Dear Artists, Creatives and Other Broken Saints
I wrote the following poem about four years ago to help me stop worrying about what my neighbors/friends/relatives/dentist or other writers thought about my writing style and ability.
I wrote the following poem about four years ago to help me stop worrying about what my neighbors/friends/relatives/dentist or other writers thought about my writing style and ability.
Self-care isn’t a goal you strive for. And it’s not about becoming YOU Version 2.0. It’s about meeting yourself where you are with a soft and open heart. It’s believing “my ordinary self is enough.” It’s feeling safe enough to show up in the world 100% you and inherently giving others permission to do the same.
Growing up, our overachiever family placed a high value on competency. Often that translated into a critical mindset toward self and others, where we frequently saw the bad before the good.
You may need to consider taking steps towards emotional healing if you, like many do, tend to bottle up difficult emotions. Grief, sadness, anxiety, depression, addiction, unhealthy obsessions, anger. We hide them in the basement of our minds and continue living under the pretense that they are gone.
Stress can interfere with cognition, focus, problem-solving, memory and mood. When we reach the point of complete overwhelm we need to pause, breathe, get out of our heads and re-set.
By all counts and measures, feeling like a failure is a real thing. In an age fuelled by social media, with its filtered images and glamorous stories, our accomplishments can seem small in comparison, making it easy to feel like we’re falling behind.
While a few of us are re-imagining our lives, creating new businesses and launching creative projects as a result of this global crisis, most of us are still licking our wounds or are in survival mode. And almost all of us are grieving from profound loss.
Many of us have trouble accepting ourselves fully. We find it easy to appreciate our strengths, but when it comes to our flaws and failures, we develop an overwhelming sense of judgment and rejection.
Many of us feel discomfort when we’re required to take a stand, speak our truth or let others see our brilliance and unique talents. Why is this?