How Did We Get Here?

Releasing and Recognizing Frustrations in Growth

Lately, I've found myself looking for myself. I'll take myself to a mirror and look into it and debate on where I am and when I got lost. It takes a lot of energy for me to not get frustrated in these moments. A part of me wants to scream. Where is the confident, intelligent, wild, bright, aware woman I had come to love so fully? I'll touch my face or my heart and ask, "Where are you?"

I hear a little voice in my heart crying out, "I'm right here! Why can't you see me?"

I take a deep breath and remind myself to be patient. Leaves fall too, and you know what? With some care and fluidity, they tend to grow all over again.

“Why are we so hard on ourselves and so patient with others?”

A child falls off a bike, and you say, "It's okay, just get right back up and try again." We experience a lifetime of trauma and when we can't get up one day, we beat ourselves up: "Why can't you just get up today? Stop being so sorry for yourself. Just grin and bear it." These are terrible narratives. We deserve to be patient with ourselves in every different moment of our story. We deserve to foster and love our inner child.

Why 2020 Brings This To Light

Here we are, in a year filled with a virus forcing us inside, a finally blinding light on systemic racism, and colossal environmental disasters. I'm in Oregon, so the third category is the fires for me, but I know that phrase covers a lot of different events around the globe.

I noticed it was when I could finally breathe again that I collapsed. As if in that moment, when I could finally rest, my brain vomited so many emotions that hadn't been processed, that they collided, and I couldn't see. Maybe I ignored it too long, or maybe it was just really too much.

I mean, think about chronic stress, right? When we grow up in stressful environments, our body kicks in our cortisol and adrenaline to help us survive, but in doing that, we repress our immune system, processes, etc. When the stress finally fades away (assuming it actually does), our bodies get sick. And if in those moments, we don't chose to take care of ourselves because we never have before, or we are afraid, then we commit to the cycle of sickness churning our emotional and physical insides.

How awful.

But that's how we're trained right? So, when something as shaking as 2020 hits, is it any surprise we are all fighting for some semblance of sanity?

We are being pushed so hard right now. It is in these moments we must be the most patient with ourselves. Of course this nonstop, non-navigable plane of existence, with constant factors out our control and no social systems to rely on for help has pushed us to randomly and suddenly lose it. The pressures of not understanding what to do or how to do it instantly put us into a childlike state and force forward everything else we haven't dealt with like an unbearable chasm. Of course it brought up every childhood, relationship, work, friend trauma you thought had been locked away, or neurotic tendencies you believed were long gone.

“This year has been a global flight or fight response, where we don't know if we can do either.”

And all I can really say to you or me is, be patient, because you have grown so much, and you still are growing. We all are. It's okay to fall again. Just because you learned something, doesn't mean you don't have to maintain and re-learn it sometimes.

In the words of Glennon Doyle in Untamed, "We can do hard things," and this year... this year is a very hard thing.