safe and alone.

Relationships are hard.

Romantic or otherwise, relationships can be some of the most magical, fulfilling, and interesting experiences we have in our lives and (sometimes simultaneously) can be devastatingly painful, disquieting, and disorienting. There are not many experiences which contain so much contrast. 

However, relationships are essential for our personal wellness. Loneliness may be a part of life, with everyone feeling alone at some points in time, but our minds, bodies, and souls respond to human connection. Whether you are the kind of person with a hundred good friends or one or two people who you trust with everything, relationships are part of your health and your happiness.

 In my personal life, I am not very good at relationships. A lot of that has to do with my mental disorder, but some of it is just part of how I developed as a person.

I am not trusting. I am impulsive. I overshare. I lie. I am a flake. I am selfish.

And I am scared.

I am scared of relationships. Both romantic and platonic relationships carry a lot of risk. Trust is a risky endeavor, and relationships are build on it. That risk often leads me to chicken out. I abandon friends. They do something to offend me and I use that opportunity to bail on the whole concept. Under the guise of having strong boundaries and standards, I have kept myself safe and alone.

Slowly, through the experience of my graduate program and my personal development, I am changing that. I am trying to be a better friend and to cultivate friendships that are supportive and fulfilling. I have met so many amazing people over the last year or so. I don't know how much I screw up as a friend, but becuase of my willingness to be honest and vulnerable, these people have stuck with me.

I am building relationships I never thought I would have.
And it is so great.

Here's to vulnerability.

5 things I wish I knew.

I talk a lot about being gentle. I say it to clients, both work and school ones, and I say it to my friends. I talk about honesty, specifically emotional honesty. I discuss the benefits of being genuine and accepting of yourself, exactly as you are, while still searching for opportunities to grow and expand your mind.

In short, I talk a lot about wellness.

However, in practice, I often fall short. I am not gentle with myself. I am impatient, condescending, belittling, and entirely negative when I am thinking to myself. The same grace that I try to give the people around me is sorely lacking when I focus on myself, looking inward.

There are a few possible reasons for this:

Maybe I don’t like the person that I see when I look in the mirror.
Maybe I am not as successful as I would like to be, as accomplished or productive.
Maybe I could be a better friend.
Maybe I don’t try hard enough.

OR… maybe I have been taught to be hard on myself.

That last one rings a lot more true to me than any of the statements before. I have learned, through my culture and my own personal experiences, that I am capable of excellence and that anything less is inadequate. I have learned that anything that can be perceived as a weakness must, in fact, be a weakness.

All of these things are false. Unfortunately, I can know that intellectually without believing it in my heart. So, if I could tell myself five things and immediately believe and incorporate them into my core beliefs, they would be these things:

1. Although I am capable of excellence, the entire range of my ability to generate product is acceptable. It’s ok if I only do good enough on something. It’s even ok if I fail. My value as an individual is not correlated to the value of the things I do.

And no, I do not believe that we are what we do.

2. Saying ‘no’ is not wrong. My ‘no’s are not usually very straightforward, but they involve not signing up to participate in a school organization, not volunteering to do extra shopping for a work project, and not working on weekends or holidays. I could easily fit more work into my schedule, more volunteering into my day, and eventually I could easily just schedule myself out of a life… but, my down time and my personal wellness have become very important to me. That means that I must say ‘no’ to activities I don’t actually want to do. Our lives are so short. I do not want to spend any of my brief time on things I don’t find personal value and fulfillment in, especially at the cost of my own wellness.

3. Relationships matter. Up until fairly recently, I have treated my priorities as rigid and sacred. My priorities always looked like this: school, work, family, friends. Not only is that list deceptively simple, it is not conducive to personal wellness and self-care. If I made a list now, it would look like this: Myself and Michael, family and friends, personal interests and passion, school-related stuff, work-related stuff. But, like I said, my priorities are more fluid now. I do what feels right and good at the time. That means that I procrastinate. That’s ok. I get everything done. The things that I can’t procrastinate on are relationships. They are high up on my priorities because they have to happen right now. They cannot be put off until tomorrow, or until I am less busy.

4. Choose the right people’s opinions to let matter to you. I think that we all do this. We allow the people who have the lowest opinion of us to hold the most weight in our opinions of ourselves. This is backwards. Find the people who you love, who you care about, and who you know would be there for you if you needed them. Find out what they think of you. Put stock in that. Don’t listen to the people who aren’t personally invested in the person you are becoming.

5. Let go.

Hopefully reading my list has helped you to look into your own wellness. Maybe you could make lists of your own. I know that I am going to work on listening to my own advice in the next few months and see what changes happen in my life because of it. I’ll let you know how it goes.