I am learning to live by myself. I am learning to live by myself for myself. This is hard. This is very hard in a world that is littered with overstimulation. This overstimulated world moves at a pace that is faster than the human heart can beat.
I am learning to breathe. I am learning to breathe by myself. I am learning to breathe by myself for myself. This is hard. This is very hard to do in a world that is littered with overstimulation and moving at a heart bursting pace.
Decades of heart racing social interactions, oxygen sucking schedules, and unrealistic success standards made me fade…very fast. My heart inflated and stayed inflated. It was always just on the edge of bursting. My lungs cinched themselves shut, and my mind went fuzzy. I felt everything. I felt too much. I forgot how to think for myself, I forgot how to speak for myself and among all the too muchness of the world I held my breath. My body was running on nothing but observation and impulses. Catch and react. My eyes would see a behavior. My ears would hear a tone of voice and the two outside sources would jumpstart a gut impulse. Catch and react. I was always racing, always hoping, always trying to be like what I thought I saw from the outside world, but there was always an intense sting as I fell short every day. Catch, react, and push back.
I wanted to feel like I was enough. I wanted to be enough. Although just being seemed to make someone not enough of one thing or another. The world wouldn’t allow one to just be. So I didn’t allow myself to be, either. This forced me to attach myself to something outside of myself and I just tried to be that one thing. So my fuzzy mind picked the character called “Good Girl”. Then for over 20 years every piece of me rehearsed the role of “Good Girl”. Though I felt I was falling short in this role it seemed easier than to fall short being myself. Through all the trying to move at a heart bursting pace in an oxygen sucking world it’s no wonder I fell short trying to be a good girl. I was not myself. I lost myself.
After decades of not breathing or living for myself I am coming to and snapping out of my daze. I am allowing the shock of the world to clear. I am letting old ideas of success fade. Then I can breathe a little easier. Then I can breathe for myself and not for the world. Turns out I have never been able to breathe for the world. That’s too much air for one person to take on. I am only one person. I can only breathe for myself.
As I learn to breathe for myself then I can live for myself. Once I am able to live for myself nothing about me can be cinched, fuzzy, or close to bursting. No more trying to be a good girl. No more forgetting how to be. I’ll just get to be…
I will be enough. For now, I’m in the process of strike. I’ll be under construction for a while. I’m in the school of unlearning. This is very hard, but this is very exciting…
And as I venture through this process, every moment I am learning that I am enough… right now.