The Space I Long For No Longer Fits Me

For months I’ve wanted to write on my blog. To share what I’d been going through and to release it from my mind, but everytime I sat in front of my open screen, my mind just went blank instead. It wants to do that very thing right now. And not because I don’t have any one thing I can’t write about, but because I have too many things ricocheting inside of my skull that I could write about.

My mind is everywhere and it feels like every day, the feeling gets more and more intense. I’ve found myself smoking again to allow my mind to feel any sort of relief from the clutter, but it doesn’t help. Sometimes it just takes me to a “base level” where I am not thinking or feeling much of anything. While other times it makes the clutter inside my brain more noticable, and then overwhelming to look at.

The mess and chaos in my head is always yearning to be sorted through and tamed, but if I am being truthful with myself; I haven’t wanted to deal with it. I tell myself I don’t have the time, but that’s just an excuse because I haven’t made it. But everything feels heavy on me, and yet I know that all of my reasons I’ve conjured up are just an excuse as they leave my mouth. For some reason, I just hadn’t been able to keep from clinging to these false justifications, which scares me. I’m afraid of that, and I’ve been too afraid to finally face what needs to be purged from my mind. 

All the things I told myself at first, were things such as; “I was working more”, and “I was adjusting to living in a new place with a roommate”, and that “between work and settling into the house, I also needed rest”. But I’ve settled into the house, and I have always still had plenty of leisure time to/for myself after working. I even started to bargain with internal thoughts and feelings of those closest to me in my life, for believing they may be the root to me feeling more energetically drained than usual. I wanted to believe it was their doing that I have not had the capacity or time to deal with my internal struggles. When really, all I’ve done was put my problems and inability to take accountability onto others, because it was easier to do that. It’s easier to look at someone or something else, point a finger, and say “That’s what’s causing my suffering, that right there, not me”. 

But to look in the mirror, and say that I’ve been the one hurting myself, is a lot damn harder to swallow.

It’s one thing to be young and first learn what it means to let yourself down in some of the most important ways; but it’s another thing to know that that particular naivete has worn off, and that the only thing standing in my way, is simply just me. And it’s even harder that I know all of these things, and it still not be enough to convince me to pull myself out of what I’ve been dealing with. I’ve somehow unintentionally managed to feed one piece of me, to halt another piece of who I am. And that’s tough.

I pride myself on being open, honest, and raw. Being able to take accountability for myself, and make changes. And I’ve failed myself in every single one of those categories, as of late. I haven’t been open. Open to facing the pain. Open to even looking at it. Open to simply sitting with myself or others to talk about it. I hadn’t been raw with anyone, let alone myself in any part of what I was keeping inside of me. I already mentioned the ‘taking accountability thing’, but again, I have still failed there and it needs to be mentioned. And I certainly haven’t made any changes if I’m sitting here, just now finally being able to admit any of this. 

They say awareness is the first step in the process of healing, so we can check that off my list. But many have said that acceptance is actually the most important part, and it would seem that’s the area I have found myself stuck in. For me, admittance has always allowed me to solidify that I truly understand the depth of what I am aware of, but I haven’t wanted to accept any of these thoughts or feelings that have been plaguing me for weeks upon weeks now. Which is what is causing the stagnation. And even though, as I have constantly been reiterating awareness, admittance, and comprehension of those things are what will lead me back to my freedom, knowing I already know what I must do, I am still scared. 

I’ve never been more scared in my life, and THAT is what’s hard for me. 

A quite peculiar thing is that I have always welcomed, even embraced change. At times I’ve even felt I am the walking epitome of transformation itself. But I am so scared of all this change that’s to come, even if I need it to happen to take me where I truly want to be in my journey.

I’m being torn between clinging to the people, places, habits, and things of my past, that make me comfortable because they are what is known vs. surrendering to release all that is in my past, so that I can have a clean slate.

Nobody ever talks about how tough it is to keep yourself from being encumbered by the comfort of what one is already familiar with, even when it comforts us at a soul level. 

No one prepares you for the fact that you must be willing to let go of very big parts of what you believe to be your identity, in order to find the real you.

