Column 6: Therapy & The Space Between

“It took a little time, tequila & therapy” - Old Dominion

Wine: ONEHOPE Love Language California Chardonnay

Recipe: @cookingforone1 Chicken Tarragon Salad

Fun Fact: I didn’t think I liked Chardonnay for most of my (wine drinking) life. It wasn’t until I moved to Napa when I really explored this varietal and enjoyed all of the wonderful iterations of this beautiful wine. Similar to this full bodied white, for a long time, therapy was something that I just didn’t think was for me. Looking back, it's one of the best decisions I have ever made. 10/10 recommend it. I think everyone could benefit from it in some way. I also think everyone could benefit from reading this column with a glass of Love Language Chardonnay and a plate of my @cookingforone1 Chicken Tarragon Salad. 

I was in my car driving home, and almost there. With just a few more blocks to go, I was trying to hold back the tears until I could just get home. But they started to fall anyway. By the time I had my car in park, I was full on sobbing. It was a release of a buildup that had been in the making for some time. It was just a few days after Christmas and at some point in my 20’s, the holidays became harder for me.

I can’t pinpoint one exact reason that the tears came. It generally takes a lot to make me cry, but they were flowing that evening. There were a number of contributors to those tears, but at the root of it was that I felt empty, and I was lonely. The holidays can have that effect on you when you are single. They can point out everything that is missing from your life, and that night I had let the negativity and scarcity get the best of me. I was doing my best to process the trauma that my 20’s brought. From when I was 20 and I came out of the closet, to the death of my brother and the state of our damaged relationship, to the good, bad and ugly of my dating life - I felt like it was all coming together in a perfect storm and I had reached a breaking point. I was exhausted and tired. And I felt like much of the excitement I once had for my young adult life had faded.

I had let myself believe that my life was somehow worth less because I was nearly 30 years old and single, lived alone and didn’t have any real sign that any of that would change anytime soon. I was frustrated and felt like it was unfair that so many I knew had found love, but I hadn’t yet. I felt like I had spent my 20’s “waiting for the other shoe to drop”, but it never did. I had let me being single contribute to my sense of inadequacy. It was a period of my life where I wasn’t taking very good care of myself, in many ways. There were many elements of my life that were going well, but at that moment in time, it was hard for me to see them. I felt like my vision & perception of my own life was cloudy.

My drive home in the evenings has always been my least favorite part of the day. For pretty much all of my 20’s I’ve enjoyed the ways I spend my days. I do work that I enjoy, and I have hobbies and now great friends that bring me joy. I’m good at filling my days with things that are fulfilling for me. But it's always been in that space between my days and nights where my sadness came. 

By that time, I had been looking for a therapist for almost 6 months, and had just found one that I was about to start working with. I needed it. I wasn’t enjoying or appreciating my life very much. I knew I was taking all of the positive things for granted, and I wanted to get out of that place. I felt like I was in a mental prison that I couldn’t figure out how to escape. I was sick of feeling so incomplete and alone. I felt that as I grew older through my 20’s, that I was focusing more and more on the things that hadn’t happened for me yet, and I reached a point when it all felt suffocating.

The Search

It took me a long time to get to the place where I knew I needed help. I had spent most of my 20’s reading all sorts of motivational self improvement books, but had struggled to put all of the advice into practice, or use it when I was at my low points. There was this gap between where I knew I wanted to go, and me getting there. I thought for a long time that I could “dig myself” out of the hole I was in without anyone else's help, and prided myself on that. I’d later discover what “lone wolf syndrome” was, and how much of a real thing that was for me. But I’ve learned that there is strength in asking for help. There is power in recognizing your weaknesses, and seeking out the help to get better. 

It took me 6 months from the point I decided I was going to start therapy to when I finally had my first session. I struggled in the time that I knew I needed help, but hadn’t found the right person just yet. It was frustrating. 

