BONUS: Growing with Grace 🌺
Self work is hard af but it doesn’t have to be | GROWTH & GRATITUDE Week 3-ish
Howdy, folks! Since I missed last week’s newsletter (not gonna over explain. We’re growing!), here's a bonus entry ahead of Friday’s regularly scheduled programming taken right out of the pages of my actual journal. It’s vulnerable and emotional but has a really good garden metaphor. Enjoy!
PROMPT: Where do you still need to see growth in your life?
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” - Carl Rogers (from Radical Acceptance)
Self-work often feels like a tug of war but not in the way one would expect it to be. I don’t feel like I’m at war with my old habits and new habits and feelings I want to embody. I’m diving head first into improving my mental health and I’m taking so many steps to learn more about my past and my trauma responses and better coping mechanisms and all that jazz. Love therapy, love books, love writing and talking about my own journey (hello!).
It’s just that the more work I put into changing my unhealthy habits, the more I feel like everything negative about me is put on display and dissected over and over again. Self-work feels like I’m telling myself something is wrong with you, you need to change. You’re not good enough as you are. Which puts me in a tug of war where I’m resistant to the change I’m actively pursuing. Sometimes, self-work causes me to not like myself.
I don’t know how to give myself grace while growing.
I sometimes feel like I’m just reinforcing every negative thing anyone has ever had to say about me, every time someone told me I wasn’t enough or told me what to do when I wasn’t soliciting their advice. Self-work sometimes feels like changing in order to please someone else, to make people happier with me which is the opposite of what I’m supposed to be working on. It feels like changing only in response to negative feedback (which I give myself). It feels like fixing myself which implies that I’m broken, something else that feels counterintuitive when I’m trying so hard to heal my inner dialogue and be kinder to myself.
Maybe I am at war with my old habits: my people pleasing, my silencing myself, my intense negative self talk. But not because I’m trying to hold onto these feelings. These habits have just had a lot longer to take root in my life, and they sometimes feel a lot stronger than the new habits I’m trying to cultivate like boundaries, honest communication, and affirming myself. And I can’t plant anything new until I pull up those old roots and that’s turning out to be a lot harder than I thought.
I don’t know how to give myself grace while growing. I don’t know how to plant new seeds in the garden of my life without hating all the old things that grew there. And that’s what I still need to work on. I’m learning to accept myself while also trying to change myself and that truly is a paradox.
Self love is the soil in the garden. Without it, nothing healthy can grow.
Maybe I’ve been doing things backwards. I look at self-work like you need to change so that you can love your life. In reality, you need to love your life first. Not so you can change, but so you can automatically put effort into making your life better. Because you love yourself, and you want what’s best for yourself.
Turns out there are steps to this self-work thing and I’ve been skipping a crucial one. No wonder it’s been so hard. I’ve always looked at therapy and my research and all of my journalings and internal tug of wars like I have figure out what’s wrong and solve the problem, the problem being me. Turns out, before you can do any problem solving, you gotta learn to stop seeing yourself as a problem. Self love is the soil in the garden. Without it, nothing healthy can grow.
Now, what are the steps to achieving self-love? I guess I have to figure that out.
This entry was written for WEEK 3 of the Finding the Right Words December Challenge under the theme of GROWTH & GRATITUDE🌺. Follow along using the graphic above and write about whatever comes to mind with the corresponding prompts. Share with me using the tag #FTRW or email me at jdoggett9 [at] gmail.
There’s no wrong way to journal. You just gotta find the right words. Happy Writing!