I’m Still Learning

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past couple of months. I temporarily lost myself in the wake of everything that was going wrong. I reset my mindset again and again and I found new truths and let go of old ones and found hope and lost it and found it again. What went right I didn’t hold on to and anxiety won out.

All of this helped me to see how powerful anxiety can be. It also helped me to see who I really was and what I wanted for myself. Helped me to finally see myself as Tiana the individual and ultimately see that it’s ok to want things for myself. To be selfish. To want to experience love.

To see for the first time the life I want to lead clearly. To see too that it is possible to get there. That there is nothing wrong with dreaming of it. But, to also realize that the only control I have is over myself and my actions and reactions.

I also learned that I can be a bit irrational at times. That fear can make me create situations in my head that are very unlikely to happen even if I believe it at that time. That sort of delusional state is what caused a lot of the problems I encountered in the recent past.

Since realizing this I’ve done my best to resolve the problems that I’ve been encountering. Inwardly and outwardly. One of the best things that has come from this was from a ted talk I found that talked about regret. I forget what it was called but, I saved a quote from it that I will always keep in mind, “If we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or loose them we should feel pain when things go wrong.”

Our regrets and our guilt are not our enemy. It is what tells us what we’ve done that was against who we really are and who we want to be and it teaches us lessons on how to be better as people. I made some majorly stupid decisions that hurt someone I love dearly. But, the regret and the hurt I feel from the aftermath have taught me something of who I am and who I want to be. I’m stubborn. When things go wrong I panic. I want things to work out with all parties involved and I get scared when things go awry to the point that I make things worse because I’m no longer reacting from a rational place. Then upon realizing my mistake I punish myself mentally because I think “how could I have said that? How could I have done that? I’ve ruined everything.”

Because, at the end of the day I’m not a person that gives up on people I care about. I’m the kind of person that stays. I’m the kind of person who will be there for someone even if I hadn’t heard from them for years. I’m not the girl that anxiety creates me to be. I’m not the girl that depression drives me to.

These past few months I had the lowest point in my mental health journey ever and I came out of it. I faced myself and realized that yes I’ve made some bad decisions and yes I’ve caused unnecessary pain, but I’m still learning. I learned the lesson I was meant to learn and I take pride in the fact that I will never make the mistake I made again.

I learned from the pain what it was to really love and not just love another person, but to love myself. Because, even through it all I have myself to keep me stepping forward through every experience life has in store for me.

The weird thing is that while writing this I feel so hopeful. I feel excited about what life has in store for me. I feel for the first time that I’ve truly seen my deepest flaws and accepted them. Accepted myself even though that’s not what this post is about. I’m stubborn and anxious and emotional and impulsive, but all those things come from a place of wanting to be a good person of wanting happiness for myself and those around me and sometimes that means taking an approach that is wrong, but stemming from good intentions and really maybe I’m not so bad after all.

Maybe it’s not that I need to truly change to be the person I wish to be, but to let go of all the negativity towards myself. All that beating myself up. All that misguided self-hatred for feeling like I’m some sort of menace towards the people closest to me. It’s more like I’ve been a temperamental child that took too much on her shoulders and released all the hurt in any way she could trying to keep myself sane and keep everything going right instead of reacting calmly when things went wrong. For the first time, I feel that there really isn’t anything wrong with me. That there never has been. That all the pain I let build inside all that guilt is unfounded. I’ve suffered enough. I don’t need to continue hurting myself mentally anymore.

I know this post has gone a little off the rails and it’s very existential, but I’ve just had one of the most important realizations of my life. I feel free in a totally new way. I feel like myself in a wholly new way. I feel like I can move forward in my life in the best way possible and take on anything that comes my way because I see who I am wholly and I don’t hate myself anymore, because I did.. I did for a long time, but I can see myself for who I am totally and I can see that I’m just trying to do my best with the cards I’ve been given. Yes, I’ve reacted badly, but I know why I had those freak outs and panic attacks and at the center of it all it was from thinking I could do it all on my own and make things better, but that was not in my control. I see myself now and how badly I want to start over and to just live well and love the people I love and not take life for granted. That I deserve to start over. That I deserve to give myself another chance at dancing through life and going with the flow instead of trying to keep everyone happy. To let myself want. To let myself hit a brand new reset button and fully live life authentically as me and know that no matter what it will be beautiful because I won’t be fighting internally anymore. To finally have forgiven myself for everything. To accept myself with all the pain, anxiety, sadness, and all the good, happiness, and hope and see that I truly love myself. To realize that no matter how hard I’ve tried I’ve never truly loved myself like I do in this moment. To know that I’m going to love myself in this way for the rest of my life. To know that I’m going to be my best self from today onward and I’m going to grow so much and love so much deeper from finally accepting myself and loving myself truly from now on.

Thanks for reading! I’ve been on a very huge rollercoaster of a emotional journey recently and I’ve shared it with all of you in the hopes that maybe something I’m going through can help some of you in some way. This post was cathartic and unexpectedly wonderful for me to write. I feel that this was what had been holding me back from living the life I wanted for myself for so long. To know that I’m over it now means that there are infinite possibilities ahead. I’m excited to see where life takes me going forward.

-Till next time!