Here you are, feeling stuck, lost, alone and frustrated. You have perhaps been in a few relationships that haven’t really gone anywhere or you are stuck in the same relationship but feeling unfulfilled and lacking meaningful connection. Maybe you were extremely successful and driven throughout your high school years, maybe in college you really dove in and grinded it out, striving to be at the top. Often in college we create strong relationships with mentors and professors who guide us along the way, we are mirrored in our dreams and motivations by our peers. It’s like a built in safety net that keeps us rooted in our path. We are enveloped in it. It feels like a time of thriving and extreme growth. During this time, life did not come without challenges, late nights were customary, reading until the early hours of the morning was routine and breaking for food was only done out of necessity.
When you graduate it feels like all your dreams are finally ready to takeoff. You are ready to fly and really dive into the real work now. At this point we start to realize that our dreams are a little different than the reality of what it’s like after graduation. Perhaps we come back to that feeling of lost here and a perpetual feeling of stuckness. Perhaps you are still living with a college partner, maybe you have moved home at this time out of financial necessity and feeling like you went back in time. Maybe you’re starting to question your choices in college, perhaps questioning yourself, maybe even questioning your path forward.
If this sounds like you, you are just one of many 20 somethings trying to figure out what a path forward looks like when it previously was so clear and set in stone. It can be a really confusing time and maybe even a dark time. Maybe you’ve experienced anxiety or depression before in your younger years and you feel it creeping in again. Maybe this is your first time really feeling what anxiety and depression feels like. It can be quite surprising and disappointing, sometimes we feel hopeless in and helpless to our situation.
What often happens here is that we start questioning our intuition and reevaluating choices that have been made in the past. It might feel like we’ve lost connection with ourselves and start to not understand own body or how to meet our needs. My hope is that through reading this article you will learn to better understand yourself and ways to reconnect you with you. I must warn you that this does not come without anxiety. If we shift our belief system to understand that anxiety is not bad, we can begin to see anxiety through a new framework, a framework that is rooted in change. A lot of what you are experiencing in this moment is the need for change and the drive to resist change because of severe discomfort and because of dreams that have been well embedded in a stable path for so long.
Before we began talking about our intuition let’s first talk about grief. When we make a change and when we finally make the decision to carve out a new path we must first pause and allow ourselves to grieve the previous path and any dreams that came with it. This might show up as anger, resentment, self-questioning, self-doubt, sadness and denial. We need to allow ourselves to make space for these feelings and breathe through them as they arise. Try not to push them away, but rather welcome them in and ride the wave. If we do this, we can begin to learn that we are capable of sitting with difficult emotions. As you breathe through drop that breath down into your belly and hold for a few seconds, return that breath out through your mouth and really work on passing the grief through your body. Try that again and sit in that space until you feel a little shifting in your body. It’s okay if that grief surfaces some tears or some anger. Stay with it and continue to focus on your breath, and on bringing in compassion and warmth into your body. You can do hard things.
Next, I want you to practice a little exercise that I learned from an amazing psychologist, Julie Gottman. She taught me a way to find my intuition and my voice. I want you to close your eyes and think about something that you really like, something simple that no one can convince you that you don’t love. For me it’s my morning cup of coffee. Now closing your eyes and staying in a comfortable position I want you to try to convince yourself that you do not like this thing, that this thing is terrible and you never want it again, keep trying to really convince yourself that it’s not right for you. Continue breathing and convincing for another moment or so. I want you now to notice what arises in your body, what is surfacing and where is your body communicating to you that you’re actually lying to yourself and not listening to your own needs, wants and desires. Take note of that space. Now I want you to take a deep settled breath again and climb back into convincing yourself that you do actually like this thing, that it is right for you and no one can convince you otherwise. Settle in that space and after a moment of telling yourself repeatedly in your mind that you do like this thing. Check back in with your body and notice where your body is communicating to you that you are telling the truth and that you’re actually listening to your needs, your wants and your desires. Take note of this space. Write it down so that you don’t forget it.
Once you have done the exercise above, I want you to take some time to think about moments when that feeling of untruths surfaced during different choices or interactions, or perhaps during past relationships, maybe even your current relationship. What you are starting to notice is that perhaps your actions and behaviors have not necessarily been in line with what you really want or need. It’s okay if this surfaces, it doesn’t mean you need to do anything about it now and it doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. It just means that sometimes along the way we stop listening to ourselves and sometimes find ourselves down a road that we don’t like anymore. The wonderful thing is that once we start to notice this, we have full agency of changing the situation. Changing the situation can involve environmental changes, emotional changes or cognitive changes, like learning how to think about a situation in a different way.
The next thing we need to talk about our boundaries. Now most of the time when we think about boundaries we consider how other people are going to feel when we exercise boundaries with them. This might look like cutting off a phone call that’s lasting too long or a friend or family member that might over share or ask for too much. What I really want us to shed light on here is the fact that we have boundaries with ourselves too and often we overstep these boundaries. These are very painful boundaries to overstep because repeatedly they lead us to a space where we are no longer supporting our self or exercising love, value and worth toward ourselves. Self-boundaries can look like allowing ourselves to say yes when we really want to say no or continuing to stay in a relationship, whether a romantic or friendship, when we really don’t feel good about ourselves and don’t feel supported by the other person.
If we think about boundaries in a different way, a helpful way, it might be easier to exercise them. Consider boundaries as something that actually save and protect relationships. Boundaries are really just the distance at which a relationship needs to be in order for us to still want to interact with that person and be close to that person. For some these boundaries might be in seeing someone or talking to someone once a year, for others it might mean a little bit closer like leaning on each other to process through our challenges and problems. Only you can determine where that boundary is, it just takes checking in with your intuition and seeing how you feel when you think about that person, when you’re around that person or when you’re talking to that person. The challenge here is that you really have to listen to yourself and honor what your body is communicating. Trust yourself. We don’t need to justify anything here or find reason for the feeling. It just is. Don’t climb into people pleasing or avoiding your feelings, trust yourself and lead with that.
Here you have a little plan to be able to check in with yourself on multiple different things that are going on in your life right now. Get out a pad or a journal, have your favorite pen or a pencil and start to write down all of the situations that feel confusing or overwhelming or stuck. Once you have a list going make time on your calendar to sit with each one of these, don’t try to tackle them all in one day. Set aside 10, 15 maybe 20 minutes a couple of days a week to check in with yourself on these different topics. It helps to journal after each one so that we don’t forget that feeling that surfaced when we gave space to listen to it. It is easy to climb back into our daily routine or activities or relationships and forget that feeling. You can never go wrong with that feeling though and I would encourage you to come back to it time and time again when you start questioning.
Once you have sat with these different topics and have decided how you feel on them, start to make a little plan going forward. Go with baby steps, or just dive in head first and see how you feel. It might take a little support from others, maybe the support from a trained professional like a therapist or counselor of some sort. These roads typically lead to change and transition, take it at your own pace and trust your intuition; you’re making the right choice for you. It doesn’t have to make sense now, shifting your belief to trusting your intuition and knowing that it will all make sense when you get there is important here.
You are capable of doing really hard things and carving out the path that is right for you.