I was specific in what I was looking for in a therapist. From pretty early on in my search, I knew I wanted a gay male in their 20’s or 30’s. Many of the things I wanted to discuss in therapy had to do with my experience of coming out and living as a gay man. There were elements of my experiences that I didn’t want to have to explain to someone who hadn’t lived it themself. There were times when I was concerned that I was being too picky, and that I was suffering for longer than I needed to while I was still looking. But I was instantly validated in my thinking from the moment I began my sessions with who I found. 

At the beginning of our first session, my therapist asked me what my goals were. I liked that because throughout our work together, we had a north star of where I wanted to get to. And that was to get to a state of mind where me not being in a relationship was no longer sabotaging my day to day happiness. I felt like I had let myself get to a place of such scarcity around that area of my life, and I couldn’t enjoy all of the positive things around me.

Lone Wolf Syndrome

Pretty early on, my therapist asked me what my friend group looked like. At the time, I was still relatively new to Napa and didn’t have too many friends in town. Most of which were either back in San Diego or had spread in different directions all over the country after college. Of that group, few were gay, and none of those people lived in Napa. At that point, he said it should be one of my goals to build more of a gay community around me in Napa.

It wasn’t long after this conversation that I stumbled upon my group of good friends here in Napa. I shared in the “community” column how an ex-fling introduced me to them. The relatively short amount of time in between the two was a crazy stroke of luck. But I do think that once I had this conversation, my eyes opened up a bit more to the importance of finding friends, so finding them made it that much easier because my eyes were already open. A big part of me connecting with these guys and the beauty of our friendship was about feeling accepted. It wasn’t as if I never felt accepted before, because I have had many wonderful people in my life. But it's a different, specific type of connection that was based on many shared similar experiences. 

Like I wrote earlier, somewhere in my early 20’s I adopted (without me realizing what it was) “lone wolf syndrome”. In general, it's the thinking that you are better off alone than with other people. To a certain extent, growing up I felt like my sexuality would cause people to reject me. So I would retreat into solitude as a way to protect myself and feel safe. I mentioned in the “community” column about how for a long time I didn’t meet other gay men that I could relate to very much & connect with, and as a result I felt like it would be easier if I just went through life without gay friends. That being said, I was still very intent on finding a romantic partner. However, what I didn’t realize was that a big part of what I was looking for (and failing to find) in a romantic partner, were things that I should have been looking for in friends. But I had (temporarily) given up on that. Throughout that time, somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that it would be nice to have more gay friends. But I would always push that thought aside and not put too much energy into it. There came a time towards the end of my 20’s where a certain quote really hit home for me: “If you always do what you always have done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten”. I wasn’t happy and I knew I needed to make a change. The process of finding gay friends that I connected with filled a hole in myself that I once thought could only be filled by a romantic partner. And it opened my eyes up to how great my life was and still currently is, and how much life I still had to live as a single guy. Life has gotten a whole lot more fun since they came into the picture.

As much as I’ve prided myself on being somewhat of an introvert, I know now that I need human connection. There are so many activities like cooking & writing that I truly enjoy doing solo and that fill my cup, but there is a certain space in me that can only be filled by that connection with someone that just understands you. There’s now a healthy tension between those two sides of me. And I try to balance my life so that I have both because I know I am at my best when I create time and space for each of them.

Attachment Theory

By the end of our first session, my therapist gave me the homework of reading the book “Attached” by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel S.F. Heller, M.A. This was one of the best & most helpful books I have ever read. It brought me an astonishing amount of clarity around many of my dating experiences that, at the time, had left me dumbfounded and scratching my head. Better yet, as I was reading and sharing this with my friends, an incredible amount of them would almost instantly respond saying that they too had read that book or heard about attachment theory. 

