Well, it’s safe to assume that many of you have noticed my absence on this blog this year. I took my break at the beginning of the year and I set it to two weeks. When the two weeks passed, I realized that I might need some more time so it became a month. Then it became a habit.
What is hard to face now is that these 6 months of my absence have not been a much-needed break since February. These 6 months are the result of my habit to stand in the way of things that make me happy, push me to be better, get out of my comfort zone. It’s my way of sabotaging myself and wrecking anything that brings me joy.
It’s not a voice in my head yelling that I do not deserve happiness and that good things are not meant for me. I wish it were. This situation is much more sinister and dangerous for me. It’s a part of my own personality, my psyche, something deep inside of me that is still clinging on to despair, anguish and pain as my natural state. If it were a voice, I could be able to silence it but it’s a part of me and I don’t know where it is or how to change it or even cut it out of me.
This entered the danger zone when that part of me managed to keep me away from writing for 6 months. I didn’t publish as much, I barely dedicated any time to journaling or working on my book. What have I been doing for the last 6 months?
I have been running a marathon in the wrong direction. I have been reversing every good habit I built, I cut holes in every safety net I have and then I resorted to my toxic coping mechanisms to deal with what I had done. This is one of the rare moments that I refer to it as “what I had done” because I struggle with seeing this as a part of me, a part of my body because I cannot reconcile with the fact that it is indeed me who is causing all of this. I am my worst enemy.
If I slip up with my diet, miss a workout, take a two week break from my blog, instead of coming back to it and resuming my life in a normal way I decide to run a marathon in the wrong direction. The reasoning is something in the lines of “Well, since I’ve done it once I might as well do it again”
Writing it down, I realize how unreasonable and toxic it is but I know there is still a high chance that I will go back to this same pattern of behavior after I finish writing this.
The part of me that dug me out of the holes I buried myself in over the years has been debilitated this year. How many more holes can I dig myself out of? Soon I will be 26 – Have I reached the point of no return before I even spent 3 decades on Earth? What will happen when my source of power runs out? I guess my life would then be a never-ending comfort zone. I would just hide in the shadows, I would close my notebooks and steer clear of any signs that I once had dreams, aspirations and a belief that I deserve more. It would be a lifetime of anxious mornings and plain surviving. It would be nothing.
It’s dark and scary having to confront this but I guess that the only way to stop running a marathon in the wrong direction is to fall down, get my knees bloody, slow down just enough to realize that the road signs are all the same: “Dead end ahead”
