Hello bloggy blog! It feels like eons since I’ve shared a post here. I’ve been moving through different phases, attempting to do things I thought I should do, and learning that change doesn’t have to mean doing things I don’t want to do. I’ve felt like less of a jumbled mess but I think I’ve still been misdirecting myself more than I’d like. I kept running into the same roadblocks, the same hurdles, and feeling stuck. For me, these have been signs (that I kept bypassing) indicating I wasn’t in alignment. 🚫
Alignment, I feel, comes from doing what feels good to me in a way that uses my skills, talents, and abilities properly. It includes feeling supportive and seen but not forcing anything to happen. In this space, things just F L O W. 🌊This feeling is essentially what I’ve been in search of for so long, but recent months showed me that I was not living in a way that was conducive to this spirit of purpose, ease, and flow that I craved.
Let me fill you in on where I’ve been the past few months….🧐
I’ve been trying to grow my social media presence and I spent a period of time posting everyday even though I don’t always feel inspired to. It also takes a BIG chunk of my time on the daily to compose Instagram reels (which are primarily what I was posting). Just to break it down: I have to prep, film, edit, compose a caption, and then strategically post it at the right time for the algorithm, plus seek out accounts to engage with, and prepare to do that all over again. So, I was totally plowing through my energy reserves and practically making Instagram a full-time job…except it was a job that paid me nothing.🤪
What’s more important for me to note is how I was completely bypassing how I felt when the signs of unhappiness were there. 🤦
I lost the creative joy I used to feel from creating Instagram posts. I was making content based on what I thought would hit, and not content that I actually wanted to make.
I was letting myself feel pressured from others to PROVE MYSELF—to prove that I am enough.
I was following tons of business and marketing accounts and taking in an excessive amount of other people’s advice, while suppressing my exhaustion with the whole process.
I was forcing myself to be on social media A LOT and chat/message/comment/engage when my naturally introverted self has a pretty low bandwidth for socializing.🥴
I felt like I was trying to push products/ my services to prove myself.
I felt like I wasn’t being seen by others for my knowledge, skills, and talents, and to combat this…I kept creating more offerings, making more posts, and doing more in an effort to get ahead.
Whew! I’m exhausted just from writing that list—but not as exhausted as I was when experiencing that practically every day for around 2 months. So when you mix it all together, what do you get? A recipe for burnout.😩
We live in a society that values productivity and practically mandates people work, in the paid sense of the word. Work is literally anything you spend your time on! If we were to look at work through this perspective, then it neutralizes it. ➡️ Work doesn’t have to be hard, laborious, stressful, involve long hours, be for someone else, or even involve pay. #ThingsINeededToBeRemindedOf The work I think we should value more is that which makes us EXCITED or brings us SATISFACTION with how we are using our energy. 🍧
I’d like to take the concept of work a step further and say it’s worthwhile work to spend time with yourself. No one taught me this but it’s something I’ve learned to be true over and over again. Therefore, excessively doing in recent months led me to craving and taking a big break (from Instagram, my podcast, and my business) to come back to me. As a creative individual, I really think spending time with myself not only recharges my battery but gives me the space to notice my own good ideas. 🎨 If you’re always around other people or doing things you don’t enjoy, that tends to silence your own inner voice. Who are you if you aren’t in touch with yourself?
Considering self-connection is an area that I have felt lost with multiple times in my life, I can offer some solid advice, from personal experience, on how to come back home to yourself.
1. CREATE SPACE🐚
It can be hard to recognize what’s not working for you when you’re IN the thick of it. In this case, you need to put some distance between you and the thing (or person).🕶️ Separation creates space. For some, this newfound space may be all they needed—i.e. It wipes an unnecessary task or two off your plate. For others, having space in their life allows them an opportunity to get some perspective—perspective that can even help them change directions. However, let’s not get ahead of things quite yet!
2. WORK ON THE BASICS
What do you fill your time with when you’re in this place of more space than ever before? 🍹 If you’re hyper-conditioned by society (hello, you’re human) or really desperate for direction, you may be tempted to launch into anything! I will caution you to take a step back and breathe. When you’ve been in the work, work, work or do, do, do mode for so long, it’s hard to be still with yourself.
