Finding my ‘why’

‘Find your why’. This is something my friend has told me numerous times. We’ve both wanted to grow, move forward and create positive change in our lives. I have tried to create various new self-care habits over the years but have found they won’t stick. Looking back, I think I never found my true ‘why’, as I didn’t know what was authentic for me yet. So I would try and create habits that you read about are good for you, without questioning if it’s authentic to me or something I wanted to do.

I noticed recently, over the past few months, I’ve found it extremely hard to do anything related to self-care. The only things in my life that I have managed to stick with have been the things relating to changing my job. That’s looked like: continuing to practice my massage and thinking of ways to find new clients, and volunteering on conservation days. Because I so strongly want to change my job in the future, I know it’s vital to keep working on gaining massage experience and doing courses that will expand my knowledge on that. I also see myself working part time in conservation in the future because that’s something else I deeply care about. Volunteering is the only thing right now that will help me get closer to being accepted for a job in that field. The affirmation that’s been keeping me going is: ‘You go after what you want’. This reminds me that if I want something badly enough I need to go after it and not give up hope that one day I will achieve my dreams.

Repairing walls on a conservation day recently

I couldn’t understand why then I was able to stay focused on changing my job one day, but haven’t been able to stick with self-care routines. I realised I have been getting side-tracked by the experience of pain. I feel a lot and somehow when I experience something painful, I seem to keep myself in that painful place by thinking about other things that cause me pain. It’s like my brain is trying to prepare myself or make me stronger by keeping me in that place of pain for longer. Then the next coping mechanism (after I’ve become completely overwhelmed) is to go numb and distract myself so that I don’t feel anything. So I’ll watch mindless tv, go to town so that there is constant stimulation around me to distract me, and escape into my mind by day dreaming. During this process I completely lose touch with myself and I can keep this going quite comfortably for a long time. In fact, that’s how I have lived a lot of my life, to the point where life has passed me by (nearly!). I’ve hopped from job to job, all unfulfilling and not authentic, just hoping that one day miraculously things would change without me having to take action.

So the work for me then, is when I experience painful situations to learn to sit with that pain until it naturally passes through me, rather than delaying the experience so that it leads to overwhelm. Practically that might look like taking myself to a quiet spot outside so that I can privately feel what I need to feel, perhaps journal about it and work through my feelings.

The next challenge will be not to give up on self-care practices that actually help me feel better and are authentic. Usually self-care is the first thing I would let go of when I’m overwhelmed.

Regarding my reasons ‘why’ I should continue with self-care, I think it needs to be linked to the reasons why I have been able to keep pursuing anything related to changing my career. That is my future. The self-care practices I have found in recent years are all authentic to me and calm my nervous system. But the reason for me to stick with those practices is not because it’s good for me, because in a moment of feeling low, I won’t care about what’s good for me. The reason is that it’s an investment into my future self. Everything that I work hard on now is what I will look back on and be able to say: ‘This is how I got to where I am now’.

That’s not to say I want to focus on striving for something in the future and miss out on life in the present, but I want to create habits that all feed into the way I want to live in the future. So that my future self becomes my present self.