This book recommendation came on the heels of the therapist asking me what my dating history was like. Looking back, he had noticed a pattern, but didn’t exactly tell me what it was. But it only took me a few chapters before I realized what that pattern was. In a nutshell, there are 3 different types of attachment styles: anxious, avoidant and secure. They are somewhat self explanatory, but it definitely takes reading the book to fully understand the dynamics of relationships when individuals have the same or different attachment styles. It’s worth noting that one person can experience being a different attachment style at different times in their lives or when dating different people. I found that I had certainly been all 3, but I discovered that I had the tendency to fall for the avoidant style, which in turn would bring out my anxious tendencies. Spoiler alert: the two don’t mix well. Time and time again, I would find someone I liked, express feelings for them, and they would pull away. Them pulling away would in turn cause me to want them more, and hence creating a very unhealthy and vicious cycle of neither party being happy or getting what they wanted.

I’m a big “quote person”, and a big part of me working on fixing this tendency of mine can be boiled down to 2 quotes that you’ve likely heard before, but are certainly worth sharing: “Actions speak louder than words.”, and “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” These days I’m getting better at seeing the red flags that I used to ignore or somehow rationalize, and simply walk away. I know it sounds silly, but you really can’t make someone love you and I have gotten better at seeing the forest from the trees and knowing when something is not meant to be. Regardless of past pain and disappointment, I’m working on still putting myself out there, but also letting go sooner when something isn’t working. The result has been a newfound peace, and calmness in myself, which has had a ripple effect on other areas of my life too.

Trauma & Self Worth

Growing up in the closet, I felt like there were so many subtle messages that made me feel like I was “less than”. Because of that, I felt like I needed to show up & over perform in other areas of my life to make up for that one “less than” thing about me. I used to think that my presence alone or the truest version of myself wasn’t ever good enough. I know myself to be a hard worker. I like to work, and I’ve generally pursued endeavors that I enjoy. But it wasn’t until recently that I realized that I often overextend myself in an effort to make up for me feeling less than. I’ve always felt like I needed to do and to give more.

Growing up, I was never the “smartest” person in the classroom. I generally got mediocre grades, and was never too good of a test taker. I felt like I had to work twice as hard to get half as good of a grade. I was overweight for part of my teen years, and had a whole slough of insecurities around that. The cynical side of me thinks to a certain degree that I still carry the mentality of “once a fat kid, always a fat kid”. I wasn’t very coordinated, and never too talented at sports. Somewhere in elementary school, I stopped playing sports and instead went home to watch the Food Network and teach myself how to cook. People around me in school thought that was strange and would poke fun at it. That combined with keeping the secret that I was gay, resulted in me having a pretty serious inferiority complex. I felt like I fell short in many areas of my life that seemed important at the time. 

I now know that overcoming adversity is the common denominator between many of the “greats” in the world. There is so much strength found in overcoming challenges. Many of the most successful “anyones'' in the world have come out on the other side and realized their self worth. They’ve fine tuned how to harness that adversity and use it as rocket fuel.

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When it comes to dating, I’ve noticed a tendency in myself to overextend and to give too much. I had a good friend once flat out tell me that I was doing exactly that. They said that I had so much to give, but that whoever I was with needed to prove that they were worthy of all of that first. Otherwise, I’d end up overextending myself and feeling like I wasn’t getting enough in return.

The other way I would attempt to overcompensate was with my use of humor. I think I am naturally a funny person. I can make people laugh easily. I can see the opportunities for humor in between the lines of everyday conversation, and I often take those opportunities. One way I attempt to gain the approval of people and to become likable is to make people laugh. Recently I’ve learned that making someone laugh isn’t the only way to make someone smile. And even today I find myself using self depreciation as a way to get people to like me. I know that self depreciation can be used in a positive way. It can be a way to show humility, and that you don’t take yourself too seriously. It can easily break the ice between people. But it's a slippery slope. And in my mind, the flip side of it is simply this: why should you have to belittle and break yourself down to win over the affection of someone else? It's something I’m still figuring out how to use in a healthy way.

