She asked, ‘Why did this happen?!’ ‘What is this for?!!!’. Frustrated with what was happening, not understanding how it could possibly be for anything other than to make her life harder, and desperately wanting to find meaning so her brain could make peace with it.
She wanted to be a peaceful person. She wanted to be like all the super happy, positive, peppy, smiling faces on Instagram, telling her that if she just thought ‘positively’, everything would be OK and her dreams would come true. That toxic positivity just made her feel worse sometimes. It made her feel like there was something wrong with her and she was an awful person for having feelings.
Instead of accepting all the parts of herself, she found herself censoring, creating reasons why she should be grateful and talking over the part of her that was trying to let her know how frustrated and hurt it felt. She was rejecting herself, and it only made her feel worse.
Sometimes the part of her that was hurt and constantly told to be quiet because it wasn’t ‘acceptable’ to her, got fed up. It shouted and raged and reacted completely over-proportionately to the smallest thing, because it was so tired of being ignored. That didn’t help either, it just made her hate it more.
Eventually, she realised that in order to feel better, she needed to accept every part of herself, even the parts she didn’t like or didn’t understand. She started letting the frustrated part speak. She had compassion for it. She could be grateful AND frustrated. She could be happy AND hurt. Her feelings didn’t have to be either / or, they could be AND. Funnily enough, the more she acknowledged the different parts and feelings within her, the more they settled and felt less overwhelming. They just wanted to feel heard and seen. She didn’t need to fix anything, she just needed to give herself space to be herself.
Doing this more and more, she realised that the things that happened that frustrated or hurt her, weren’t there to frustrate or hurt her, they happened so she could learn to love herself just a little more, and to bring another part of her back home, to herself.
What is it for?
