Tonight, I am feeling a strong sense of emptiness. Despite getting some wonderful news this morning the excitement from that seems to have long since fizzled out and I am left feeling nostalgic for things I can’t have, and a sense of longing for the things that never happened but could have happened. Maybe this is because I have spent the last hour scrolling through my exes social media before deciding enough was enough and completely unfollowing him; maybe it is because I am currently curled up like a burrito listening to Keaton Henson; maybe it is because I am incredibly homesick and hanging on to the idea that I get to go home for a few days on Friday. It is probably a combination of all of these things in reality.
I missed blogmas yesterday and so thought I would do a little personal post as a peace offering for the lack of what I feel is realness on my blog lately, I don’t really know what I’m creating and hope to get that fully sorted in the New Year but until then here is this and Blogmas will continue tomorrow, up until the 24th.
Self love is something that everyone seems to preach about online these days, even I did a blog post on self care tips just the other day (which I felt so fake posting while in the midst of a mental breakdown). I think the point I am trying to make is that it is almost forced upon us to care for ourselves and while, yes, it is so important there are also times when just feeling is vital. It is important to sometimes just sit and cry over a boy for a while, it is important to miss people, it is important to love and lose. Without these things you are unable to appreciate those things that are going well in your life - had I not had a terrible morning it is unlikely that the one email that cheered me up would have done so in such an immense manner otherwise. But once you are done feeling, it is then that you need to take the self care into action, it is then that your health and mental wellbeing need to become the first priority.
Recently I have been making myself feel guilty for not feeling anything at all, whether it be happiness or love or sadness it all seems somewhat foreign to me at the moment. As though the rest of the time I am just kind of existing and not really taking the moments I am living in; I take a lot of things for advantage which is something that I noticed when I stopped being a tourist in my favourite city and became a resident. I stopped taking it all in and just accepted that these are my surroundings that this is what I see everyday. I stopped being fascinated by the canals and bikes, they became a part of my routine. They lost their foreign beauty and I am going to begin to challenge myself to fall in love with this city all over again (even if it means going to random places and forcing myself to take somewhat decent photos).
I think for me, forcing myself to feel will be one of the biggest self care actions I can possibly carry out due to the enormity of it which is why it is something I am writing about within this post. Yes, I did just admit to feeling homesick and sad and then go on to say that I don’t really feel anything anymore but what I mean is that I need to force myself to fully understand why I am feeling what I am feeling. There is a difference between being hit by emotions and actually accepting that these are your feelings and this is what you are going through, by learning to do this I feel I will be much more able to then learn to care for myself in a way that is matching for the needs of my current state.
Basically what I’m saying is that I need to learn the difference between not having showered for three days and feeling a bit gross because I spent the day in bed, one of these is a self destruction of sorts and the other is basic human activity every now and then. Both however leave me feeling guilty, I need to stop reprimanding myself for doing these things and begin to take an understanding about why I do these things instead, thus will in itself be the biggest form of self care I can commit. Taking the time to learn how to better myself and develop as a person while also ensuring I am caring for myself.
If you take anything from this post it should be that you need to be able to feel, especially if you are a creative like me, but you also need to know when do draw the line and begin to care for yourself. We are all learning the arts of what is best for us day in day out, this is vital for our own personal growth but please remember to live in the moment too.
x
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