There is no doubt that I have used humor as a coping mechanism throughout my life in a number of ways & situations. Anytime I’m slightly nervous around someone, I will take the first opportunity I find to crack a joke. It was almost as though I felt the need to “perform” for people. I have the tendency to layer on humor so much that I suspect that it has prevented people from truly getting to know me, and learning who I really am, outside of the funny guy. In a way, it was self sabotage. Lately I’ve begun to actively practice unwinding this extension of my tightly spun ball of shame. I have been trying to practice a new state of calmness. Rather than hiding behind a wall or humor, I try to simply just show up as myself, and interact with people in a more authentic and sincere manner. I’ve found that I connect better with people when I’m calm, and just try to speak from a genuine & thoughtful place. There is no doubt in my mind that while I was trying to use humor as a protective method, I was also building a wall. Humor used to be in the driver's seat of my car, but now I’m packing it into the trunk.

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Growing up, I remember my brother giving me a hard time when I showed certain emotions. At some point, I began to hide many of my emotions and became fearful that if I shared with people what was truly on my mind, that they wouldn’t like me. I also remember that I used to be able to make John laugh. I think that humor was one of the few things that brought us together, so as a result I used it in excess for years after our relationship deteriorated and after he took his own life. It's a sad reality to me. Neither of us were ever very vulnerable to each other. In hindsight, I don’t think we knew each other very well at all. To this day, his pain is still somewhat of a mystery to me, and one that I wish I knew more about. 

I wrote in column 1 about how my brother essentially rejected me when I came out of the closet. For all intensive purposes, our relationship ended then. 10 years later, I now wonder if that rejection resulted in my fear of being vulnerable, especially in dating. I wonder if I subconsciously put walls up to keep people getting to know me. I think I still carry around some level of shame from that series of events. 

Like I’ve said before, opening up to the right people has the power to strengthen relationships. And vice versa, opening up to the wrong people can cause trauma. In Taylor Swift’s song “Dear Reader”, she sings not once, but twice the line “Never take advice from someone who's falling apart.” It's a sad but true lesson I learned the hard way. 

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The experience I outlined in column 5, “a near miss” on sexual assault, left me guarded in many dating situations. It made me hesitant to make myself vulnerable to some guys. That situation robbed me from some of the carefree freedom I felt in my early 20’s. The feeling of having something happen to you that is completely against your will is one that I will never forget. I count myself lucky that I got away somewhat unscathed, but it certainly made me more aware, and more cautious.

The act of sharing that experience in its entirety with my therapist was freeing, and felt like a bit of the weight that I carried was lifted off of my shoulders. Having the safe space to talk about me felt good. I shared that plus many of the other things I wrote about in these columns with him, and (although it sounds cliche), the process of “unpacking your baggage” is a freeing one. There's so much that we hold inside, and I can’t stress enough how great it felt to unload and examine it with someone I felt safe with. Like I said before, sharing with the right people is so important.

That “near miss” left me guarded to say the least. I’ve done my best to see that situation for what it was, learn from it, but still let myself to…well, I have yet to write a sex column and can’t say that I ever will (haaaa!). Maybe I’ll go there one day, but today is not that day. The point is that there's a certain caution that people can carry after situations like that, and I’m doing my best to rid myself of that…in a safe, responsible and fun manner. So, case closed for now :)    

Rewriting The Script

At one point in our sessions, I fearfully asked my therapist, “But what if I never find someone, and I spend the rest of my life alone? What then?”. It was a question that had haunted me for years, one that I rarely uttered out of fear of it coming true. 

He answered my question with another question: “When you think about all of the reasons you want to find someone, and all of the positive things that you are looking for, why can’t you give those things to yourself?” It struck me, because no one had ever asked me that before. I think the point he was trying to make was that people often look for things in a romantic partner that they need to find within themselves first. It's in the same vein as the phrase “becoming your own best friend”. Like attracts like, and if you want someone to make you happy, you need to find a way to make yourself happy first. Because then that happiness and energy will attract that same energy. Call me a broken record, but Beyonce once said in an Oprah interview, “You have to have your own life before you make yourself someone's wife.” I’ve learned that I still needed to explore and hold space for all of the possible paths that my life could take, and to then tell myself that it is possible for me to find peace and happiness in whatever path I ended up on.

Another way of looking at it: What's stopping me from simply enjoying the life I have already created for myself? Why do I have to let my singleness get in the way of finding joy and peace in my day to day life?

Once I began therapy, I realized that one of the main contributors to my unhappiness was found in the space between the expectations of what I wanted my life to look like and the place I was at that given time. I was beginning to realize how much of society’s messaging of how “marriage & children” are what everyone in their 20’s should be aspiring to was affecting me as I grew through that decade. The older I got, the more that I felt that those were the things missing most in my life. The older I got, the more I would compare myself to those around me who were finding love. I’ve now learned just how poisonous comparison is, and how much it was taking away from my peace of mind and ability to be present in any given stage of my life. We’re all on our own paths, and I’m learning how to respect the journey I’m on. 

It wasn’t until my late 20’s that I allowed my mind to wander into the possibilities of what my life could look like without a relationship or children. There came a time in our sessions where my therapist told me to make a list of all things in this so-called “script” that society was deeming to be important that hadn’t yet happened for me, and to just completely disregard them. He suspected that much of my sadness and loneliness was coming from me “amplifying the lacking” and in me dwelling too much on what was missing. He then empowered me to rewrite my script with all of the positive things that I currently did have in my life, and to practice more gratitude for those things. These days I begin and end my days with my gratitude journal, writing down a minimum of 5 positive things (big or small) that I am grateful for. 

To this day I still believe that a relationship is something that I still want, but I no longer feel like I am holding myself in this “happiness hostage” situation until that happens. I’m now actively exploring all sorts of other beautiful areas of my life that make me happy. So much of what I worked on in therapy came back to the simple practice of gratitude, and learning how to shift my energy to be in alignment with abundance rather than scarcity. Many of these things were not new concepts & theories that I had heardn’t before, but hearing them in therapy really brought it home for me. One of the biggest impacts therapy had on me was learning first and foremost how much those theories applied to my life, and second, how to put them into practice in my day to day life.  I think sometimes we hear good advice, but then dismiss it because we tell ourselves things like “Well, my situation is different because of x, y & z”. But in actuality, oftentimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple. And sometimes the answers are right in front of you.

Talking About It

Growing up, therapy seemed almost taboo to talk about. There was a stigma around going to therapy that caused me to feel a sense of shame around ever going to or discussing it. That being said, after going to therapy, I’ve found that the more I share that I have gone through it, the more people also share with me that they too are in or have gone to therapy as well. More often than not it is followed by people expressing how glad they were that they went and that it was the best investment they have made because it was one in themselves and their health. 

When the idea of going to therapy would come to me, I used to ask myself the question: Would I pay someone to talk to me and give me advice when I have good friends or family that I can talk to? The short answer: Even with good friends we can often still have a filter of some sort, and they can also have biases. It's strange, but I’ve felt that there are things that are easier to say to a complete stranger who can serve as an unbiased, neutral party. And in turn, there are things even our best friends will hesitate to tell us out of fear of hurting our feelings. Finally, to put it plainly, therapists are professionals trained to be good listeners and to give constructive advice to help us get to a better and healthier state of mind. 

The “Now What?” Moment & Forward Motion

I’ve noticed a common denominator between many singles in their 20’s & 30’s. I think we reach a point that I call the “now what?” moment. For me, it hit when I was going through therapy. I reached a point where I was feeling pleasantly settled in most areas of my life, even in the romantic relationship category. You wait and wait for it to come, but it just simply hasn’t yet happened for you. I got to a point where I was like “Ok, if this isn’t going to happen for me right now…then now what? What else do I want? How do I want to spend my time?”

