I Am Exhausted
My god, the act of choosing myself over and over has me utterly tired. I mean, bone tired. After so many years of speaking the language of others’ love, the act of learning my own love language has left me in the unknown. This feels like the time where I could give up, to yield to the uncertainty and the fear attached to it. But perhaps, instead this is the time where I challenge the fear and simply choose to embrace unknown because each time I learn to listen to even the faintest whisper of my heart, it pays off ten-fold.
Learning how to listen means unlearning everything I know about love because everything I know about love has come from looking for it outside of myself. This entire journey is about me learning what it means to love through the lens of my own heart as opposed to someone else’s. As I write this I feel the familiar tug of fear brace itself around my chest. It wraps around my rib cage and tightens ever so slightly. I hear it’s familiar question: You want to learn how to love yourself? Is that even possible?”
To that I say, yes it’s possible even if I don’t know how to do it. The art of learning how to love myself comes from approaching this fear with curiosity. It also forces me to quiet the anxious mind that inevitably kicks in once it feels even the slightest whiff of fear enter my body. The anxious mind has been a close companion all of these years of trying to give my heart away. It’s been in the driver’s seat when it came to assessing how to best reshape who I was in order to receive love I so desperately wanted. The anxious mind is what kept me in the cycle of trying over and over again to be enough, to give enough, to share enough of myself to such an extent that when it came time to give my heart away to another I didn’t even question if the method worked. I simply believed that in order to be loved I needed to give away the most precious part of me because wasn’t that what love meant? Sacrifice?
It's taken years for me to learn (or perhaps acknowledge) that the anxious mind has been trying desperately to keep me in the state of familiarity. I used to consider that a good thing, familiarity had to mean safety right? But that is not the case. When it comes to the heart, what is familiar is not always in our best interest. Familiar is simply what we have learned how to do because we have witnessed it over and over again. Familiar is a habit we don’t even realize we carry until our mind, body and soul begin to shout “enough!” loud enough that we change course. It is only then that we enter uncertainty because we want to or we have to. All the while we will be fighting with ourselves because the anxious mind will always embrace certainty and familiarity over the unknown. But what do we stand to lose if we don’t embrace the curiosity of growth and the excitement of knowledge?
Excitement around love is a concept that is foreign to me. Love was understood as safety in the sense that it made “sense” and was “practical.” I rarely considered love to be exciting unless it was told in a story that embraced excitement like a one off soulmate chance encounter or two people fighting so hard for their love that they overcome the odds. Do you see the extreme ends of the spectrum here? For me love only had two possibilities: Safe and solid or exciting and probably sacrificial to some degree. To put either of those labels on my own individual heart feels uncomfortable and constricting.
I don’t want to label my heart in any way. Who am I to tell my heart how to love or how to exist. I am the one who decided it was meant to be given away all those years ago so what if I’m not the best judge of its well-being at the moment? The goal of this 90 challenge is to change that. To challenge that. To once again become the keeper, the protector and the guardian of my own heart. But nothing about this journey is smooth. It is clunky and filled with obstacles of my own making. That is what makes it beautiful in a mildly annoying way. It’s due to the obstacles of my own making that I find myself completely deconstructing everything I’ve ever known about love and instead choosing to fill myself with the one thing I know to be entirely true: That my heart’s entire purpose in life is to beat solely for me and continue to keep me alive.
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