Starting to Feeling Like Myself Again

So back in November 2021 my boyfriend and I moved in together. This was such a huge step for both of us and from the jump it has felt SO natural. Just two besties taking the next step in life together. But like any BIG change, there was some serious adjustment periods. Now that we’re 7 months in, I think I’m finally settling back into a routine.

It’s been such a weird phase of life–we’ve both had some major changes go on this year. We moved in together in November, in January 2022 Mason quit his job with a company he’d been with for nearly 8 years, I lost a family member in January that brought up a lot of old pain I had to sort through, and then in mid-February we started on this huge house flip project. (Both of our first ever times flipping a house solo. Scary!) Ever since then it has been learning curve after learning curve. I feel like what would’ve taken maybe 90 days before (from a mental-load perspective) to get used to has taken me closer to that entire 6-month time frame.

Blessings into burdens, or are they?

While almost everything that’s happened has been an absolute blessing and massively exciting, something just hasn’t quite felt right. It’s like all along I’ve felt the “same”, but “off”… you know? Similar enough to normal-Sam that sometimes its easy to brush off as a short-term funk. But once I started to hit that 2+ month period of feeling more and more “off”, I realized this is an undeniable season of growth for me. It was so hard to acknowledge that I could be in a challenging season while everything around me was the best it had ever been. I love everything about my life, and yet I felt exhausted and frustrated. And rightfully so, there’s been so much going on both personally and professionally that it I really had two options: sink or swim. An environment that either breeds growth from success or growth through “failure”–either way, growth is inevitable.

What I thought at first is that I’d discovered a whole new layer of mental blocks and limiting beliefs that I didn’t even know were within me before. But the more I take time to reflect on it, I think it was so much more than that. First of all, past me deserves way more credit, because she had a handle on her mental state and did the work to clean up old wounds. Further, what I’ve come to realize is that in venturing into so many new experiences at once, I accidentally lost my ability to gauge & my discipline around a variety of helpful practices. For instance, setting boundaries, assessing negative self-talk when it came up, and projecting my insecurities onto others.

So rather than discovering strictly old patterns, I realized I had accidentally created new ones–new ones that were NOT serving me. I found myself so focused on healing old wounds and working on old beliefs, that I forgot to be intentional with the brand new ones I was forming.

In(sta)-secure

A silly example of this is my internal conversation around my social media presence. Pre-roommate (as I like to teasingly call it to Mason), I used to be heavily present in my social media accounts, blogging, and just the internet in general. It was just me–I never had to filter myself, worry about impeding on anyone else’s privacy or preferences. Well fast forward to Nov 2021 when my SO moves in, whom has a virtually nonexistent internet presence LOL.

I immediately started feeling weird about showing up on the internet. At no point did he expressly tell me anything that indicated I should slow down on the internet or reign in from previous practices. Yet somehow, I created this entire storyline in my head that I couldn’t story as much on Insta because I needed to respect his privacy, or that I couldn’t take as many pictures when we did things because I didn’t need to be “plastering” our private life all over the internet. My words, not his.

…Like what?! I needed to take a serious chill pill, but eventually I let my mental story, which I completely fabricated on my own, totally change my relationship with social media. I managed to make it where for the past ~6 months it has felt nearly impossible to show up online… an activity I used to thrive on and genuinely enjoyed so much. I haven’t fully worked out why I got so twisty around this issue, but I’ve been working on slowly dipping my toes back in and reminding myself what I enjoyed about showing up. And most importantly, that it is safe to do so whenever and however I want to.

Anyways…

All of that to say that in creating new phases of life I realized I no longer had a road map for how to do the old things. Everything looked different and so I lost all the blueprints for a bit, thinking there was no way they could fit into the new developments of my life. And maybe they can’t, maybe they have to be altered, but that doesn’t mean any of my old behaviors/thought-processes/beliefs are wrong or no longer valid. We’re all allowed to grow and we have to allow our beliefs to grow with us. We can add amendments to the old schools of thought in order to make room for whatever new, uncharted experiences we find ourselves in.

Previously, I would get SO excited about ideas I had for my life. I had some seriously large goals for myself and have always believed I had everything I needed to achieve them. It’s wild how when you lose that powerful headspace how quickly the rest can go with it. Now, this isn’t ground breaking. Anyone who’s self-aware realizes the power of our mental states. It completely forms the reality we live in at all times. And for the past ~6 months I have gotten very unintentional with mine, and it shows.

But here’s the thing…

We get to start over any time we want.

We get to acknowledge all the good things that happened along the way.

We get to forgive past missteps.

We get to embrace the opportunities ahead of us.

We get to be SO unbelievably fucking proud of how far we’ve come.

We get to write the rulebook, draft the timeline, and set the standards of excellence. And we get to re-write, edit, and change them anytime we see fit.

We get to know and believe we are capable of amazing things.

So here we are. In today and today alone.

What will you do with today?

Here’s to feeling like YOU again.