For me, I was living in a town and apartment that I loved. I had a job I enjoyed showing up to everyday, had great friends and was taking pretty good care of myself. So many things were going right, but love just hadn’t come yet. By then I had realized, as the song says, “you can’t hurry love, you just have to wait.” I had spent many years wanting it so badly and trying to make it happen, but despite my best efforts, it just wasn’t in the cards for me yet.

I recently started listening to the Goop podcast and the first episode was with Gwenyth Paltrow and the one & only, Oprah Winfrey. Oprah said something that resonated with me, “Don’t hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it. Want it. Let it come from the intention of real truth for you, and then let it go. And if it's supposed to be yours then it will show up and it wont show up until you stop holding it so tightly.” When I heard her say that, I think I rewinded the clip and relistened to it at least 3 times. It was the tall drink of water I had needed for so long. But I don’t think it would have resonated with me as much as it did at that moment if I hadn’t experienced what I had in the past few years.

What she said was the missing piece of the puzzle that I had been looking for for years. And the best part of this learning was that it allowed myself permission to simply just let it go. It didn’t mean that I no longer wanted it, and it certainly didn’t mean that I’m giving up on it. But it allowed me to let go of the part of wanting it that was becoming unhealthy & counterproductive for me. It was a release of tension that was not serving me. It gave me permission to be at peace with where I was. I’d be a liar if I said that today I am 100% there. There are still days where that loneliness hits me and I get knocked down. But in general, I’m in a better place than I was, and I don’t let it run my life like it once did. 

Most importantly, therapy taught me how to manage my mind. In one session I asked my therapist something along the lines of: “I still feel sad and lonely at times. I still want to find someone. How do I get rid of that sad feeling that there is still something missing?” His answer was simple but powerful. He said that I didn’t have to get rid of those feelings, and that they may never go away. He said that there really wasn’t anything wrong with wanting a romantic partner, and at the root of people wanting a companion is that they want a “witness to their life”. This phrase resonated with me because I really do want someone alongside to witness and enjoy all of the elements of my life alongside of me. 

While I learned that there wasn’t anything wrong with feeling lonely, it was important that I didn’t let that loneliness consume me. I learned how to pull myself out of those feelings, and not let myself sit in them too long. I needed to acknowledge them, and to not push away or suppress them, and to certainly not belittle myself for feeling them. He said to let them land and feel them, but then to keep moving forward. And that when those feelings arose, to do healthy & positive things that made me feel good, both mentally & physically. He said that it would be that practice that would pull me out and pull me through those moments. 

The word he kept using that I always remember is that people often need to “reparent” themselves, and learn how to take better care of themselves. These days I have an arsenal of tools and habits at my disposal to pull myself through. Sometimes it’s having a good friend over for dinner and some wine, other times it's a hard workout or a massage. When I have the time, it’s a spontaneous day trip to a new town in the bay area I haven’t visited before. Fully appreciating my freedom and all of the possibilities of where my life could take me has been powerful for me. Taking good care of myself and gratitude are the 2 common denominators here. But the best tool for me has been writing these columns. It's been a creative outlet for me to express, process, share and ultimately validate so much of the things I have wrestled with for the past 10 years. To this day I still have lows and sometimes fall into negative thought spirals. But the difference between now and before is that I now have tools to pull myself out of those holes faster and not sit in them longer than I needed to. It's certainly work, and a practice that I need to constantly devote time and energy to, but I’m better than I once was.

This column began with the story of me driving home from work on a December night. To date, my drive home is still the hardest & loneliest part of my day. I still often feel like I’m on my way to an empty home, because I am. I still want to go home to someone I love. However the difference between then and now is how I handle those feelings. I first tell myself that what I am feeling is ok, let myself sit with it for a few moments, and then pull myself out of that by rooting myself in all the good that exists in my life at that moment. I remind myself of all the possibilities that each night ahead of me holds, and all of the ways I can enjoy this time by doing things that fill my cup. More on that in the next column…

So back to my question of, “Now that I am here, what now?”. My answer is simple: enjoy. I’ve gotten to a place where I feel like I’ve worked hard and created a great life for myself, and am doing my best to fully appreciate it. In a way, you could look at it as optimizing my current resources and maximizing their positive impact on my life. Rather than continually seeking out new areas of happiness, I took inventory of all that I already had that gave me joy and filled my cup, and simply enjoyed those things. The result is a life filled with more fun and more peace. And I feel good. 

