Happy Black History Month, y’all! I wanted to do a check-in on how we’re doing a month and a half into the new year.
Have y’all been keeping up with your resolutions/goals/whatever you call them? I haven’t! Well, I guess that’s not totally true. In my last post, I talked about shifting my focus to be more about my personal well-being and really committing to it. I can confidently say that I have been doing really well with maintaining this focus and making actionable steps toward creating a better, safer environment for myself; however, I have found that I needed a lot more repair, if you will, than I initially expected.
They say it takes 21 days to form a habit, but I think I’m going on six weeks now (42 days). It’s not that the habits are not forming, but I’m realizing that I really am making a lifestyle shift. This means undoing 29 years of bad habits and unlearning a lot of information about myself and others. If I am not constantly reminding myself of my long-term goal to live more authentically and honor myself, I so quickly fall back into those bad habits. Where I say I have not been keeping up with my resolutions is that I set some for myself with no definitive timeline, measurement, etc. related to my physical health, content creation, and so on. I have not worked on those resolutions in the way that I want. What I’ve found has been the most challenging is one of my worst habits comes into play when I’m not excelling (by my own standards) in all areas of my life which is self-criticism. When I choose to rest over working out, or look disheveled to run two errands, or choose to have dessert and a glass of wine in the same day, anything like that, I start criticizing myself about whether or not I’ve earned the thing I want to indulge in.
As I’m building a healthier mindset, I’m battling this habit harder than any other and, to my surprise, it takes a lot out of me. There have been some really low days over the last six weeks, and when you have depression, the struggle is twice as hard as you combat digging yourself lower while trying not to beat yourself up about thoroughly feeling your feelings. They say it’s always darkest before the dawn and I do think the dawn is near. There does come a time where you just have to push yourself beyond what is comfortable. While I know I need more space and rest to continue getting better, I may swing too far on the pendulum and never move forward. I was supposed to post this blog post, for example, on the 1st of February, but here we are. One thing at a time, one day at a time.
I’m still choosing peace over grief. I’m seeing the benefits of this motto every day and I feel myself getting stronger mentally. Everything else is going to catch up over time, but right now, I’m just hoping that this will help me start to feel more present. I still carry that wary feeling that things are too good to be true, that I need to focus on the future, and that I can’t fully express my enjoyment about things because I don’t want to be let down. But I do want to be excited about my life because I don’t know when my life could end. It’s never to be morbid, but you really do only get one life and it should be lived to its fullest. 2024 is bound to be one of the best years of my life and I want to be a part of every minute of it. 🙂
xx, AE
Lex in the City 