Jen just jen

full :: transparency
2019-02-14 05:25:32 (UTC)

making friends with fears

Here I am again, trying to 'pay attention to my fears, make friends with them, and offer them rest."
It's a fickle thing to listen to my own thoughts when they turn toward the persistently down, and finding the way back to lighthearted thinking can be a tough endeavor. But I want to win at my own life.
I'm having trouble finding the commitment to that desire.

I'm falling into the same thought-pattern habits.

tomorrow I start my new work. I'm excited, especially when I'm remembering just how qualified I am to do this job. I am qualified, it's a comfortable environment for me. What I'm not comfortable with is meeting new people and the expectation that puts on me. I hate it when I forget to speak for my own needs and questions and there's an uncomfortable silenced filled with my insecurity that ensues. I forget how this expectation I have of myself overshadows what I'm capable of doing- the conversation I can make can be friendly and surprising when I let go of who I want to be, or who I'm supposed to be. I forget how to be myself when I get anxiety about a whole situation.

But I've been in these shoes before. I just have to throw my expectations out the window. I'm admittedly out of practice with my own flexibility in thought, but I shouldn't let me lose track of the larger goal- I want to move forward with my life onto actual goals.

I get stuck here in my thinking. I know it's what I do want, but the concept of upholding responsibility again gets me afraid and willing to let it all go. While it seems I've spent the past year of my life doing is pursuing the road of less responsibility in order to make more room in my schedule for myself, I have to remember, this wasn't initially true of me. I did want more meaning in my life and I wanted to uphold what I'd earned and fought for in life. But I didn't want to uphold it all by myself, which seemed to be the story over and over.

And now I'm still afraid of reaching the point of finding responsibility to uphold but having to do it all on your own.
And I know part of this is a lie. Or it's not the whole truth.

I know there are always people around to share the burden if you seek their help. But sometimes I am looking but I don't have the words. I'm just like that and it makes me bitter..

I was listening to our brother Jordan Peterson talk about his 'integrating your shadow' jazz, and it jived with this part in me. A particular part in his speech was about how bolstering your confidence lies in making yourself strong enough to face what has made you bitter and use it in your own anger productively. This can assert itself as 'speaking up' or 'fighting,' and other things passive people aren't so inclined to do. And he said this bitterness can come from anywhere, and sometimes it comes from the things in you that have gone unsaid, and then you have to figure out a way to address those things and make your own character right.

I've had things in the past I wanted to say but never did and that's the bitterness that kills me inside. It's like 'Atonement,' but sort of not exactly. Just in the way the little girl holds onto a small event that changed the course of history for everyone involved for the worse her whole life. And the way she has to watch it all play out but she doesn't know how to cope because she can't change what she did. it's like that. at least to me.
Because the event itself is lost to history, and everybody came out of it 'fine' but it is also terrible. Just life today in my relationship with my family, I can't enjoy their presence sincerely because this hasn't been recognized as something that happened. It just goes unsaid, because I let it.

So yeah, it always haunts me, in some small way. I feel like it's changed me too, and when I focus too much on that I start to think I'm not capable of anything, at least relatively.


There's this paradox, it seems I can be proud of who I am today, but I don't know if I can be proud of who I am. I wish those were one in the same. My mind often derails itself from the proud track at that lament, but today it seems fair. It's alright to me.
I can take responsibility for who I am.
I'm really not so bad.


And when I take life one step at a time- not getting lost in my relation to the whole [expected] picture, it seems, maybe I can make it there, or somewhere close to where I want to end up.




Ad: