Selfed

I experienced a redirecting rejection recently (ayyy alliteration game strong) that made me realize that having boundaries upheld is as challenging as upholding them. In therapy this past week, I learned that I have a magnetism for not only a certain type of people, but also situations in my life that extend beyond relationships to being more about my boundaries not being firm and fixed. Adapting my four values for connection enables people and situations to slip through the cracks so to speak, only to later warrant my own immediate poor reaction to the person or situation that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

As I processed the redirection caused by the rejection, I recognized that a boundary of mine wasn't upheld in the interactions that should've let me know to shift the dynamic in the first place.

Creating and upholding boundaries is a challenging process, but well worth it. While it seems like we limit the quantity of connections we can have, it exponentially increases the value of QUALITY connections we have along with quality opportunities that align with who we are. Knowing your boundaries and having them be firm serves as a warning to others for dealbreakers. Having boundaries does NOT make you selfish, so please don't let that be what holds you back from having them for yourself!

I've been challenging my habitual patterns when it comes to sex lately. What I've found is that oftentimes when I think I want to have sex, what I want is something else. The something else is the undercurrent of what sex represents to me, which is connection. What's that look like or feel like? I look at past experiences I've had where I felt like I had sex and reflect on the fact that what I actually felt was a sense of connectedness.

What's "doing the work" look like? Following up from episode 03 where I talk about self care being care for your identities, the word discovery stood out to me as being the work of healing. Through discovery we explore, or through exploration, we discover. Whichever comes first, I think they feed each other. It's through caring for the identity that the work we hear people talk about just organically happens. The ever elusive "work" people speak of is done through discovery and exploration so that healing can happen through expression.

Self care is in fact Identity care. My therapist and I went over some things that serve as self care, and they all seem unappealing or expensive. I don't exercise for me, I do it because I need my body to function as it does. I don't exercise my mind for me, but because I need it to be sharp for survival through communication. Now where my identities lie are in an invisible space. How do we care for THAT/THOSE? Through exploring, discovering and expressing our identities, we are able to heal and override beliefs that don't serve us because our behaviors start to challenge these beliefs which validate our identities.

With so many signs of assurance from the world around me, I've felt like lately, I keep having to talk myself out of my own decisions. Why it's so easy to go against my intuition, I'll never know, but it is. I recall a few recent situations where impulsively acting on intuition worked out in my favor. The currency for connection is karma and I've been getting old checks in the mail unexpectedly which is way better than owing anyone money. Trigger warning here as I mention attempted suicide from a past partner I reconnected with recently who gave me the closure I had no idea I needed.

Episode 01 of Selfed, self-education your future self will thank you for, is simply setting the expectations of what you can expect moving forward.

On this episode, I state my identities and put my own self out here outside surface level associations with the world around me, and I do so in a way that I hope you'll be able to identify your own as well if you choose to stick around.

In order for me to put my healing on display, I think it's important that I can comfortably articulate who I am in a sense of my internal identity.

If you'd like to connect, email me [email protected].