In a nutshell, Joseph Campbell put it best when he said, “You must be willing to leave the life that you planned in order to find the one waiting for you.” A big part of my newfound happiness has come from abandoning all of the expectations I held onto so tightly, and embracing what simply was already in front of me. Now more than ever I feel like I’m in uncharted waters. It's sometimes a scary thing to let go and surrender, but it's also liberating. It's a beautiful type of freedom.

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That night in December in my car, there was one thought that caused me a great deal of pain. I asked myself, “If I were to die today, what would I leave behind?” There was a big part of me that felt like it wouldn’t mean very much, or add up to much. I know that wasn’t a fair or true thing to say to myself, but that’s how I felt. I had been through a certain amount of trauma, and I was doing my best to cope. But I wanted my life to mean more, and to have more to show for it than what I had created with my life by that time. I had told myself that I needed to get help, and to pull myself out of the hole I felt like I was in. And then I told myself that once I got healthier mentally, that I wanted to create something that would be my mark that I would leave on the world. Something that I would be proud of that would help others in a meaningful way to me. There was much I had accomplished, but I wanted more.

After a lot of thinking, writing and discussions with some people close to me, I landed upon the idea of this blog. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to share the experiences of my past 10 years - the good, bad and ugly in all the areas I felt most important and significant. There was so much I had learned, and yet so much I still have to figure out. But what I know for sure is that human connection is one of the reasons I think we are all here on this earth. To find true, pure, authentic connection is a gift. 

Storytelling is one of the most powerful forms of art, and one that has pulled me through many of my darkest hours. Knowing that someone has gone through something similar to what I have, and come out alive and better for it, has been powerful and inspiring to me at different points of my life. Although it's hard and sometimes uncomfortable to revisit some of my darkest moments, it was of the utmost importance to me that I shared my experiences in the most raw and real way that I could. I write with the hope that others will be able to connect with some of these experiences, and use them as a rope to help pull them through a hard time they may be going through. Writing this blog has been the lemonade to my lemons.

I’ve found that so much of my unhappiness has been found in the space between what I wanted my life would look like, and what it actually was or currently is today. I’ve always been a dreamer, and I’m proud of it. But sadly, I’ve learned that I have been the breaker of my own heart time and time again. I’m learning that it's a beautiful thing to have dreams, but that I needed to be kinder to myself in this space between their ideation and them coming true. I’m also trying to get back into touch with the carefree freedom that I once had at the beginning of this decade. I think my 20’s hardened me in both good and bad ways, but now I’m actively pursuing more fun, joy and freedom than ever before. Life can be fucking hard, but it can also be fucking fun, and I want more of the latter in my next 30 years.

I know it's cliche, but life really is precious and we really aren’t promised tomorrow. It’s so fragile. So much of me going into therapy was me not wanting to spend another 10 years of my life disappointed that my life didn’t turn out the way I expected it to. Life really is way too short to live like that. I used to live in a space of so much fear that my dreams wouldn’t come true. Fear that I would never meet someone to spend and enjoy my life with. Fear that the dreams I had for myself, that I had desperately hoped for and tirelessly worked towards would never come to fruition. But I’ve learned to let go of that fear, and now know that if it is meant for me then it will come. I wrote it once and I’ll write it again (because it's just that good). Oprah said it best: “Don’t hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it. Want it. Let it come from the intention of real truth for you, and then let it go. And if it's supposed to be yours then it will show up and it wont show up until you stop holding it so tightly.” I’ve learned that I am worthy of these things coming true, and that all good things take time. And in the space between, I’m finding peace.