Struggling To Trust Myself…

This is a common theme.

It’s come up in counseling, in spiritual direction, and in multiple conversations recently making me sit with the discomfort longer than I would like to. It’s become my greatest insecurity, my most frustrating flaw, and me getting in my own way.

I think part of it stems from not fully knowing myself. Or feeling distant from her…my most authentic self masked by jobs and belief systems and productivity and trying to plan for the future as a way to attempt to avoid pain.

And this year I got sick of it. I’ve experienced a lot of loss the past few years and part of the humanizing experience of grief for me is that I realized I was keeping my authentic self filtered. I realized I didn’t want to get to the end of my life and feel like “that just wasn’t me and I wish I had done it differently”. I felt so disconnected from who I was and who I wanted to be that I wrote in my journal on January 26th after beginning to lean into the things that feel like me or even just make me happy…”I feel the most myself then I have in a really long time”. Since it’s been a revelation that feels like I am making improvements on most days and then there will be a string of one, two, or five days that feel like I have reverted back to old patterns that reinforce the narrative.

My spiritual director often tells me “your soul knows what you need” and I nod and I get teary because it’s such a foreign concept to me. My whole life I have been told “don’t trust yourself” in one way or another. At my last session, we talked about the concept often preached in sermon’s that “I must decrease so Christ can increase”. I couldn’t even fathom an alternative to what I thought that meant when I heard it because the way I have internalized that for years is: my needs don’t and shouldn’t matter.

A reinforcement of what it was like to lose myself when I was young.

As my counselor and I have talked about when you experience childhood trauma and your needs cannot be present (because there isn’t space for them) our head and our body often responds with guilt or doubt when trying to express them later in life. I struggle to trust myself and that I know what I need. Maybe even if I do exercise any amount of self care or self indulgence then I feel a rush of guilt and criticize myself for being selfish. Taking time for myself automatically resorts in being selfish. Nothing else makes sense. My body will respond no other way. Yet.

This uncomfortable and sad reminder that I struggle to trust myself is also pushing me to converse and engage with myself in ways that make me feel more whole. And that feels redemptive and beautiful and somewhat clunky at times but authentic and true nonetheless. “Freely and fully yourself” as my spiritual director often tells me.

It shows up when I take a dance class. When I am sitting with friends who are seeing the full and free version of her. When I am reading just for fun. When I am cooking a meal. When I am making space that doesn’t have to be productive but my only goal is to be present. When I am writing because I love it and not because I am scared what people will think or if they will question the ways I’ve changed. When I allow myself to feel what I am feeling and don’t try to justify it or explain it away. When I look in the mirror and love who is staring back at me. When I don’t let religious pain get in the way of having a spiritual experience.

Some of these things feel new yet familiar. Maybe revised? And like I can honor it more now that there’s a second chance to return to pieces of myself I feel like I left behind or tucked into the box under the bed because I thought it was the right thing to do at the time. And maybe it was. Maybe there is reasoning or feelings that looking back on now I’m not remembering but as a whole I look at that time of my life and see a lot of things that were lost when they didn’t have to be. That makes me sad. I also see how some of those decisions led me to places, people, and experiences that I am forever grateful for. This is why we can hold two things at once. It can be both.

I wrote in my journal after counseling one day during this season…

“Even if something is uncomfortable and messy, I’m not going to turn my back on myself”.

And I hope you don’t either.