Honestly, tell me when is the last time you did something you wanted to do?
I meant.. truly. You ignored your budget, responsibility, and all that adult shit and just did what you wanted to do?
For me.. it was as recent as two days ago. I’ve been in the spirit of ending things. I ended a friendship with someone I was friends with for over 20 years. I also withdrew myself from someone I’d been around for over 10 years. I had a argument/fight with my partner that in the past I would have dropped everything and left for but instead, I took a new route– apologized and fixed it.
I’ve always been a rigid, black or white kind of person. We are or we aren’t, there’s never a gray area for me. And frankly, life has always been comfortable for me with that kind of thinking. But recently I’ve realized a few things.
I spend a lot of time considering the variables of public opinion. And public opinion doesn’t always mean people who I don’t know on social media, or in everyday life, or at work, but it also means my friends, past friends, or even distant family members who I have no contact with. As a single woman with no children and no husband– I spend a lot of time considering how my daily activities will be received by these people who don’t contribute to my personal goals or life.
It felt almost shameful even to type that, but it’s my truth.
I’ve always had this deep, underlying need for perfection. Maybe we could chalk it up to my childhood upbringing of needing and wanting attention from an absent parent, and believing that if I just do the best at xyz, I’d finally get the recognition or attention I so badly needed. So it’s elevated and transferred into a kind of thinking that often says things like:
- I can’t be the ugly ex.
- I can’t be the family member that lives like everyone else. When they see me there has to be a level of unfamiliarity there, so they can see and understand deeply that If they don’t want to connect with me, I too don’t want to connect with them because the gap in lifestyles and beliefs is so wide it wouldn’t make sense.
- I’ll be the most successful person, so it can be a direct reflection of the goodness my mother planted in me, and it will make my other parent so sick when they realize all they missed out on and will never have access to.
- What will people say about my sense of loyalty and support if I end decades long friendships. They’ll say I’m fake or changing.
And those are just the mild thoughts.
I’ve been in an overall season of shedding things that no longer suit me. But when I think about it wholly, I realize if you’re alive, you are in a constant state of shed.
Shedding people, ideas, beliefs, skin, hair, jobs, routines, uterine lining, tastes, expectations, relationships, and so much more. It’s a cycle, as is everything in life. You accumulate, and within time, you go through a cycle of use and discard.
It’s interesting because as I scrolled through Instagram, I saw this clip of Devi Brown’s interview on The Breakfast Club, explaining the importance of shedding and cycles. When I first heard the clip, it hit me like a brick in the back of the head… because while I know I’m in a cycle of growth and am always open to embracing the change that comes with it, I couldn’t help but identify that maybe I wasn’t as accepting of it after all, or operating in a state of “doing what feels right for me.”
Remember when up above I mentioned having the underlying thought of what people who don’t even have access or interactions with my everyday life would think of me doing certain things? Well, that wouldn’t be so if I truly respected the natural order of cycles, shedding, and how life moves.
When I think about shedding, my mind falls into relationships first. I’ve always had troublesome interpersonal relationships with others. I am someone who is actively healing from intentional and unintentional traumatic harm. Being obsessive over relationships and then quickly abandoning them has been my nature, but hearing Devi speak about being comfortable with doing what you want, what feels right, having difficult conversations, and placing boundaries really resonated with me.
Most of my friendships are like the wild wild west. No boundaries, no bumpers, just vibes. We say whatever to each other (within some state of reasoning), have no time parameters for communication, and have the most bizarre “expectations” when it comes to showing up and supporting each other.
I like to think of myself as a fantastic friend, lover, and even employee. I can admit past traumatic experiences have turned me into a hyperactive overachiever. I must always be the very best I can be, and I place a lot of expectations upon myself that others may have never thought to place upon me.
And that’s where things get a bit sticky. Those same parameters I place upon myself, I project to others without really giving them a heads up or understanding of what I will or do expect of them and *boom*, we got conflict and disappointment. But when that comes, the same expectations that someone may not know is there, is present when it’s time for conflict resolution.
I’m someone who mostly allows and runs toward hard conversations to grow in relationships with others, but the glaring truth is that if the hard conversation doesn’t flow or operate in a way that I am mentally prepared for, I bail. I block the person and move on with my life, and maybe you can say that’s part of doing what I want, or it could be another way of prolonging expired connections with others by dragging out conflict that will continue to cycle until completely resolved.
This is, of course, still a working thought– but mostly, I’m finding that I want to feel comfortable in the unknown and known, even if it’s uncomfortable in the pursuit of total resolution. To be able to obnoxiously stand 10 toes down in the shed. If I’m putting you out, or you’re leaving? Fine, then go. Being one of those people who are absolutely okay with being loud and wrong. (I’m still very jealous of rigid people who stand in confidence even despite their wrongdoings, because as someone who is so fluid and enjoys the feeling of joy, that kind of fluidity and acceptance of apologizing just so things can move on often makes me feel like a punk ass bitch).
But ultimately, processing and accepting the natural cycle of life and change, is going to be the key to becoming who I want to be, doing what I want to do, around the people I want to be around.
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