The last few months I’ve been taking a good look at what holds me back from living my best life. I alluded to it in my An Un-Becoming post. I was tasked to complete a values worksheet in the cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) program I’m in. I had to rate how important a list of values are to me, along with how satisfied I am with them. The former was easy. The latter made me sob. It hurt in the deepest core of my being to see in print how unsatisfied I am. After sitting with the pain for a couple of days, I said out loud – So, whatcha gonna do about this kid?
Initially, I thought to work on my goals worksheet. And while setting goals is all fine and well, and I do it regularly, I realized I needed to look at my past before I started planning for my future. I wanted to see where the gaps were really coming from. How much of it was internal versus external. How my responses and reactions to people, places, and things were contributing to my dissatisfaction with my life and myself.
I journaled about it and a few words kept jumping off the pages and slapping me silly in my gut. One of them was inhibitions. Yuck. Not a word I like. Not a word I want to used in any way that indicates I have some. Not a word I’m proud of. Not a word I wanted to write about. But the ink in my journal couldn’t be denied. Even if I used correction tape to blot it out of my notebook, I couldn’t unsee or unfeel the word. Interesting that product is called correction tape.
Me and my love for dictionaries, I looked up definitions. A few I found were:
An inability to act naturally, especially because of lack of confidence.
An inner impediment to free activity and expression.
The process of restraining one’s impulses or behaviour, either consciously or unconsciously.
But for myself, I have to ask: are they really inhibitions? Or are they inhabititions? Yes, I made up another word. I’m very uninhibited that way. But for some weird reason, that nonsense word came to mind and actually made sense to me. In two different contexts, but I’ll only delve into the first one now.
When someone or something inhabits a place, it lives there. My past lives inside of me. It’s become a part of my genetic makeup, the workings of my brain, my memories. I classify periods of my past as previous versions of myself. Aspects of past versions of me were flooding my mind and my heart this week. I wanted to ask a close friend their thoughts on something I’m interested in doing. I felt nervous about asking them, even though I can share anything with them, they know me better than I know myself sometimes. I highly value their opinion. So why would I be afraid? In a word, insecurity. I was fearful of how they might respond, that they might misunderstand me, that they wouldn’t engage in discussing it with me.
Insecurity is a part of every single past version I have of myself. But I’ve started to push that part of me out. I didn’t want it renting space in my mind, heart, and soul. I gave it a notice of eviction. In time, it will leave and be replaced with stronger senses of security and confidence. And it began with hitting send on a text message. I simply asked if I could get their feedback on something. They were busy at the time, and that momentarily made me feel insecure. I wondered if I should even be asking them. I didn’t let it last though. When they had time the next day, they told me to ask the question. Okay, so maybe I drafted it out, rewrote it a few times, overthought how to say it. But I took a deep breath and sent the message. I was elated. I was free.
As I drove to one of my usual writing spots this evening, Adele’s Someone Like You came on the radio. The song really doesn’t have much to do with this post. But two lines in it do. It was like I was hearing the current version of me speak to previous versions of myself. Me today, kicking out the insecurities of my yesterdays. Basically saying to them: See ya! Don’t wanna be ya anymore!
“I hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it”
Picture credit: me, from my journal after hitting send!
Their Words. My Musings. 