We are still in the depths of winter, so I find myself hesitant to ritualistically mark the beginning of a new stage when this calendar is essentially man-made. Like almost every people since the dawn of time, it feels more right to claim spring as a new beginning, when Aries opens it newborn eyes after elder Pisces goes to sleep. Why create something new when the old has not yet finished?
But there is something to be said for a date celebrated by millions at the same time. And so, instead of promises of a new beginning when I’m still amidst a healing slumber, I’d like to share the most potent lessons that I learned in 2021. May they bring you something of value.
Healthy love is likely everything you thought it was not.
The love game is broken. The dating and relationship rules out there are usually the exact opposite of what happily 10-year-plus married couples — and your therapist — will say. I’ve chosen to only ask for relationship advice from them, and it has made me an overall healthier person — as well as disillusioned at how much we are led astray by advice from people who haven’t actually lived the true workings of a long-lasting love story. I have learned to listen to advice from people whose emotional regulation I trust, and who I would be pleased to accidentally trade lives with. The rest may mean well, but will likely give me advice based on where they are at…. not where I want to be. PS being married doesn’t make for good relationship advice if it’s from people in unhealthy marriages. Sounds logical, and yet I’ve spent years asking advice from people who are in toxic dynamics themselves.
Discomfort is not suffering or pain — and I am not a victim of anything permanently.
Today it is very easy to conflate discomfort (rejection, other forms of not getting our way, and even diagnoses) with the loss and pain that this would have caused us as helpless children. We claim these concepts as being an unmovable object instead of something to overcome. But we are not helpless children anymore, and a lot of my growth this year has come from realising that not living exactly how I want doesn’t make me a victim. Impatience won’t kill me. Struggle doesn’t mean I’m being harmed. Having certain traits and behaviours that are unhealthy doesn’t mean I’ll always be that way. Being abandoned doesn’t make me the victim of anyone but my own expectations and demands. As an acupuncturist of mine once said, “it’s not that you *are* a depressed person — you currently have the *symptoms* of depression — the latter reframed will allow you to break each one down into manageable coping mechanisms, as opposed to a permanent state”. And he was right.
Life is very fucking short — and people I think I’ll have time with will die before I expect them to.
I lost a client I was supposed to do end-of-life photography with. I was hospitalised via ambulance, and quite frankly, was afraid I wouldn’t leave the hospital. I’ve lost multiple people to COVID, some much younger than me. In all these situations I understood that one day you can be here… the next you might not be. You don’t get to choose, control, or decide when — but you can rise up to the challenge to make sure you take your last breath without any regrets.
When I am most convinced that I am right, I am probably not.
The more open we are to being wrong, the more likely we have emotionally regulated and are viewing the situation without bias. The more we hold on to our rightness, the more is likely at stake if we turned out to be wrong. Perhaps our entire identity depends on this being correct. And so, this year, I’ve noted that when I’m stubbornly putting an exclamation mark after a sentence, with no room for a question mark…. something is asking to be explored. And it will not be fun.
Most people are not able to view humans through a trauma lens, but from a space of judgment instead.
That’s a quote from my therapist yesterday. She was saying that it’s easy to say someone is being manipulative, attention-seeking, toxic, and all those other words we use to dismiss and dehumanise and cancel — but it’s a lot harder to understand and show compassion for where people are coming from. We rank other people’s toxicity as unforgivable but expect understanding for our own — or ignore our own, repressing it so we can focus on other people’s wrongdoings instead. But we barely give ourselves true compassion, so how can we expect it from another?
Life is only just beginning — and it will always be this way.
I think we all have this idea that there’s an elusive stage we’ll reach where we’ll have a particular thing figured out. Where we’ll be ready *once* xyz happens. I’m starting to realise that that idea is what robs us of life itself. You blink and now ten years have passed — and not only have you not reached that elusive place, but you haven’t reached readiness either. I thought I’d know myself by now, be in a certain place by now, but it turns out… I’m only just getting started.
Everything I was avoiding “for later” — or for not at all — was usually my brain trying to avoid the very things that would help me be where I wanted to be…. for “protection”.
Brains will tell you it’s a gut instinct, or suffering, or anxiety, or depression, when you find yourself resistant to something or someone. Or your brain will be like, “I just need x and THEN I’ll be in the headspace to do y”. Your brain is lying to you. My brain has lied to me for over half a decade that I am too broke to be the generous person I used to be, that I am too broke to look after myself properly, that I don’t have the energy or time to do what makes me happy, that I’ll connect with what I love “once I’m more settled”. But like a master saboteur, my brain then kept me unsettled so that I’d never reach that elusive space. Turns out…. the thing you’re saying needs to happen before you do xyz? Will only happen when you xyz. I hate it… because it’s robbed me of a decade or more of not doing what I love. But I love it because, once I figured this out… life shifted to being more my own, less at the whim of something I couldn’t control. Don’t underestimate how much of your opinions and actions are just defense mechanisms because your brain thinks it’s protecting you, but is really just holding you back. Everything you want but deny yourself, and wish for secretly… what if they weren’t crazy wishes but whispers from something you don’t understand? What if your dreams aren’t intangible ghosts but the cheat sheet at the back of your most difficult math book?
You are so much closer than you realise.
Sometimes I find myself feeling like there’s a mountain of steps left before I can even feel a semblance of control or achievement in certain areas of my life. I’ve learned that with the right work — especially on mindset, goodness me is gratitude and breathwork wrongly dismissed, especially by myself — things can change for the better in such an instant that we wondered how we ever lived life differently. It’s usually the point where I want to throw in the towel that what I wanted was actually right around the corner.
Keep going.
May the rest of this slumber until Aries season bring you the strength to shed what you no longer need, the wisdom to rest when your ego is screaming at you to push yourself, and the discipline to push yourself when your brain is telling you it’s impossible to continue. May you enter the spring renewed, with an understanding that winter had to bring death in order for the life you want to exist.
Happy New Year.