When I create space in my life, I tend to cut ties with extraneous responsibilities and just focus on the absolute bare minimum. I’m not saying you have to do the absolute bare minimum but I find this helps me rest and find my footing again. 🧘♀️ Bare minimum also doesn’t mean stare at a wall all day. For fun activities: I lean into meditation, no-pressure creative projects (i.e. something you’re doing just for you), and spending time with my family and pets. These are simple things that make me feel like ME.
3. ACKNOWLEDGE THE PHASE🌻
I believe we go through cycles and sometimes we’re in a phase of the cycle that calls for doing more or doing less; sometimes it calls for planning or reassessing. Regardless of the point in the cycle we are in, we know that it will circle around, as cycles do. We struggle and overcome, and then struggle again and overcome again. That is life—filled with learning and growing. 🎱
The best thing I have found, as I luxuriate in this space, is to not put pressure on myself to hurry up and “fix” myself. I’m not spending time on rest or joyful hobbies to simply recharge and throw myself back into stuff that I hate. No. I’m spending time on these things because I deserve it and it makes me feel good. If you spend time on yourself with *rushed energy* or the energy of “I’m not deserving of taking time for myself”, then that cuts you off from yourself and all of the beautiful things in life meant for you.
I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my favorite people. Mark Groves, on the Mark Groves Podcast, says:
If you don’t take care of yourself, it’s always going to feel selfish.
Years ago, healing is not a word I would have associated with myself in a long-term state. To me, healing was the 1 to 2 weeks it takes to get over a cold or the 6 months someone might require of physical therapy post-injury. I’ve even shared about my childhood arthritis and how remission seemed almost immediate. I’ve never had concerns linger around long enough for me to see how layered healing can really be.
Healing is a process.
It was a naïve way of thinking to believe that healing was a one-and-done situation. It was only through a variety of trials as an adult that I have explored different ways of being and different practices. Each one has taught me a lot about myself but some really led me astray in ways that I’m still unpacking today.
Just to name a few: when I got my first full-time job, I was exposed to working with others, learning what I value in work, falling in love, and stress like I’ve never experienced before all-in-one place. I over exercised my body into a state of amenorrhea and hormonal imbalance. There’s also the interesting facet of disordered eating and body image issues that I can’t remember establishing but nonetheless affected me in major ways.
So, when I realized how much any one of these events, or aspects of them, was affecting me, I had to seek out healing.
Check out my post on How to Recognize Dis-Ease for more explanation on what it means when something is affecting you. For me, often the desire for healing came from insomniatic thoughts keeping me up and crying at 12 am. Or spending too many evenings with a belly ache and a disgust for the way I would treat myself. A lot of the time, it came from me seeing someone I admire living FREELY and me really wanting to no longer be tied down to my burdens.
However, just because I made a decision in ONE moment, it didn’t mean I was relieved.
There is the initial stage of learning what’s wrong. I use the word “wrong” loosely here, only as a means to signify what is out of alignment for you. What happens after this has no pattern, guidebook, or timeline because it’s different for everyone. It is inevitable that I learned more about my relationship to my symptoms and why they existed in the time (days, months, and years) following the ah-ha moment when I realized what was out of alignment.
Sometimes it seemed obvious like, maybe I ate food that just doesn’t sit well with me. Yet, as my unique process of healing moved along, I realized there is a lot that I was doing to myself. It wasn’t necessarily some outside thing affecting me, in several cases I began to flip the script and see how I was affecting me.
The role of the self in healing:
They say that the first step in recovering is recognizing that you have a problem. Well, I knew very well that I had a problem but that didn’t always inspire action. I simultaneously held in my mind the desire to change my ways and the desire to cling to what was comfortable. The fear of “what if I’m unfixable?” or “what if I try something different and it doesn’t actually make me feel better?” plagued me and kept me oscillating between getting better and just being in a rut.
