CONFRONTATION
Hello again.
This is a long post. It’s not perfect but I feel I just have to post it to get it behind me. It’s hard for me to even proofread this thing.
I’ve been wanting to get back to writing for years. I haven’t really known how to start. I’ve spent much of the time trying to figure out how I was going to word my experiences in the last several years. I’ve felt quite lost, confused and questioning the principles I developed which I felt made me who I was. That was a difficult state of mind for me to be in. Because for a long time I was so sure of myself, I was a massive advocate for self-love, and I implored every one of my followers to be the same. I was unashamed of my mental health issues and being unapologetically who I believed myself to be.
I’ve been single for most of my life, and I felt that having a loving partner was the only thing I needed to be the icing on my hard worked for cake. I felt that so strongly (no idea why) that I put it out into the universe to give me a loving, stable partner. Looking back (hindsight my friends- a beautiful thing), I realise that for the longest time the universe was disagreeing with me and saying:
‘Nah man, you don’t need that shit in your life’
‘But I want one’
‘Em, seriously, you don’t’
‘But I WANT one’
‘Well alright, here you go’
How’s me, the petulant child, stomping my feet at the universe for not getting what I wanted and thought that I needed, disagreeing with the natural order of things and the true journey of my life.
Well I asked and boy, did the universe deliver. I was gifted with a hilarious and confident gentleman, who also turned out to be a convicted criminal. He dumped me via text message two months after we started dating, and I still, to this day have not seen him since the minute he walked out of my door with a casual ‘see ya later’.
Shortly after that I met a gorgeous, sensitive and sweet man who I thought was all my dreams come true. I was so set on having this life partner who I’d marry, own a home and have lots of babies with, that I naively ignored the myriad of red flags. The relationship was abusive and it broke me. It caused a level of trauma that set me back years in personal development. I completely forgot all the things I not only work hard for but truly believed about myself.
I’ve been putting off writing this post for the longest time not only because I have felt a deep sense of shame about what I felt I had allowed to happen, but also because I didn’t want to offend anyone who was involved in that part of my life. I met some truly wonderful and beautiful people who I still have love for today. I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers and I just wanted to sweep it under the rug and put it all behind me.
Unfortunately, healing doesn’t work that way and I realise now that I needed to confront that part of my life.
For someone who constantly talks about self-love and self-care, I felt like a fraud after this relationship ended. I was so upset with myself and I felt ashamed. I was embarrassed, I felt I had no place talking about the things I had so strongly advocated for and I couldn’t bear to write or even read my blog. I didn’t feel entitled to my feelings of heartbreak and hurt, to the point I would bring up my abusive relationship constantly to friends and family, hoping that they would validate my feelings and tell me that it was ok for me to feel the way I was feeling.
I didn’t know how to cope with that feeling of shame. I felt like I had let everyone down and I had no business in being my true self. I became a hermit, barely leaving my room for six months. I continued to let toxic people walk all over me because I got to the point that that’s what I felt was all that was in store for me in life. I was extremely depressed and fighting off suicidal and self-harming thoughts for a year. I remained in a toxic and controlling job that crushed my spirit because I was too exhausted from my mental illness and trauma to do anything.
The craziest thing was, that I wasn’t even aware of how much I wasn’t coping until I went to the doctor, thinking I had some kind of hormonal imbalance (lol). I was waking up in the middle of the night with what I later found out to be severe panic attacks. Heart racing and beating very hard, unable to breathe, feeling like I was going to throw up, feeling paralysed. I could barely move because I felt like the walls were closing in on me. I was constantly tired. Sitting in the doctor’s office, watching him read over my medical history, he turned in his chair to look at me and calmly say,
‘Emily, all of the symptoms you are describing are definitive of depression and anxiety.’
I was shocked. Me, an advocate for mental health who had a strong history of mental illness and had been surrounded by mental health issues my entire life. I was prescribed 50mg of Zoloft (which eventually increased to 100mg) and some Temazepam for my midnight panic attacks.
It opened the flood gates for me, and I spent the following few weeks with a tidal wave of emotions, releasing months of repressed grief. How on earth did I not realise that I had been completely ignoring my depression and anxiety, just trying to cope and get on with my life. I was in so much pain with what I had gone through that I couldn’t even face it, out of fear of going through all of it again in my mind. The thought of it was terrifying. I was terrified.
Four things kept me going. My dog, my friends and family, knowing that I wanted to be around for them, my coach, keeping me in check on eating right and exercising (Emma you are a fucking superstar), and the fact that I had gotten out of this headspace before, so I knew I could do it again.
