This picture of leaves reminded me how long it took me to learn to accept all parts of myself, all their moods, and all the mood swings from one to another.
How many times have we tried to maintain a euphoric mood or force a party that just wasn’t a party that day?
I would say that we are made of many more layers than we like to admit, and that any attempt to stick only to the comfortable layers is doomed from the start.
influenced by changes in temperature and the seasons? Why then don’t we see ourselves as part of nature and eagerly await what new colors the changes will bring?
For me, it was always fear. Fear of once again experiencing an emotion that wasn’t comfortable, so by struggling to go through something unfamiliar, I prolonged and slowed down the natural course of things.
Return to acceptance
We always come back to good old acceptance: accepting ourselves as we are and accepting that we’re more prone to change than we’d like to be.
It is precisely in accepting and exploring some darker corners that you find various secret doors to very pleasant moments and to an easier passage through tougher times.
Old and unresolved
These days I’ve felt something I haven’t felt in a long time. A kind of dullness, lack of ideas, and meaninglessness. I felt a deep sense of dejection and the feeling that nothing really made much sense. I’m familiar with that feeling from before; back in the day it used to come up more often, usually during phases when I was doing things I didn’t find very meaningful.
Some say that post-COVID is like that, prone to depressive states, and being cooped up in an apartment certainly doesn’t help.
Whatever it was, I decided to embrace that feeling and deepen it to see what lay beneath it. I let myself drag myself around the apartment, without lifting my spirits with music or pretending to feel better than I actually did. I wondered what was going on.
When I was feeling a bit better, I started offering myself ideas about what all made sense, but I discovered a deeply wounded part of myself, one that very often goes unseen even by me. A part that wants to be asked how it’s doing, a part that wants someone to let it rest, a part that needs permission. The one that wants to be praised and then rewarded with rest, to have someone tell it that it deserves it.
And since that simply wasn’t happening, part of it became angry, offended, and hurt.
I’ve learned that, first of all, I need to give myself permission to rest when I’m tired, not when I’ve completed enough tasks to convince myself it’s okay to be tired. I’ve learned that rest isn’t a reward but an integral part of life every single day, and that we don’t have to earn it.
What have I learned?
And I’ve learned that it’s good to sink sometimes so we can resurface smarter.
And then, when I was ready, I gave myself a Theta treatment and released all beliefs that rest must be earned, that being extremely tired is a sign of one’s own worth, and that I must constantly seek proof of my worth in external praise.
Winter is a time for introspection, and I’ve really embraced it this year.
Well, that’s why my spring will be less hectic.
