Hello my little lightbulbs!
How have you been?
I’m sure you can guess from the title that I have been doing swimmingly; blessed with good fortune, divine light and serendipitous circumstance. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case and things haven’t been too great for me recently. I have managed to slowly and gradually creep away from who I am. I recently faced a sudden and harrowing realisation that I’d managed to creep so far away that when I stopped to look back – ‘me’ was a dot in the distance. In panic, I tried to get back to myself – to sprint in the general direction that I had been. Needless to say, it was much harder and much more complex than it looked. My attempts of panicked and hasty resolution was to no avail.
I feel quite confident that losing sight of ourselves is a common thing – and something, I fear, that happens more than once in a lifetime. Hectically trying to stay financially afloat, managing the expectations of society and loved ones, it’s easy to lose ourselves. For women, we also have that lovely gift of conditioning that tells us our purpose in life is to be auxiliary – our needs come last and we need to people please. With these factors, and a gazillion more, losing sight of our true self could almost be expected.
That guiding voice inside me was practically gone and I felt a very surreal loneliness. What inner voice remained mixed seamlessly with anxious thoughts and the opinions of other people. Internet sages did little to soothe me – their advice being to trust myself, focus on my dreams, and listen to my intuition. All of this advice was far away in the distance, with ‘dot me’ – unattainable. How can you focus on your dreams when you’ve been focused for so long on everyone else’s and don’t know what they are? How can listen to your intuition when you can’t hear it? When your thoughts and decisions blur together anxieties, attempts to mind-read for other people, what you think you should be thinking, and your true feelings.
I tried journaling to amplify that inner voice, but when I came to prompts like ‘What makes you feel nourished? What do you want your future to contain? What are elements of your authentic self?’ The overwhelm and panic set in.
Unfortunately for me – despite doing a lot of work on it already – my people pleasing habits, guilt and over-responsibility are a LOT. It still takes me a lot of self-abandonment before I can realise the harm that I’m doing to my spirit. And even though it’s not my first rodeo, the correlation between self-sacrifice and loss of identity is something I struggle to notice until it’s too late. When I did notice, it was like tuning into a radio station at full volume. My body had been screaming at me for a long time and I heard it all at once. It was mortifying; that someone capable of so much love and introspection has been able to neglect herself so thoroughly. Whist horrible, it’s also been a crucial realisation – allowing me to hit the breaks and prioritise the ‘dot me’ search party.
I wanted to write about this in case you’re going through something similar. You might not have heard the warmth of your own soul’s company for a while; life and commitments and self-sacrifice might be nudging you away from your true self. While I haven’t made it all the way back to ‘dot me’. I feel like I’m heading in the right direction and want to share some helpful tips before they dissolve from my brain – as usually happens when I don’t need the information anymore.
Imagine Little You
This is a technique that I was sceptical about at first, but it’s also sometimes the only way I can get myself to treat me with compassion. It’s nice and simple too- but can get emotional. You simply imagine you at age five being in a situation similar to the one you’re in or feeling what you’re feeling. You can imagine this little child sat facing you, explaining the situation or how they’re feeling and looking to you for help. How would you comfort and care for this child? Would you put the needs of other adults above them to this little person’s detriment?
Photos can be useful to help you visualise better. Your capacity to love, nurture and protect is practically forced back to yourself.
Simplify Journaling
Instead of sitting down with the hope to organise your entire life with pen and paper – simplifying the journaling process will be helpful too. If you’re someone who has never journaled before – this is a great time to start.
Freewriting is excellent – where you sit and write whatever comes to mind for five to ten minutes. If you want a little more structure – simple, short-term question prompts have been useful for me recently. Instead of ‘What is your five year plan’ – you could try questions like: ‘what would a perfect tomorrow look like for me? Who in my life makes me feel loved and energised? How do I behave and what thoughts do I have when I’m with this person?’
Meet Your Basic Needs
If ‘you’ are gone, if you are in ‘dot you’ mode: nurture the husk until you return. Keep that body nourished with good food, water and movement. Your body has been doing so much to keep you going, so give back to her.
Reminisce With Loved Ones
Ask loved ones what you loved to do last year last month or last year or whatever time it was before your started to lose track of yourself. What hobbies/ films/ places were you passionate about? Their answers are a good starting point. You can try these things again and see if they still bring you joy. Just remember that if it doesn’t bring you the same joy, you haven’t failed, ‘dot you’ may have just shifted positions. Who we are and what makes us happy can always shift – we just need to keep tabs when it does.
Be Open To Signs
I love a good metaphor, a nice anecdote. And when answers are fleeting and immaterial – I look for them in suggestions, signs and whispers instead. I overhear conversations between friends and see if the guidance from one friend applies to me; tidbits of conversations, quotes and poems; tarot cards or horoscopes. Take note of what messages feel relevant to you, not what should feel relevant. That’s a good trick to catch your true self – she tends to be a little timid after being abandoned and may send you signals indirectly.
Try To Move Away From Martyrdom
Losing yourself serves no true loved one in the long term, and it certainly doesn’t serve you. No one who loves you and wants you to flourish is going to allow themselves to benefit from you putting yourself last. You certainly don’t benefit from martyrdom, despite what you’ve been told. It doesn’t make you a ‘better’ person, you don’t get Good Person Points every time to put someone else’s needs above your own.
Of course, it’s nice to be nice and all relationships survive on compromise – but it has to be reasonable. And you carving yourself into pieces is not reasonable. My dearest love, only you are responsible for how much of yourself your pour into others. You losing your light and thirst for life is not reasonable. Chasing these Good Person Points at best accumulates to making you a withered version of your true self. At worst, it makes you a foreigner in your own body who is resentful of how much invisible labour you’ve had taken by other people. Both of these options aren’t going to make the world a more beautiful and loving place, are they?
You might not even realise the extent that you martyr yourself. I know I didn’t. I was so laser-focused on providing comfort, attention and love (and assessing how well I was providing it) that I didn’t take note of what was coming back from those relationships. More importantly, I wasn’t taking note of what comfort, love and attention I was providing to myself until I was a shrivelled prune who felt like her worth equated to how comfortable she could make everyone around her.
You owe yourself more than an empty shell, a bleak murky ‘dot you’ in the distance, a distance flickering light in the fog. You are a human, not a raisin. You are complex and vibrant, your needs are wonderfully human – not something to be ashamed of.
No matter how far away from yourself you have wondered, there is always a way back. I promise you. It felt really hopeless for me recently and I still haven’t tuned back into my intuition or found ‘dot me’. But I get moments of clarity on the radio, signs in the forest of where she’s been. I think I’m gaining on her! You can do it too. Get your map, your boots on and head off out to find and stoke your fire.
Stay Positive.
Love,
Jess x
AKARUI LIFESTYLE 