Wellness
I was unwell during the week of wellness which was ironic. I had a particularly rough PMS followed by a particularly painful period which made a lot of my plans go topsy-turvy. But perhaps because I picked this value, I gave myself the space to rest and recover. One thing that stood out to me was just how important sleep is to wellness. The days I get restful sleep of seven hours or more (uninterrupted) are the days I feel best.
I’m going to continue to focus on sleep and getting adequate rest daily. I intend to do this for the rest of the quarter so that the sleep piece of the wellness puzzle is well figured out.
Trust
I chose to focus on this value from August 6th to 12th after finding trust issues bubbling up with some people in my life. I wanted to look into this value from the perspective of understanding when I should consider re-establishing trust with another person and when I should decide to disengage. I also wanted to look at areas of my life where there were trust wounds and heal them.
Most of my introspection happened on long walks. I had a coaching call where I discussed the specifics of what I was going through and got some good insights. I also had a call with my therapist where I covered various aspects of my trust wounds and what I could do about them. I started listening to DAI again and have been thinking about my trust in reality/life itself.
The biggest positive that came out of this whole exploration was rather unexpected. After going into rabbit holes after rabbit holes of thoughts, I decided that I wanted to trust my past self. It seemed like I was still evaluating whether some of the decisions I had made in the past were right or not. I realised that no amount of evaluation now would be very useful because I would never truly be able to put myself in the shoes of my past self. What I could do was trust her to have made the best decisions she could have with what she had to work with at that time. That gave me a lot of solace and allowed me to release thoughts of my past and turn my focus to the present. I feel like I healed my relationship with my past self and now see her as someone capable, smart, and caring.
Value for week #33 – Resolve
I have decided to focus on resolve as the value for this week. Why this? With all the thinking I did last week, I realised that I want to find a solution for and decide firmly on a course of action on certain past experiences I’ve been (negatively) obsessing over. The other day, I woke up from sleep realising that some things that have happened in the past that I’ve been beating myself up about don’t inherently have any meaning. I’ve been choosing to give them a negative spin and then taking too much responsibility for them. I could just as well decide to take the good stuff and close the chapter, so to speak. I could, if I wanted to, once and for all decide on the meaning and from there, come up with a course of action. If a meaning I’m giving to a past experience or decision is not serving me and is hampering my ability to pour myself into contributing to the world in a meaningful way now, then it needs to change, doesn’t it?
I was expressing to my therapist how I found it surprising that I had put something atrocious completely behind me but hadn’t done the same with other, seemingly less harmful experiences. She said something that stuck with me. She said that when something traumatic happens, we can be one of two ways. We can think, “that happened and that’s in my past. I’m not defined by it.” Or we can let it define our identity and hold onto it, letting it affect our present.
My aim this week is to give a different meaning to one particular experience from a few years ago such that I can stop being defined by it. I want my identity to be carved out of the empowering and not the disempowering. This is my resolution for the week.