From striving to being
Good morning, happy Saturday 🌞
For the last week, I’ve wondered what I would write about in this newsletter:
How do I put all this, that I’m feeling and experiencing, into words? Let alone just a few of them?
Will I write about Love Languages? About honesty in dating? About love? About my joy? About my new fondness of the Austrian dialect or passion for Knödel?
And:
If I’m truly happy, do I have anything else left to write about?
I hope I do, and it seems to be true this morning.
So first, I want to write about how:
All my life I’ve been striving
It feels like all of my life, I’ve been striving:
please my parents and my friends
do good in school
be liked and admired by everyone
get into a good university
complete said university with high achievements
eat 100% vegan
get a good job
do a good job in said job
go above and beyond
make more and more money
get a promotion
do meaningful, creative work
get more and more appreciation, approval, and admiration
start my own business
become a radical honesty trainer
do what I love
help others
have a positive impact on the world all while…
having the perfect home life and
being perfectly healthy, balanced and happy myself!
Oida! That’s a tall order. One I’ve been struggling to fill, as anyone would and as I’ve written about in recent posts. And as a consequence of my striving…
Many times throughout the last few years I found myself stuck with this urgent feeling that I can’t shake - it tells me I need to ‘figure my life out’ and basically sit at home and isolate myself until I do.
Essentially, I was stuck in a freeze state of indecision and worry, as I sat futilely trying to use my mind to figure out the best plan for my life. I never seemed to figure it out, as I would always come back to the same exact spot, going round in circles in my mind, thinking about my life, rather than living it.
Have you ever been there?
Obsessed with optimizing yourself and your life? With achieving more and more? Ever been busy in your head while at the same time experiencing a sort of emptiness of your direct, felt, lived experience? I sure have! 🙋♀️
Covid times definitely didn’t help - (or more precisely they absolutely helped to keep me stuck in my mind and away from real life).
But I guess being stuck in your mind is real life sometimes, too.
So what about the end of striving?
So where does striving end and living begin?
I think it has something to do with your capacity to love, mostly yourself but also everything else you can experience in your life.
For example, if you learn how to love your body, you can stop striving to achieve some kind of physical perfection - whether that be though your weight and fitness, make up, fashion, boob job, whatever - you might just decide to relax and be okay with you and your body as it is.
If you learn to love yourself unconditionally, you might give yourself permission to do what feels good for you - like start that rock climbing course or take that trip to India - rather than working incessantly to achieve some arbitrary measure of success that will make you look good from the outside.
So something about loving ourselves - and our lives - a little more can help us give up this constant need to strive for and achieve more.
Loving myself more the past few years, practicing Radical Honesty, I’ve given up some of the pressure I put on myself to be any way other than I am. But I couldn’t let go of my striving completely (and let’s face it, maybe that’s impossible). But in the past few weeks I’ve experienced a great letting go of perfection - and a warm welcome into the world of just being.
From striving to being
I notice I am not so satisfied with this newsletter now - will you even read this far?
Anyway.
So in the last few weeks I fell hard in love and basically moved in with my new partner. We’re somehow already living like an old married couple, I imagine. And it’s lovely.
The most mind-blowing fact about it:
He loves and accepts me completely as I am.
Never before have I had a boyfriend who simply accepted me as I was.
It was always:
“You’re going to wear THAT out of the house?”
“You’re so boring.” (When I didn’t do what he wanted me to do.)
“It’s not my fault you have that extra skin down there.”
To all my previous partners, there was something wrong with me in their eyes. I wasn’t allowed to just be - not that I needed their permission to just be.
But just being myself would have meant rejection.
And so I was on a constant journey of people pleasing, even the people who were the closest, most intimate connections I had in my life.
Even with them, there was a sense of having to keep up the facade, to keep up the charade - if I didn’t do X, I wouldn’t be loved. Or if I did Y, he’d stop loving me.
No one ever really showed me unconditional love, (other than Mama) until now.
Now, Stefan reflects back to me all the love I’ve worked so hard to give myself the last few years.
In him, I find permission to unfold into my truest self in every sense.
And in the process of allowing myself to be - I discover being.
To simply exist and let things come to me.
To experience the taste of my coffee, or his lips, or the Knödel we made together. To feel the smile form at the corners of my lips when I think of my life right now.
To experience going out of the house in my favorite colorful crazy bell-bottom pants, and noticing people looking at me, smiling at me - and feeling myself as I do so.
Hearing the birds, feeling the sunshine, seeing the sights, petting the dogs - on long walks together.
In him, my self love is magnified.
And so I can be.
And so it felt like a challenge to write this post this week - I somehow feel like I don’t need to strive for anything - like everything is okay as it is.
Like I am okay, as I am.
I am enough.
Knowing that is one thing - feeling it deep in my bones is another.
And so this is my continued challenge for the week.
I could write so much more, and I’ve already written too much.
If you’ve read this far, please will you ❤️ this post?
Thanks for your support on this journey.
Will you let me know if this resonates with you, in the comments?
Love love love,
Chelsea