or a life or a way of life. Sometimes there are things that you feel intensely and deeply and they are uncomfortable as hell. But that does NOT mean that they are bad. What doesn’t work is beating yourself up for being a living, breathing, feeling human being. That’s where that asshole in your head comes in to play. He or she lacks compassion and empathy. And you deserve that as much as the friend you gave a pep talk to last week.

I sat in my darkness for a couple of days. It didn’t feel good but I needed to sit there. Because being in those feelings was the key to moving through to the other side. If I’d tried to avoid them or berate myself for having them, they would have lasted a whole lot longer. When I'm in that place, I remember the words of Winston Churchill:

When you’re going through hell, keep going.

Because life is amazing. And then it is awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and the awful it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful. You can thank L.R. Knost for that piece of truth and wisdom.

Keep going, my friend. Keep going.

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Ally Is A Verb

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Get out of your head…