I’ve always lived by the choice theory. We don’t choose the things that happen to us in life, but we choose how we react to them and how we move on. How we grow from experiences, whether the feelings associated with them are positive or negative, is completely up to us. I decided that a good life, a full life, was still within my reach if I wanted it. It was going to be hard, tiring and not without challenges, but if I wanted it I could have it.
My weeks had their peaks and troughs. However I lived with the knowledge, even if it was disguised sometimes by fear, that I was going to get through this and be the person I wanted to be again, feel the way I wanted to feel again, have the things I always wanted to have again.
I think the turning point for all of this only happened a few months ago when I went to New Zealand. Travelling on a ticket I originally purchased over a year beforehand to go with my ex to visit his family. To be honest I didn’t even think that it was going to be hard for me to be there, at all. It didn’t even cross my mind. As soon as I saw the beautiful mountains of Queenstown, just as we were about to land, I started feeling anxious, really anxious. I was fighting back tears; a fight I soon lost and started sobbing on the plane. The entire drive to the bed and breakfast I was white knuckled at the wheel, scared that my anxiety might cause an accident.
I took my journal with me, determined to reach the destination of some crazy self-realisation journey and come out of this trip a new person. I beat myself up for not writing the entire time until the very last night. Knowing I was feeling scared, lost and not myself. I ended up having a breakdown on this trip, crying hysterically in a way I haven’t done for a very, very long time. I was so lucky on this night that my friend Beza was there, because I don’t have many people in my life who could have handled that situation in the way that she did. She was amazing. I spoke to my stepdad for half an hour just releasing over 12 months of repressed feelings (who also, was amazing, I couldn’t have picked a better person to speak to).
The next day I was just in shock. I think it was the shock of everything, I didn’t realise that being there in New Zealand was going to be so difficult for me. It took me by surprise and then it hit me like a tonne of bricks.
I spent another fantastic night in Queenstown with Beza, I went bungy jumping. I read, I relaxed, and Bez left the next day. I had one more night there by myself and since everything happened, I was just trying to understand why I held on to my trauma and my feelings towards it so tightly. Why did I feel the need to talk about it to people so frequently? Why couldn’t I let it go?
I started thinking about one of my favourite books that honestly changed my life. In ‘A New Earth’ by Eckhart Tolle, he discusses the origin of the word ‘identity’. He explains that the original meaning of that word is ‘to make it the same’. When you ‘identify’ with something, you are making that thing, feeling or experience the ‘same as yourself’. You are saying that that thing, feeling or experience is who you are. I realised that I was identifying with my trauma from an abusive relationship. Not accepting the right I had to those feelings only fuelled the assimilation. I decided I didn’t want that anymore. I decided that I deserved more than that and that I was more than that.
In that moment, I finally accepted what had happened. One of my favourite quotes is a definition of forgiveness;
‘Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been anything other than what it was.’
It’s acceptance. It’s not living in the past or trying to control or change something that has already happened. Not trying to control things you have no control over. At that moment, a sincere feeling of peace washed over me and I sat in silence staring out my hotel room window.
I finally got out my journal and started writing.
‘I think I find so much conflict in myself because I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. I guess because it hurt so much, I honestly wanted to find and understand that reason. I haven’t been able to just accept the divine timing of my life. Accept that the experience has happened, accept and acknowledge my own feelings.
‘Today, I realised that I don’t need to understand. Understanding won’t change what happened. Finding reason in it all, like I can somehow crack the algorithm of life. It won’t get me any closer to cheating hurt next time it stops by for a visit.
‘Maybe I needed to come back here for a full circle heal. Ah, the irony.’
Following this entry, I realised that I didn’t write sooner because I wasn’t ready to. Had I not have waited; I probably would have spent much of my holiday dwelling on these negative feelings because I would have been putting so much energy into them.
I decided to stop identifying with my trauma. What happened sucked and I learned some extremely powerful lessons that now I am so grateful for. But those experiences do not make me who I am. How I healed and grew from it does. I’m proud of that now.
One thing I really want you all to take away from this is how to be there for someone who is hurting. When someone you love is in pain, don’t try to fix them. Only they can do that. Trust me I’ve spent enough time in my own head, going over everything and trying to think of things I could’ve done better, I don’t need another voice to add to the conversation I was already having with myself for a very long time. Don’t try to bash the character of the person/s who inflicted that pain either, it could just make them feel silly for the experience in the first place. Just listen and acknowledge that pain, acknowledge their feelings and say, ‘I’m really sorry they hurt you, it’s not fair and it’s not kind. It was a difficult experience for you, and you are allowed to be hurt and be upset by it. You need to feel hurt right now so that you can deal with your grief and grow from this. Everything will be ok soon.’
Everything is temporary, the good and the bad. Don’t wallow in the bad, it’ll be over soon. Don’t take the good for granted, because it could be over soon, too.
