The first week of counseling, I realized I was completely disconnected from who I truly am. I went through a very jarring transition as a stay at home/work from home mom the first year. My experience isn’t uncommon but it was new and terrifying for me. I felt like I was lost in sea of sleepless nights, breastfeeding, breast milk blowout diapers and not achieving a damn thing in the process. Yes, you read that right, I felt like not only was I new mom but I was a new mom who hadn’t done much (In my brain) and now I have a little peanut looking up to me and my accomplishments. Although, I was working on my goals through classes and editing projects, pro bono while pregnant or with a newborn, I didn’t feel like I was at the stage of my career I should have been in. I had to look in the mirror and examine why I felt so low about myself. Why was I constantly comparing myself to peers? Was social media to blame or was I just not talented? These are just a few of the personal areas I’m working on and I hope to get a hold of. I know that I have the power to control these limiting beliefs about myself but somehow; I lost the ability to love myself unconditionally. This, like everything else, is a journey I will forever be on.

I feel like in the last few weeks I’ve gained some valuable insights about life and the journey we are all on. Our purpose to learn from each experience, good or bad, and accept that everything has a divine purpose and its best to not dwell on the situations that have disappointed us. That’s not always easy to do because our society has created a checks and balances journey competition we all seem to be on with each other which just makes most of us insecure and some of us crazy. We owe ourselves the opportunity to experience life with wonder, exhilaration and sit in the pain when we need to. We need to learn to give each other and ourselves more compassion. The machine of capitalism has taken a mental toll on so many of us and its high time we disconnect and reflect and seek help to do so if need be. We all deserve more happiness.

There is more growth to come.

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I always found solace being unattached, single, or relationship adjacent (I describe this as a pseudo relationship with some of the activities but zero commitment). Relationships always seemed daunting, cumbersome and something my early 80’s born and later associates have notoriously struggled with. With the information age has come technologies that have all but erased intimacy in personal relationships. We can text a few words to set up a date, dodge someone we aren’t interested in by ghosting them and we can fumble at getting to know people via a text exchange all while being lazy and using shorthand.

We have become conditioned to live on a superficial frequency. Everything we want from images to food (Ubereats anyone?) has become instantaneous and real relationships are anything but quick! The building of a relationship is a journey much like our individual life paths. So many of us have become accustomed to seeing the perfectly filtered lives of individuals and couples whose lives we admire forgetting a picture only shows a fraction of the story.

What I’m learning is when you’re in a relationship with someone you are really in a relationship with yourself.

Lots of the relationships I was in ended up crashing and burning because I expected them too. If we spent more time modifying ourselves there would be more successful relationships. It really does take a person connected with themselves to ‘unsuck’ at relationships. And this concept, along with anything you are good at in life or working on in life is and will always be a personal growth process. This process of engaging with oneself and healthily reflecting on how one can grow and modify will ultimately help every type of interpersonal connections we want to have and sustain. I care about improving and strengthening areas I’m not satisfied with. One of those areas is I’m not happy with the majority of my relationships. This has been a trigger area for me since I was little girl. Part of “unsucking” is getting to the root cause of the sore spot and working towards addressing unhealthy patterns to hopefully have more pleasant outcomes. More to come on the ah ha moments I hope to gain during my self exploration.

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