“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
Marie Curie
I've chosen to make a lot of changes in my life--I just moved to Seattle, moved in with my love, am taking on new challenges in a new job, and allowing myself the space and time to make lifestyle changes that were hard to do before. Everything is different, and I understand it's objectively good because all these changes are intentional, but it's also terrifying because... well... everything is different.
We're socialized to pathologize negative emotions, and it's a thing I have worked hard to unlearn. It's worth unlearning. It has made a huge difference in the quality of my life, and continues to do so the better I become at it. But it's easier for me to say it's okay to feel scared, sad, frustrated, etc. and much harder to mean it.
For me, meaning it means not denying my emotions their space to unfold and flow out of me. It also means being non-judgmental towards myself as I feel things, and I've had difficulty with this over the past few weeks. On July 30th, Connor and I drove the last 200 miles of our 1000+ mile road trip, got the keys to our apartment, did our walkthrough and inspection, unloaded all our boxes from the van to our second-floor apartment, then immediately drove to IKEA to pick up a list of things I had made before we moved to give us a relatively comfortable start, and tried to go to Home Depot, but it closed by the time we were done.
At the end of the day, I felt like a complete failure.
Some of the things we needed from IKEA were out of stock at that store. We didn’t make it to Home Depot on time. I felt like I was being irresponsible, like I should have planned better, I should have checked to make sure these things were in stock, should have unloaded faster, saved time.
It was ridiculous, because we had already done so much. It was like my first year of teaching--planning everything as much as possible and feeling like I’m not doing enough because I’m only looking at the 2 things that didn’t get done instead of the 100 that did.
Change is challenging. My changes are all choices. And, perhaps because they are intentional, these changes beget pressure. I wanted to make changes, so I did. Now I have to continue to put in the work and follow through with my promises to myself. I must nurture the parts of me that have felt neglected over the past years. I must heal the parts of me that are doubting that I deserve the things I desire.
It doesn't look pretty right now, and it doesn't have to, and I don't know that it ever will. The hard work required to make changes to your life doesn't take away from the value of those changes, nor does it devalue your journey.
I'm realizing more and more that I need to be transparent about how messy this process actually is--to normalize it and take the pressure off myself, to show the steps that are easier to hide, and to share in the little achievements along the way.
Cheers to that. More to come.