Oh yeah, the rut. There’s also the time I spent not actively trying to get better. When I thought I’d reached a good place with myself, I’d succumb to my old ways, thinking I could handle a swim. Instead of holding my head above water, I quickly sunk into the habits, discomfort, and thought processes that I thought were gone.
I didn’t know I was backpedaling until I was in the thick of the muck again. I do not admonish myself because this needed to happen once, twice, 38,420,950 times until I finally learned I don’t want this to keep happening! We are human beings that learn through patterns and establishing new ways of being requires commitment to try again. Healing isn’t about “getting it right”, it’s about being willing to learn your ways, anticipate possibilities, call yourself out on your BS, and be willing to start over many, many times.
To put it simply: healing is a process.
Healing may start out as a way to get rid of toxins, negative thoughts, bad habits, and pain. The healing that endures takes a more holistic approach of not just looking at the symptom but how that symptom arrived in the first place. The process of healing involves an ongoing journey of learning, connecting all aspects of health, and being open to adapting.
xo,
Melanie
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Disclaimer: any material shared on Mel Makes It Happen is based on personal experience of the author and meant to be used for educational purposes only. The information is not a replacement for medical care, therapy, or professional advice/treatment.
I’ve been waiting for that big thing to click inside of me. Like, the save-all; the missing piece of me that I haven’t been able to put my finger on; the aspect I’ve been ignoring. Perhaps the very thing that I need is in front of me and I haven’t seen it—or maybe I have that backwards: it is inside of me and that’s why I don’t see it.
It’s easy to feel desperate when you’re so narrow-minded, only able to see what’s in front of you
Still…what is that thing? Just as equally deluding as the idea of where the big thing is hidden, is the idea that we only have one big thing. The media glamorizes stories of revelations so it’s no wonder we expect to wake up in bed one day with a soft, shimmering beam of sunlight hitting our faces through the crack in our bedroom curtains. Then, there in that moment, we KNOW the answer to life or, slightly less dramatic, whatever has been on our mind.
However, that’s a fanciful, romanticized picture of what we expect to happen to us. I shouldn’t speak for everyone but, at least for me, I’ve wondered when that moment will hit me. While I actively seek out self-development, I also have a tremendous desperation to find my calling. Did you catch that word? I hold excitement, motivation, and persistence to find my calling, but also desperation.
Where does this desperation stem from? Honestly, I could blame society’s pushiness towards youth to “stop messing around” and “commit to something already” but I blame my own self-created comparison trap. When I compare, I look at others who already seem to be in their passions and careers and make myself feel unaccomplished. For all I know, I could be at the start of my big thing right now, too. As the person on the inside, I can’t see that grand scheme of it all quite yet.
Moreover, there’s also this inkling of a suspicion that I have that negates the whole “we all have our big things” theory. It could be that…
Perhaps life isn’t composed of one big thing but simply a series of small, consecutive actions directed by a common value.
For example, sometimes actors gain fame because of that one movie they made, or writers for that one best-selling novel, or scientists for that one significant discovery. It’s not to say that other bodies of work outside of their claim to fame are any less worthwhile or deserving. Nor are the individuals who do not end up with that one big thing that launches them into fame.
We are intentionally (or unintentionally) holding ourselves back by thinking we need to have ONE THING. In the struggle to find it and make our mark, we beat ourselves up, battle conflict and doubt, try different avenues and, when that isn’t fruitful, we question our self-worth. The more likely problem is not that we don’t have a calling; it is that we are many things. Sure, some areas might shine a little brighter than others but nothing would stand out if all we had was one thing. Imagine that.
It’s the combination of all of our experiences—and never are there any too small—for those are what make up our lives.
Therefore, the big thing that we seek cannot be found on its own. The big thing begins to take form only once you’ve been through enough little things. Let me also clarify that little does not mean unimportant. It is a matter of carrying out enough consistent efforts towards things that interest you. It can be different things or the same thing—it’s all going to help create that larger thing. Perhaps the moment of discovery happens quite picturesque like I described before. Yet, my hunch is that the little moments start to trail into one another and sooner that you know, you’re in the thick of your big thing: your story.
