DO YOU SEE THE PATTERNS// PINK, RED, GREEN & SHIMMER

(TRIGGER WARNINGS- Mental Health)

It's January 15th, the middle of the month.

Last year, I promised to post every 1st of the month, but that's changed. I've decided to move the day I post blogs to the 15th. First are scary to me in any capacity. Too much pressure, too exposed. Fifteen is concealed, protected, and much less daunting than Firsts.

This is also how January, the first month of the Georgian calendar, feels. January, similar to February, has never been a great time for me. Too exposed, too cold, too daunting.

Too many negative memories.

This January feels like three months combined, like it should be over, like we should be in March. I've had a lot of time to think this month, which may be why I feel the passage of time moving slowly. Having a lot of time to think usually means spending a lot of time alone, something I've also been doing this month.

Twenty-twenty-three was a year of growth for me, a time of analyzing and correcting myself and contemplating the whys of my life. This slowed down as the year ended, but in a way, it left me with more to analyze and think about; it also left me exhausted and bored as the new year began.

I started this blog as a continuation of trying to understand myself and, hopefully, along the way, help others start that journey. To give you a timeline, in twenty-twenty-two, I had my life blown up in my face, some of which I've discussed here and others that I refuse to speak on.

One day, I will feel comfortable talking about it, but that day is not today.

Twenty-twenty-two was the year I began tearing apart the foundation of my life, ripping apart who I was and what I wanted, trying to understand why I was so miserable, why life wasn't going the way I wanted it to go. I held a sledgehammer to everything that once made up me; my habits, my beliefs, my complete understanding of life. I began to peel back the experiences I had gone through, revealing foggy views of the world and bad habits.

Twenty-twenty-three was the year I began building a new foundation of who I am, resocializing myself, interacting with my environment, figuring out my place in this world.

I have spent two years, and many more before that, intensely therapizing myself. I wanted to break down everything and rebuild it, to barely leave any reminiscence of the girl who once lived in this body, and that's not a bad thing. This is the process of healing, my process of healing.

I'm not one who believes in self-sabotage; I hate the wording; I think it's an unproductive way of viewing things. The habits we view as "self-sabotage" are simply tactics we, humans, learned from our environments to keep ourselves safe when facing challenging times. These habits once served a purpose. In the same way, a child cries out to their mother for food, while non-verbal, we develop skills that allow us to survive. Just like how we learn to use our words and drop the crying act, we are meant to outgrow these habits, we are meant to outgrow who we once were when we held these habits, we are meant to outgrow the places we occupy when having them.

But it's not that easy; nothing about life is simply that easy. Crying is replaced with words, words that the child learned. In order to replace these bad habits, we must first learn new things to replace those habits. But, to learn those habits, we first must learn to "cry."

But it's also not that easy.

We as humans are goal-focused, constantly trying to reach perfection, this holy equilibrium. We don't really understand the idea that we are constantly growing and evolving, that life isn't linear, that it's a series of cycles; at least, most of us aren't able to truly recognize that. So, we reluctantly adopt new habits to replace the old ones we stubbornly clung to, only to repeat the cycle, unwilling to abandon these habits even though we have outgrown them, making something that was once "healthy" into something "bad."

This is what happened to me with therapy and self-help; I turned it toxic, I turned it into an obsession. I replaced the drinking with self-help books, the toxic relationships with over-analyzing, and my much worse habits became weekly therapy sessions. Those old habits I once relied on for protection, despite their harmful nature, were replaced with something else, something I needed at the time, a step towards my next stage in life, but not a forever practice.

But I'm human, specifically, one who has struggled in the past with letting go, and I refused to see when my habits were becoming "self-sabotage," I'm only now learning to look at the signs for when it's time to move on. When I've done all my crying, it's time to take what I've learned and start actually "talking."

Life is a balance: something I will repeat until the day I die.

Self-discovery is a continuous thing, just like healing.

One day, in late summer, I realized that the way of life I had accepted, that I had needed back in 2022, now felt like a cage, that I was suffocating under all the analyzing and theorizing, that what was once meant to help me, and did, had now become my way of suppressing and harming, that the girl who once preached that living life was the only way to find answers to critical questions (the whys) had stopped living her life.

I had stopped fucking around.

This wasn't a bad thing; this pause in my life, as I had fucked around my entire life, learned my life lessons from doing so; I was now in the after stage. But it was time for the cycle to begin again, for me to start fucking around; it was time for me to start living life again.

So one day, late summer, I looked at the signs and realized I had grown to hate Colorado, how being here now felt like living someone else's life, how the quiet, slow way of life left me with too much time on my hands, too much time to think. So, as I stood knee-deep in the mud about to hop on a paddle board to go cliff jumping, a scenario I never found enjoyment in and still don't, I realized that my time of healing, intensely healing, was over, it was time to fill this way of life, these habits I had taken on to prepare me for the next stage in my life, with new ones. It was time for me to leave.

Life is a series of connections; everything in life is a building block for the next building block.

Self-discovery sometimes must stop, so one can learn how to be a human first.

But I'm human, specifically, one who still struggles with letting go, and I'm only now learning to see when my habits are becoming "self-sabotage," I'm only now learning to look at the signs of when I've reverted back to crying.

I moved to Colorado because it was nothing like New York; I could live a different life than in the city. Colorado is a quiet, slow way of life, while New York is a loud, fast one. I needed to be in Colorado during the time that I was; I needed the slow, the quiet to process what I had been through over the course of my life, to analyze and therapize, so that I could grow out of my "bad" habits, so that I would have the space to learn new ones, to finish rebuilding the foundation I had torn apart.

If you've read any of my blogs before, you'll know that I believe everything is connected, that life is a series of shimmers and glimmers, signs showing us where we are meant to go next. (But not in a spiritual psychosis way, more so your brain picking up patterns and, in turn, help guide you. Remember, I am a woman of science!)

So I don't regret moving to Colorado; I would have never realized the things I did if I hadn't. One of the many hard truths I've learned in these quiet nights was that nothing is linear. Just like the night I sat on the bench on the Highline after having been broken up with, or my blackout night at Washington Square park, or even my birthday at the Met, moving to Colorado was what I needed at that time in my life, it had to happen. It was bound to happen.

But I had outgrown Colorado; it was time for me to move back to New York

.

2022 was the beginning of the end of my old life, 2023 was the year of hard work, and 2024 is the year of change.

It's January 23rd; it took me longer to finish this than I anticipated. The 23rd still feels less daunting than the 1st, but January still feels scary to me, especially with all the changes ahead of me this year. I'm trying to no longer let my past habit of fear take me over again, the way it used to, even if I'm feeling a lot of pressure to not fuck up the way I did the last time I was living in the city; my wounds from that time still exposed. That's why I decided to move in June, right in the middle of the year, concealed and protected, and the decision to move back will feel much less daunting than it does right now.

So, this is the next chapter of healing.

Everything is connected; Life is not meant to be spent in a linear formation, and holding on to old habits is so 2023.

Here's to fucking around (again) and being happy.