Nothing will ever soften the blow of learning one must also let go of attachments to certain people in your life because they are hindering your growth in some way. 

Absolutely nothing in this life, in this world, this reality we call existence, can prepare us to face the truth that everything we believed made us a whole of a human before we really had a say so in making ourselves whole, will most likely all be a facade. A facade that we did not intentionally plan, nor pick, but still a facade nonetheless. But because I am tired of living my life in the boxes, or spaces, that were made for me, or influenced by others, I’ve got to truly start taking charge in the shaping of the human I do want to be. 

There’s a very simple yet effective quote that I have carried with me for years now, and I say it, or write it to myself often, but it only feels right to share it aloud with others;

“Feel the fear and do it anyways”. 

FEEL the fear and do it anyways. 

I’ve always encouraged myself to take leaps even when I am not fully sure where something will lead me, but this topic seems to be a bigger risk of loss involved when what I’m gambling on is such a large part of my identity, my life. My only semblance of who I have believed myself to be in such fundamental ways all this time, now being told must be knocked down from the foundation, in order to be who I have always yearned, searched, and felt I was to be, deep down in my soul.

I’m always writing about how myself, and others, have and will continue to go through countless deaths and rebirths, but this one is different. This one is way bigger than the others because I am finally and FULLY closing the first “volume” of my life, of all that I was, and am, up to even this very moment itself. In the past, whenever a chapter of my life was coming to an end, it’s as if a movie of it all would re-play like a flash in my mind. The people I met, and lost. The places I went. The lessons I needed to learn. A one last goodbye moment if you’d like to call it that. But in those times, it’s usually just one person, or a place I lived, that I am saying goodbye to, not the entirety of the tweny two years I’ve been alive thus far.

I’m saying goodbye to 3 year old me; whose first memory is one of fear and pain and hurt. It’s me saying goodbye to 7 year old me; when I first met the man who is my biological father. It’s the 11 year old me; crying as I move to another school, for another time. It’s 14 year old me; mourning the loss of a boy who I thought I loved in middle school when I thought I knew what love was. It’s 18 year old me; being the first generation in my family on both sides, to graduate high school. It’s 19 year old me; stuck in a nationwide lockdown becoming aware that I have control of every aspect of myself and my future, but now worrying if I would ever get the chance to with a virus plaguing the entire world. It’s 20 year old me who cannot stand to live under a roof with the woman I call my mother because it is bringing me more pain than I had ever known. It’s 22 year old me; sitting here in this very present moment, writing about how much I’ve been struggling to say goodbye.

So many memories. Good and bad. All of my mistakes and regrets. All of my victories and hopes. Twenty two years of memories spread out in front of my own eyes, to get one last moment with, before it’s time to let it go forever. 

And as much as I have sat here in the past on my posts, and said that none of those moments make up who I am supposed to be, and are in ways a false projection of who I also believe myself to be, they still exist. And because they exist, in some manner, that does make them real, and so; they are still me. They still happened to me. They shaped me. Helped bring me to this very moment of longing to seek out who I truly am. 

I have to acknowledge that.

I have to honor that. 

Just as much as I must free myself of the shackles of everything I am not, I must say thank you for knowing that these things no longer fit within the space I am looking to be in, or who I am.

It’s the knowing deep down in my core that some things have run their course, or served their purpose that makes all of it so hard, really. And now even if in some ways these past things make up me, I have to change the energy of them, and how they define me and my life. Instead of allowing these ‘false labels’ to burden me, and effect all the good I can have in my life; I will instead let it be a fire that lights my way to my true self, instead of being the thing(s) that burn my safe spaces to ash because I chose to take warmth from simply wherever I could first find it.

The places and spaces I have so longed to feel at home in, so that I could keep growing, no longer fit me. So I must make a new home, with a completely new space in order to flourish in this new chapter I am headed towards.

I’m scared, and part of me wonders if I’ll ever be truly ready to leap into such an unknown territory like the one I’m about to, but I would always rather say I had the courage to try and see where it leads me, than to never find out at all.

All my love, -A