How’s that for a plot twist? Whenever I’ve spoken to mentors, they often admit that they don’t know everything. I think we all secretly walk around thinking there’s some key to life that others have and we just have not discovered yet. Even the so-called “experts” are only experts in their field and must be constant learners. A funny thing that happens once you “know” a lot more is that you realize you really only know a small fraction of everything there is to know. You can only know what you know. It sounds rather obvious but it is also humbling.
The truth is that everyone is just figuring things out as they go along.
So, as much as I would love to peek into the future and have an answer as to what my big thing becomes, I’m also very much about the journey. The single moment of recognizing what my big thing is will not matter as much as all of these little moments I’m living out leading up to discovering my big thing.
As someone who really beat herself up for over 20 years of not knowing what she wanted to do, I feel equanimity in accepting the journey that focuses on the little things. However, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What is your perspective on finding your thing? Or, if you feel you’ve found your thing, how did that happen?
A year ago, even 6 months ago, I had so many questions.
Why did this happen? Why didn’t my accomplishments make me proud? Why did it seem like every minor mistake I made was blasted on the big screen? Why did my supervisor belittle and neglect me? Why did I get passed over for opportunities to advance even though I was qualified? Why did the boy I love not love me enough to commit? Why did my best friend only make time to see me when it was convenient for her? Why aren’t I enough?
The list goes on.📃 However, the commonality with all of these questions is how riddled with self-doubt I felt and I didn’t even know it. 🙇🏻♀️ I thought I was motivated and giving everything a fair shot. I was doing the best I could but I was also wearing the shoes of a victim. I made myself small.
I felt like the world was happening around me and to me without ME having any say in it. I still feel like this almost every day. And every day I remind myself I am in control of my life.💡 Not because I have any supernatural powers to control the way things play out or how someone feels about me…but because I have control over how I choose to look at the world and the many actions that come with that.
It is approaching life with the idea that I deserve to be here instead of wondering “why me?”. It is about my development of strengths rather than being ruled by perceived weaknesses.🧗🏻♀️ It’s a shift from self-hinderance to self-empowerment.
I am growing and blossoming. In an effort to be more authentic to myself, I want to start posting more regularly on here with similar thoughts to these.
For anyone else trying to step into their own, I recognize you and I respect you. You are not alone.
Today is also Mother’s Day. From the perspective of a daughter with a challenging relationship with her own mother, I think we are all trying. Whatever shape or form that takes changes. It isn’t always understood or expressed effectively. We are trying to do our best to take care of ourselves and those we care about. 💗
I try to make this blog a positive space while also acknowledging the very real, and sometimes messy, things I’m going through. I hope sharing my experiences provides you with stories you can relate to or provides some value as far as letting you know that we all have some hardships and things we’re going through.
I’m actually writing this post from the wooden bench seats inside a local Starbucks, sipping an Earl Grey tea. Okay, not sipping yet because Starbucks boils the fuck out of their hot water so I will scald my tongue if I even attempt to drink it right now. Can you relate?
Sometimes it is something small that brings us together, like our thoughts on (the temperature of) drinks at Starbucks; other times it is a little heavier. Today I’m going to address love and how that translates from our experiences in our head to our heart.
In the month of December, a friend of mine spoke about how just because some people are not in her life anymore that does not mean they can’t be in her heart. At the same time, she recognized that she could be in other people’s hearts, too.
We have criteria for judging whether or not someone in our lives is living up to the tile we give them. If it is a friend or a romantic partner, we have some expectations for what that means. In my experience, I’ve struggled with having people come into my life and say they care about me but not showing that. When someone I consider close to me also vocalizes my importance to them, I wonder how it is that we can separate. Where does the love go?
FRIENDS
For a long time, I was holding onto frustration with a friend of mine who I have known since junior high. It’s a special kind of friendship when someone has known you since you wore checkered Vans and chalked your hair (every generation has their trends). There have been times where our friendship seemed to fizzle and I couldn’t understand what changed. Usually it was the hurdle of distance that we would need to overcome but we would always come back to each other.
