Peace in my mess. (Untangling the earphones of life)

Wow! Life is so complicated.

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I am about to contradict my whole blog. If that’s what it takes to find the necessary life-balance that I’ve been so ignorant of, then so be it. I won’t hesitate.

I started journaling on August 20th 2011. I was 12 years old. I didn’t know that I was equipping myself with a survival tool at the time – a day when I was going to a wedding with my mum and sister, and my mum was taking ages to get ready. To this day I can’t say why my response to this delay was writing about it in a diary. At first I wrote general recounts of my days, and noted how people made me feel, and what I thought of them. It was funny, and eventful in my own context. I wrote about my friends, family, my crushes, my stresses… They all mattered to me then, but now I see that I had a big storm coming.

As I grew up (I’m still growing) I became disillusioned with life. I developed base feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and sadness (Malibu & Lemonade). I was going through so much emotional turmoil and it was all inside me. Today I realise just how traumatic it was. I cried so much when I was alone, and no one knew because I kept it to myself. There were only a few times that I cried in front of people after being in my head about my sadness for days. I only let those tears out to them when they asked or when felt like I was about to snap.

Through it all, my diary was my refuge. I didn’t have as much energy to address ‘small dramas’ in my life because my mental state became my drama. I was living with a broken and despaired state of mind and my diary transformed from a place where I collected daily experiences to a home for my extreme emotion. I would (and still do) pour my heart out there in an effort to do something with the overwhelm of feelings I had.

Soon enough, I started doing something with this. Rather than just pouring out my heart, I began asking myself why I felt this way. Even if the answer was that I didn’t know, I would still ask. I started to look back and see if I could find reason, for anything. I became more honest with how I felt about myself and others. I kept on writing until I accepted that my answers had always been inside of me. It gave me freedom and a life-perspective that I found comforting. I learnt how to make myself feel better through writing and figuring myself out.

Two big answers I found when I was roughly 19, were that I did not believe in myself and I was not working as hard as I needed to get to where I aspired in life. The only reason I came to these conclusions is because I had been asking myself why for all these years – it had finally led up to something. I realised that I had to work hard at my craft, whatever it would be at any given point, in order to make myself worth believing in, for myself, not for others – but myself, most importantly. I could not keep hoping that one day I would feel worth something. I just had to make myself worth it, and that philosophy worked for me.

From this sprouts everything I’ve done over the past 5-6 years. My blog, YouTube channel, poetry, journalism, my style, podcast – everything. It’s all been in an effort to be fearless and believe that I can truly do what I want. The only way to know was to do it… to try. Hence, The Art of Trying.

All my posts up to this point have been one long conversation with myself. My tagline, So you can relate, is just a side effect of that. I knew that you would be able to relate to the things I write, so I share it with you.

That’s why realisations mean so much to me. Every post I publish comes from a new realisation, and I can’t express how much freedom it gives me. I erase lies about not being good enough, giving up, having a distorted self-perception, being self-conscious, etc, in all of these posts. It’s all in an effort to be free because truly, I just want to be myself with no fear. This is why somevariables.org means so much to me.

But now I am scared.

Because recent events have shown me the downside to everything I’ve just explained. There is an imbalance in my approach to life. I question myself too much – not necessarily my decisions, but my thoughts. I ask why without any prompting nowadays and it’s driving me out of my own mind.

Now I must teach myself how to relax and let go. I’ve been told to perceive life’s chaos as my order and I don’t know how to do that. I plan and plan and plan and now I can’t deal with life going its own way. Meanwhile I thought I made these plans impartially.

It’s difficult because many realisations about myself are linked to my emotional trauma. And they came about in an effort to reduce the pain I had at the time. As I said, I found so many answers, and they cleaned up for me. But those years that I spent trying to understand myself took place when I was very impressionable, and now they are making it hard for me to be okay with my mess.

I have spent so long doing things to make me look put together, that people actually believe the lie that I am put together! People who don’t know me, anyway. It’s scary when you are completely jaded by life and your current experiences, and someone pierces that bubble of truth with an assumption that you are “put together”. Is that my own fault? I speak about the façades of others from behind the façade I have developed for myself. Now I am scared of myself.

Keeping this post to myself would be the maintenance of my facade. People don’t need to know my business but this feels like a freedom path.

I say I am trying to untangle these earphones of life. I have to pay attention, stop walking, and use both hands to figure this mess out. And I must find peace in it.

But really, I must find ultimate peace in the fact that I will never fully untangle them.

I will not invalidate my past experiences, but figuring them out was so much simpler and easier than what I am faced with today. Life is so complicated and I must come to the terms with the fact that I can’t fix things anymore – no longer can I question until I find out my truth. Sometimes there is no truth to find.

Currently I’m dealing with apathy towards my faith and everything it pertains to. I am so worried that I will stop believing in God. I am dealing with broken heartedness and hurt. I am experiencing endings and aloneness (not loneliness) which is an enigma in itself. But I am also dealing with overwhelming gratitude (yet, guilt) for the good things happening in my life. These earphones are truly tangled and I don’t know what to do. For the first time in forever I have to be okay with that. Here, I don’t have a solution.

Thinking has become circular. Lately there has been no way out and I’m certain I don’t even need to be in a maze of thought all the time. I am trying to leave the maze. That’s what I mean by letting go. To stop trying to do the right thing as a result of my conclusions and ‘solutions’. Trying to do the right thing and avoid further emotional trauma has just led me to a new kind of pain, a kind that I have no cure for. Perhaps that explains why I feel so hurt by life. I knew it was spiteful but this is a sinister spite.

I began this post with saying I will contradict my blog because it is all about self-actualisation and self-belief etc – to some degree minimising the mess that life is and seeing clearer. But now, I am letting go. I don’t care about much anymore because I am slowing down my sprint away from the mess that I am. Denial is on its way out the door, and I can’t believe it was here for so long.

I pray to God (all I have left) that this leads to the balance that I need. I thought so hard in one direction and now I need to make my way to the middle. I just need to release and truly go where the wind blows me. For a long time I’ve been claiming that that’s what I am doing but now it’s time to mean it. For haven’t I grown tired?