It's so common nowadays for us to get caught up in the swing of life. So caught up that we eventually start losing ourselves in the flow. This slow muting of our own selves causes a very inharmonious struggle between who we truly are and who we've become when we're caught up in this day to day grind. This separation of self in our busy lives can cause stress, unease, and a feeling of general discontent.
Falling away from ourselves can start in a lot of ways. It can be because of an event or situation, past or present, that we don't want to face. It can be from a decision we regret and don't want to come to terms with ourselves, or it can come from such a busy schedule that we forget to visit ourselves entirely.
For most of us, it eventually comes from something we're running from. So many of us seem to lack a healthy system of dealing with regret or fear, and instead, we turn to running from it or ignoring it until it goes away. It isn't because we can't handle it, but because there's eventually something that happens in our lives that fills us with such an anger, a sadness, or dread that we are unable to look past it or to comprehend a way of working through it or letting it go. Working those steps might be impossible in the middle of the event at all, and in events such as loss or a bad upbringing, it's something that never really leaves us. These issues are hard to get around and grip us with such a tenacity that it never occurs to us that we can let them go.
Our escapes can come in many forms. Some of them seem healthy, such as school, sports, music, and some of them aren't so healthy, such as drugs, binge-watching shows or pouring ourselves into our phones or the internet. We find happy distractions in our lives, things we can go to bring us this momentary high to get away from ourselves.
Most everyone has a good idea of who they were before these troubling events happened. At one point we were virtually untarnished. When we were younger we didn't have the internet in the palm of our hands, we ran outside and we talked to our friends about the stars and our dreams. Most everyone has that unbridled person inside of them that simply is who they are at the core of it all; unafraid to dream and explore and knew what they wanted from life.
Over the last several years I lost that person. I didn't even realize that it had happened. It seemed to come on so suddenly but honestly it was just because I was so caught up in everyone else's expectations of me that I began to forget who I was and focus on who I was supposed to be. So here I am years later trying to find my own happiness, but I couldn't identify what that happiness was until I identified myself first.
Our true selves change. I'm not the same person I was years ago, but I'm similar. I still have most of the same ambitions and dreams, maybe a couple more. My idea of happiness has changed since then. I didn't graduate college on schedule, and instead of that being a hugely detrimental issue, it allowed me to set my own rules. I had not met the rules and regulations set upon me, and now it was my turn to set my own pace and my own expectations, without being so hard on myself. It gave the person that was stuck in this constant ebb and flow a place to stand and center. I started moving towards things I used to do. I started moving towards finding what made me happy, but I still had those pent up issues and hang up's in the way. I have my own events and decisions I needed to get past, but I had no idea how to get past them or how to face them.
It started with spending a few minutes alone in the quiet. I started it in the shower, so I could still keep my mind busy doing my daily rituals, but I turned the music off. I thought about my day, about what I wanted to eat, simple things. I tried hard not to think about what I was really trying to do in that silence. I did this for a few days and started moving further. I began to sit and read more and give myself the end of the chapter to sit in silence and contemplate what I had read, to think about what the characters meant to me, how the writing affected me. I had a conversation with myself on how the book affected me. I started to bring that approach to other things. I realized I spent a lot of time on my phone as a distraction, that I would immediately jump on Netflix when I got home from work when the world was asleep because I was uncomfortable in the silence.
Eventually, I got to a point that I came home, sat my phone down, and laid on the couch. I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes and listened to the quiet. I used to this a lot when I was younger, just sit in silence and think, or listen to the same album over and over again while I sat in my head for hours. It was something I enjoyed. I used to enjoy my own company and sitting on that couch for minutes was close to torture. At first. I got up to move around the room: make tea, play some piano music, something to ride over the silence but still assure me it was there. I closed my eyes and let myself relax. I allowed my thoughts to move as freely as I could let them, like a movie playing on the back of my eyelids. I let myself detach from them, I let myself simply relax into the physical state I was in and to become unburdened by anything in my past and to accept my present situation. I was laying on my couch. My cat was sleeping by my feet, my tea was getting cold. On a larger scale, I had a good job, I was going to finish my degree on my own time, and I could pay all of my bills. I didn't have to be burdened by my past, that was a decision I had made upon myself in one way or another, and I could let those go if I wanted, even if it was only for a little while. If I could be with myself and be content with that for an hour, I was okay with that.
I wish I could say that my problems are gone, that I'm completely free of regret and pain from my past, but the truth is that we don't get away from the world unscathed. Eventually I will find the strength to meet these issues head on, but for now, I am happy to find my true self and to have those moments of reprieve.