Though, during the past year I have noticed us growing apart in a different way. Her life is heading in a different direction. I’m really looking to grow myself and she’s looking to settle down and grow her family. This isn’t a recipe for a friendship breakup but my efforts to keep up with her are not reciprocated. She’d put aside hangouts we’d schedule for minor things that would come up. Rescheduling just never happened and, naturally, I took offense. I remember her calling me her best friend on multiple occasions so what happened to that?
I felt like I was always available as a friend to her and she wasn’t nearly as available for me. Some people might say this is a clear point to move on when I obviously am not receiving the amount of effort I put in back toward me. Still, I remember when I was important to her. So, I’ve come to a place where I release the frustration and resentment and just accept. I think of my friend’s words and muse that, perhaps, this is what love is like now. I don’t have any less love for her just because I’m not one of the first few to hear her big news or because she can’t meet up with me. Love has transcended into a more sophisticated sense of respect. At least, that is what I hold for her…and maybe that is what she holds for me, now, too.
It was only recently that I started to think of love’s ability to touch our hearts for longer periods than someone’s presence can provide. Just as we mourn the loss of a loved one, we feel the pain of separation from someone we care about deeply. Yet, it is with that mentality that I can hold love and great appreciation for a person whom I no longer have around.
LOVERS
I once was asked if I had ever been in love (romantically). My then 23-year-old-self responded with an absurd sounding number, like 7. The person I was speaking with made me feel a bit silly because several of those people I was “in love” with I was never in a relationship with. They all felt important to me at one time though so, if they weren’t all loves, then maybe none were. I then responded with, “none” as my answer. I was still met with a skeptical response.
At the time, I couldn’t quite constitute my thoughts surrounding love but I’ve since recognized that love exists in many forms. Love isn’t always reciprocated the way I wish. However, that does not take away from how I feel about a person or the magic they possess. The memories I have of a person hold a love that is unchangeable. In this current moment in time, situations may be different but I must fairly acknowledge the feelings of my younger self and the sparks that were so important to her!
If I do not respectfully label the love I had for a person when I was younger and somewhat naïve as such, then with what marker can I use to assess love in my life now?
The person who was disbelieving of my number of loves was also one of my loves. After saying 7, and then none, I settled on one. One was all that mattered then. He thought I was speaking about my last boyfriend but, little did he know, I was talking about him.
In my efforts to keep this post somewhat valuable and not just a gushy diary entry, I’ll spare you the details of what transpired between us. Although, if you’re interested, I have described a little bit about what happened in this post. I wasn’t looking for a relationship but I couldn’t help but fall in love with his light and his imperfections the first moment I spoke with him. I knew I wanted to be with him. Consequently, for a long time, my perspective on how everything played out was blinded by my feelings. Feelings which did not allow me to even attempt to wrap my mind around how someone could say he cared so deeply for me yet not want to be with me.
I doubted myself so much after that. I doubted my ability to see what I felt was a light in someone else. I doubted my judgment of what risks were worth taking. I remember his hurt expression on that dark and distant day when I said I loved him—and that made me doubt my ability to put trust in my heart.
He and I spent the better parts of several weeks together but I cannot attempt to understand what goes on in someone else’s head. In the end, all I was left with were his words. Words that validated what I felt we shared but were accompanied by actions that I disagreed with. I think many of our relationships can unfold this way. We say what our heart feels but our head provides the guidance for actions. This same person once said to me that we are in a constant battle between logic and emotion and it’s hard to decide which one we’ll let win.
For my friendships that have faded and my lovers lost, I cannot hold a space for you anymore. Instead, I hold onto the memories that touched me and the feelings that changed me. All of which remind me that love does not only exist in one way. Love is as free-flowing and constant as you allow it to be. It is this mentality that encourages me not to be afraid of putting my heart out there again.
The impact of people who have come into my life, for however long they stayed, does not go unnoticed. Those outward expressions of love that we experienced cannot last but they can exist in our hearts for as long as we desire. They exist as a reminder that we are alive, we feel, and that love is ours to create and give to whoever we want.
This post is dedicated to Teresa, whose words about our hearts and love made such an impact on me.
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