(Written November 2022) Life, after feeling like a nightmare for a little while, feels like a dream right now.
I don’t know what happens next, and I love it, rather than fear it.
I am even more deeply in love than before, even though I see him less (and when I do see him 🤤…).
I am focused and driven and actively working on my traumas and my healing. (Maybe more than I ever have been).
I am NOURISHING myself with wholesome foods and drinks and self pleasure and books.
I am almost entirely medication free. Despite packing a full suitcase of pills from my old life when I moved.
Things had gotten so dark before, that I never thought I’d say any of this. I never thought I’d want to live as much as I do right now.
I’m breathing all of this in.
LYL xoxoxo
How you survived is more important than how you were victimised
It can be easy to forget how strong you’ve been. It can be easy to forget how much you’ve gotten yourself through.
Instead, we can end up focusing on the injustices and the cruelty towards us. We can sit and ruminate over all the things we could’ve done better, should’ve done differently. And all the pain it has caused us.
But if you can look back at these traumatic situations, and see how your brave soul SURVIVED them, you’ve found yourself a life-long tool that you can pull back out of your backpack when you’re feeling hopeless. YOU did that. YOU got through it. And you know what? YOU can do it again.
So, the next time everything starts feeling a bit impossible. Remind yourself that you’re a survivor.
And if you’re anything like me – you’ve got a small luggage hold worth of tools to help you get through it. You’ve just got to remember it’s there. 😉
LYL xoxoxo
I see breadcrumbs from the divine everywhere
Today’s Mindset Monday is courtesy of the safest, most encouraging place for writers @inspiredtowrite. Amies work has picked me up on more dark nights than I can count. Thank you for that.
So let us take this week by the horns/ba11s/whatever you are vibing with right now, and seek the TINY beautiful things. The miniature YAY’s of microwave pings and the first feel of a hot shower against your skin.
The sweet scent of daybreak yet again giving us One More Chance and each damn bird that calls out reminding us that nature is here. Alive. Existing.
Just like you.
Go hunt those breadcrumbs. I believe in you.
LYL xoxoxo
You can be aware of the damage someone has caused you without harbouring painful resentment towards them
This is my biggest and greatest lesson this year. I am doing MYSELF a disservice to harbour anger and resent and pain against someone else. It has taken me so long to learn and accept this.
So many years clinging onto anger in the hope it would make things right. So much time wasted holding myself back by letting resent devour my identity.
I guess I thought that if no one was angry about it then it might get forgotten, the injustice brushed under the carpet, the perpetrator getting ‘off the hook’.
You won’t forget. That’s not how hurt works. But you deserve to be allowed to move on without having to carry pain towards someone else with you. (Spoiler alert – it just gets reflected back onto you).
Set yourself free.
LYL xoxoxo
The Will to Live Project
At some point since 2020 (peak Rebecca power chic takes on the world), I gave up. I don’t know if it was the multiple metaphorical hits to the groin, the miscarriage, the money problems or just general ageing. But it happened.
And I’ve spent huge parts of the last two years wishing I was 2020 me. Whilst knowing that she’s long gone – we don’t get to go back – we get to glow forward.
I don’t want to die. But I haven’t been that bothered with living either. It’s all seemed hopeless. I fell into a pit of self hatred, and in that process decided everyone else in the world hated me too (I didn’t ask them, just decided).
I haven’t really known how to address that here. Since moving to Cornwall, I’ve seen it all a lot more clearly. I’ve seen myself a lot more clearly. I’ve also seen how this attitude affects the people I care about most. How I choose self sabotage over intimacy. Running away over pushing through. Assuming the worst rather than remaining rational.
I didn’t want to announce my huge 2023 project here in case it was all too much. But I actually think this is the right space for me to be held accountable, as you always have done for me.
So, here it is. Project name? “The Will to Live”.
🪬Daily journaling, law of attractioning with my new accountability journal.
🪬New, healthy habits to replace unhealthy ones. (Books over TV!).
🪬Using this platform to walk each other through this process (I never seem to be alone when things like this crop up). Inc. new mindset Mondays, quote posts galore and posting honest stuff that cringes me out (dancing kween).
