When I was a little girl I was nicknamed ‘the sunshine of the house’. Even when my mom talks about me as a baby she says that I was cheerful and smiling always and that random strangers wanted to have a look in my stroller to receive a smile. But somewhere along the way my internal ways of thinking changed.
It was during my primary school years that this change happened. I started to compare myself to other children in my class. They seemed to have it better than us and it launched me into a low emotional state. I felt envious towards the other children. I liked them and wished them well, but deep down I was triggered into a state of pain. This is about the time that I started hating myself.
I don’t know why but I started to think that it was all my fault and that for some reason I didn’t deserve the same kind of happiness I saw with other children.
I didn’t deserve to go on nice vacations and I didn’t deserve receiving beautiful gifts from Saint Nicolaas (a Dutch children’s holiday celebration involving an old man and his helpers).
Around the same time, I started comparing myself to my sister as well. She is a natural beauty and for reasons I cannot give you I thought it made me ugly. For some reason I had planted in my mind that only one of us could be beautiful and it was obviously her. It enhanced my low self-esteem and for decades I thought this whole ordeal in my head to be true.
Without even noticing it I invited in all these demons and they didn’t have a single nice word for me. Over the years, the thoughts in my head worsened and in my mind I was tuning into all sorts of frequencies such as jealousy, envy, hate, disgust and above all self-hatred. I would think negatively about almost everyone. It didn’t matter if you were my close friend or a stranger. Slowly but surely I was dying on the inside.
I was killing all potential for happiness and with it my life energy drained.
Comparing myself to others led to my most miserable state and because I was not aware of this process it lasted for a long time. After my point of no return I became aware of this situation for the first time. For the first time in my life I was confronted with the truth about “our thoughts”. By reading the book ‘The power of now’ by Eckhart Tolle I learnt that my thoughts weren’t mine at all and most importantly, I learnt that I could question these thoughts, oppose them with intention.
And so I did start to question these thoughts and I started to actively fight them. It was like a veil was lifted. I never even knew this was a problem until I did. All of the sudden I could see clearly that it was me ruining my own reality. It was me who let these thoughts in. It was me who was wrong all this time. I entertained these thoughts for years, all on my own. And it was the first time that I openly started to talk about them. I opened the floodgates and started voicing all these thoughts to the people I loved.
At one point I shared so many of my ugly thoughts with my mom that she literally stomped out of my apartment.
This wasn’t the Mickey she had known all her life and I realized that only I had been living this truth.
Only I was captivated by my own mind and I had kept it to myself all these years. For my outer world, this world inside me was a complete shock. This happy girl was in fact not happy at all, completely poisoned on the inside. Every person in my life was a single drop in this bucket of mine and once this bucket overflew, everyone got a piece of it.
I’m really sorry to everyone involved that they had to live through this stage of my life with me. I was so confused. On the inside I knew I loved these people but I was lashing out disproportionately. Every single drop that had once entered my bucket was now pouring out. Fortunately it was a short phase and I guess I just needed release from this tense state of mind.
After my period of outburst I apologized to my mother and other people I had hurt but a lot of the damage had already been done. I had ruined celebrations and ordinary occasions. Easter that year was an absolute horror fest simply because I could not control my outbreaks. My brother wanted a different kind of egg than I had anticipated and this tiny little detail made me ruin everybody’s day.
I had singlehandedly made darkness my natural state. I embraced the darkness in my mind, lingered in it for days and then let the bomb burst in reality. I was in fact suffering from depression but I had worn a mask for so long that it only became tangible when I started sharing the inside of my mind with other people.
It felt so natural to me that I couldn’t even believe that the people around me weren’t aware of it.
In this new phase where I was accepting help, I started pouring too. I didn’t know what else to do. I started pouring to my therapist, my group therapy and anyone else I thought would listen to me. Gradually my perspective changed, gradually I started feeling better. And steadily I learnt that healing is not about pouring. Healing is in letting go.
Just pouring your sadness and poisonous thoughts will never be enough because it keeps you in the victim state. By only pouring constantly you remain the person who lived through that.
But you don’t want to be the person that lived through something, you want to be the person that learnt something from it and moved on.
The older I get the more I realize that everybody on this earth has hard times. Everybody goes through their own little hell and back again. I am not special and I’m sorry to say, you’re not special either. Reliving this thing over and over is not the trick because it keeps your trauma constantly active in your mind and body. You actually hold on to the stress.
So how do we let go of this victim state and how do we actually release? Honestly, I’m not completely there yet. This journey of mine is still ongoing but what I have found is that it is a combination of mind and body. We can judge every thought popping up in our minds, but the stress is still encapsulated in our bodies. And so the body needs release too. Of course walking is a very healthy solution here but it seems like a good idea to focus on your nervous system on the side.
Online you can find many people supporting this concept and they will offer you all sorts of stretches for your fascia. Fascia in the body is the tissue surrounding your organs and it has nerves, making it very sensitive. I have also found supplements that support the nervous system and the one I’m taking right now is a combination of rhodiola, l-theanine and gaba. It helps with my focus and diminishes my brain fog which was exactly the effect that I was aiming for.
Let’s get back to letting go.
Letting go cannot exist without trust.
These days I no longer compare myself to other people. I compare myself to me and how far it has gotten me. Nowadays my mindset is healthier and thus I see that whatever happened to me in life I was able to overcome it. It creates a feeling of trust in my own capabilities. Mind you, I was at a peak of my depression when I was still working 50 hours a week. If I can do that, then what is stopping me now?
However far along you are on your own journey, keep reminding yourself of how much you have already overcome and all the strength that was needed for it. Keep reminding yourself of the fact that you have gained experience from the past. Keep reminding yourself that you are not a victim but a person who is simply learning lessons.
Whenever you start learning a new language you will notice how many mistakes it takes before you can actually form sentences. So why are you so hard on yourself in life? You are learning and growing, and it is a wonderful thing. Every time you get back on your feet it makes you stronger and more capable. It should fill you with pride, not fear. So be proud of your achievements, big and small, and look ahead with certainty because I know… you got this!
“You don’t have to force what’s meant for you. But you do have to stop being the version of you that pushes it away. The one that doubts, shrinks, overthinks, performs. What’s meant for you will always arrive – but it will arrive when your nervous system feels safe enough to hold it.”
