Episode 100 – Coming home to yourself

Hello loves,

Today I want to talk to you about coming home to yourself.

Sometimes life dismantles the self you’ve known and you have to begin the seemingly complex task of starting over, rebuilding, and finding your new compass and anchor.

Perhaps it’s from trauma, or perhaps it’s from being diagnosed with a chronic illness. Sometimes one triggers the other.

It can be a shock to the system. I often hear “I didn’t see this coming. What do I do now?!”

Redesigning my future as a childless woman, hasn’t been easy. Some days I didn’t know what to do to get me to the next hour, let alone the next day. Grief has two sides. The one that’s the truth of desperation, fear, struggle, and pain. The other, the mask. The one we wear to survive being around others, to get through a working day, to pretend that everything is normal.

To come home to yourself is about living in your truth. 

You don’t need to curate the perfect life to be happy. It’s not about material things or looking for external sources to validate you.

The only way out is through. But how?

Everything you need is within you.

Allow the shock and grief. Slowing down is crucial. Allow yourself time to stand in the ruins.

Ask for help. It’s all too easy to deny you need help. I did it for so long. It can be difficult to trust again when everything feels unsure. Pick a couple of close friends that you do trust and tell them that you need help with mirroring and self-validation for a while and talk with them about what’s going on for you, and if you’re on the right path when you choose goals, hobbies, things to work towards that allow peace, joy and true happiness.

Develop resilience. Instead of trying to hold to an old sense of self, focus on developing skills for the process. Jung believed that our sense of self changes several times throughout our lives at significant events from leaving school to the death of a loved one.

So rather than trying to figure out how to stay the same, try to figure out how let go of everything and face rediscovering yourself, again.

Bring yourself to the present. It’s so easy to ruminate on what we’ve lost, but to discover what we want to become now we need to be present in ourselves. The simplest way to bring ourselves back to the present is the five senses test. Name one thing that you can see, one you can smell, one you can hear, one you can touch, and bonus points for one you can taste.

Taste has bonus points because it tricks your brain the most into believing that you’re safe. If your mouth is watering then your brain believes you’re about to eat and not in danger and need to run away from something. You don’t need to actually eat something, just have something in your mind that always makes your mouth water. Perhaps it’s opal fruits. Remember that advert? Just showing my age there. Though for me it’s pickled onions, especially picked onion monster munch. Oooh or Walkers salt and vinegar crisps. My mouth is watering so much now. Just the thought of them makes me happy too.

Which is my last tip. What things bring you simple joy. I used to love reading, but for a while after my hysterectomy I really struggled to focus on reading, or anything that took longer than a few minutes. However, I found it easy to focus long enough to knit. I made myself a bunny. It was simple enough to show progress quickly, and complicated enough that it distracted my brain from everything else and allowed me time away from myself to rest. And yes, I ate plenty of Walkers crisps.

Happiness comes from within. Happiness creates growth. Happiness will bring you home to you.

Well, that’s it for this week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Life in Align podcast. If you liked what you heard please subscribe and share, so that we can get this out to others who are also wanting to take back the life a chronic illness stole from them.

And remember – you are worth it, and you get to choose.

Have a lovely day.