Let’s go searching.
LYL xoxoxo
What would need to change in your life for you to feel safe?
For me, it was fast paced overwhelming city life. I was already dealing with a faulty anxiety mechanism that was working too hard and reacting to too much. My body was in just as much of a rush as my mind was to get out of every single situation that didn’t involve being curled up in a ball.
Although moving 300 miles away meant giving up everything I’d worked for, I knew my mental health had to take priority. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, I just knew I needed to breathe again.
Within three days of moving here I began tapering off my anti-anxiety medication, I felt that good. For so long I had believed that I wouldn’t ever be able to live without it, yet, I’m doing so great.
Your environment has such a huge impact on your mental health. I was fortunate enough to be able to change mine and listen to what my body needed.
What would need to change in your life to make you feel safe?
LYL xoxoxo
You’re walking through the “it’s complicated” era with me.
(Dated Jan 2023) You’re walking through the “it’s complicated” era with me.
The “I’m right where I need to be” but also “I’m being dragged through the mud by my ears” era.
The “my whole environment is so perfect” era, and yet the “my whole soul is in turmoil” era.
When the mud and silt of “being so busy I don’t have to think about anything” settled in my new life, I saw the truth. I saw how tired my soul is. I saw how much it regrets coming back to earth for one last life. (‘You should’ve stayed up there’, it tells me, rolling it’s eyes because this is exactly the kind of thing I would do when I wasn’t up for it).
“I’ll have some stories to tell my soul fam, right?” I tell myself.
“I’m creating great opportunities for all my soul mates to learn here, right?”
It’s meant to be hellish for us sensitive ones. It’s meant to crack us open hard enough for us to let the light in. I know that.
Surrendering to the pain of existence is a monstrous challenge. As is truthfully owning The Will to Live.
We must move through this pain. We must keep walking. We must let ourselves keep breaking our hearts in the hope that one day…
They will open 🪬
LYL xoxoxo
Other people’s jealousy is not your responsibility
It is not your responsibility to make yourself smaller so that other people don’t get jealous.
It is not your responsibility to dim your light to ensure you don’t trigger someone else’s control issues.
It is not your responsibility to limit your potential to avoid activating someone’s insecurities.
Read that again.
This is for my fellow people pleasers and empaths. Who can easily slip into a pattern of shrinking their lives to avoid hurting others. Who carry so much fear of hurting someone else’s feelings that they let themselves dismiss their own.
And perhaps for those of us who had traumatic consequences to face as a child if they upset someone.
You get to steer this ship now. Not them.
Take the helm. You’ve got this.
LYL xoxoxo
What might it take to become more than my own limitations?
Here I am, slumped on the kitchen floor throwing affirmations at the wall until one sticks.
I twirl the soggy spaghetti pieces of abundance and manifestations around my fingers, I even wear them as a moustache on my face.
But still. No luck.
What might it take to become more than my own limitations? To use my own meek force to run at my own impenetrable wall of self hatred and ill wishes.
It seems, at times when the spaghetti won’t stick, impossible.
I don’t know though. Rumour has it you just have to cook it longer. Bring it to the boil. “Anyone can cook” chef Gusteau would say. 🐀
(Meanwhile, I’ll take this self made metaphor of hope and continue pushing against that wall we talked about. More metaphors?).
Something’s gotta give.
LYL xoxoxo
I choose to see the light I am to this world
MINDSET MONDAY! I’m sharing this as someone who has spent so much of their life seeing the dark in myself that she didn’t even believe any light existed.
I know the way I can present myself on here at times looks like I’ve got it all together. Like I couldn’t love myself anymore than I do.
I wish that was the truth.
Life is cyclical, and self-hatred can be addictive, reassuring, comfortable. I have always been the most dangerous person in my life because I simply couldn’t see anything good in myself. And those cycles of losing myself in the darkness within will reoccur many times in the course of my experience here. I’m beginning to see that now.
It is through starting #thewilltoliveproject , journaling and making some big changes in my life that I can see the good in me again (after a long ol 2 years of losing it).
And through the shining lights of the few people I ‘let into’ my life.
I hope you find the light within you.
LYL xoxoxo