Hanging On For Dear Life While It Feels Like Life Is Falling Apart Around You
Day Twenty Two — 30 Days Of Writing About The Relational Patterns That Nearly Destroyed Me So You Don’t Lose Yourself Trying To Stay Loved.
Something I think we need to talk about more is the sheer courage it takes to stop abandoning yourself.
Because honestly, the Instagram version of personal transformation is a scam. Haha!
Nobody shows the bit where you’re sat on your kitchen floor wondering if you’ve completely ruined your life. Nobody talks about the panic, the second guessing, or the moments where you are absolutely convinced you have made a terrible mistake.
For me, reclaiming myself didn’t arrive looking like instant flow, alignment, and glowing skin. It arrived like a wrecking ball……
The more I stopped abandoning myself, the more my entire life seemed to rearrange itself around me. Relationships changed. Friendships changed. My priorities changed. The things I was willing to tolerate changed. EVERYTHING changed.
And for a time it genuinely felt like every area of my life was falling apart at once.
I remember thinking, “WTF? I thought choosing myself was supposed to look VERY different to this.”
Looking back now, I can see exactly what was happening. Life wasn’t falling apart at all. Life was reorganising itself around the version of me that had finally stopped shape-shifting to keep everybody else comfortable and happy.
The problem was that my mind couldn’t tell the difference. My mind looked at uncertainty and immediately labelled it danger.
Which is quite hilarious when you think about it. Spend years sacrificing yourself for everybody else and your nervous system thinks that’s perfectly reasonable. Start honouring your own needs and suddenly it’s DEFCON 1.
Today I was stripping wallpaper from one of the spare rooms and had an aha moment…..
I have hated this wallpaper for about two years. Every time I walked into the room I noticed it. Every time I walked into the room I thought about changing it. Every time I walked into the room I did absolutely nothing about it.
Then today, in typical Leanne fashion, I just started.
No plan. No preparation. No real understanding of how much work was involved.
I pulled off a strip of wallpaper. Then another. Then another.
Before long I was sat in the middle of what looked like a crime scene. Wallpaper hanging off walls. Dust everywhere. My arms aching. A room that somehow looked significantly worse than it did before I started.
And I wished I’d left it well alone.
I sat there thinking about how much easier life was this morning when the wallpaper was still attached to the wall.
Then it struck me that this is exactly what happens every single time we try to change our lives.
There is always a moment where things look worse.
You leave the relationship and suddenly you’re sitting alone wondering what you’ve done.
You set the boundary and immediately feel guilty.
You stop people pleasing and everyone starts acting weird.
You decide you want more from life and suddenly become aware of everything that isn’t working.
The old thing is gone. The new thing hasn’t arrived yet. And you’re left standing in the middle of the mess wondering if you should have just left everything as it was.
This is what I call the wrestling with the brown bear moment.
At the beginning there is excitement. You’ve made the decision. You’re finally doing the thing. You’re choosing yourself. You’re changing your life.
Then the bear arrives, your intrusive thoughts trying to drag you back into old patterns.
The bear sounds like:
“Better the devil you know.”
“Maybe it wasn’t that bad.”
“What if you’ve made a huge mistake?”
“What if this doesn’t work?”
You feel like you are internally wrestling with your own sanity, it feels overwhelming, the bear feels like it will over power you, you want to just be anywhere but here fighting for your life.
That is the intensity of a mind collapsing one identity and reinstalling another.
Your role in all of this is to dig in, keep showing up no matter what, even if fighting with that brown bear feels like it will drain every last part of you…..
Every single time that has happened in my life, something better has been waiting on the other side of that fight.
And at the moment the fight feels like months, but in reality it’s days and weeks…. And totally worth it.
So if life currently feels like it’s falling apart around you because you’ve started choosing yourself, honouring yourself, trusting yourself, or asking more from life, I want you to remember that stripped wallpaper always looks worse before the room comes together.
Sometimes what feels like everything falling apart is actually everything rearranging itself around the woman you’re becoming.
The wallpaper will come off.
The room will come together.
The bear will get bored of fighting you, realise you are not giving up and surrender.
And one day you’ll find yourself standing in the finished room wondering why you tolerated the old wallpaper for so long.
Tons of love,
L x