Fresh Showers of Tears

Tears. I have fought myself for years about tears and shedding them. I always felt like they showed too much emotion and weakness to myself and others. The lack of letting myself cry, even when I started to tear up, I would brush them away and force my emotions back inside my body. The evolution of letting the tears fall came super slowly, from realizing that pushing the tears back inside made the wave of emotions I didn't understand stronger. Letting the tears fall is still hard doesn't matter if I'm in a safe space with someone or on my own I still feel the shame of letting my pain and 'weakness' show. Sometimes it's even worse on my own, as the voices in my head telling me I don't have a good reason to cry and trying to remove me from feeling the pain and being in the moment. The thing is I've felt better after every time I've cried, regardless if my reality has changed or not the tears were a shower of calm. Personally, I find the best is crying in the shower with music on, it somehow has the strongest release of emotion. Tears are hard, I think I learned growing up in a lot of physical pain that no one could take away that tears scared others around me, so I stopped crying and put up a brave face. The problem was I didn't learn a good way to deal with the pain so it turned into a myriad of ways of self-harm. Self-harm doesn't always look the same, my self-harm journey has many twists and turns and I will write about it someday, but for now cry when you are in pain, and when someone around you cries,sit and allow them a safe space to let the self shower of tears fall.

Hating the Fall after the Rise

The Fall is always the same. The problem is the Rise looks different, today it was studying for five hours straight on an empty stomach. A few days ago it was sleeping during the day after not sleeping at night. Sometimes its spending time with family, sometimes it's being alone for a weekend thinking I'm doing self-care. The fall used to be the worst thing that could happen to me as I never believed I'd get to another Rise, which sent me into a deeper depressive cycle then what the down needed to be. Now I understand the cycle a bit, it doesn't necessarily make it easy to go through, but when I get to a certain place, I understand where I am and am more easily able to just be in that space in the cycle of the rise and fall. The fall is sometimes where my most creative moments happen, but it's also where some of my most self-loathing thoughts emerge from. The balancing game is to figure out how long can you allow yourself to fall down the never-ending black-hole, while still managing to see the sparkling diamonds of the high. The rise wouldn't come without the fall.  It is learning to love each place, the dark and wet creative place, and the warmth of the sparkling high and the time it takes to reach both places, and the cycle, knowing you will be back in both places again.

Self Inflicted Punishment

Self-inflicted punishment doesn't always look like punishment to the outsider. When I go to the gym on an empty stomach to create that punishing feeling to my body that I crave unhealthily, you the outsider just think I'm doing a good thing for my body by going to the gym. Most of the times going to the gym isn't used as a punishment, but every good thing can be used at different times as twisted mental punishment on my body. One of the many problems with self-inflicted punishment is that because it is your own mind creating the punishments they dont always flag as punishments which makes it hard to stop the punishment. It takes a lot of self-understanding to sit and evaluate the thought processes that your conscious mind is somewhat hidden from, by your unconscious. That process can only happen once you have flagged the thought and then have the mental capacity to breakdown and process the thought and accompanying emotions. Its a hard process as the unhealthy voice that is creating the thoughts tries to keep them unconscious to keep you doing the actions it wants you to do. Fighting the sick voice takes on many different angles as different realities trigger different emotions and self-inflicted punishments. Sometimes acknowledging the self-infliction of pain is the best you can do at that time with that issue when that is the case for me I have learned to try and do a different action of self-care that is not connected to the issue that I am fighting myself on. Self-inflicted punishment is basically a constant in my life that looks different almost every moment of the day, and I hope the more I am aware the more I can replace the unhealthy punishments with new tools of self-love that I learn.