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woah, don't delete last year's file! new year, new me is bs! you don't have to kill the old you to be better, i promise
Cheers to a new year! Can you believe we survived it? It’s been a minute, did you miss me?
Dearest reader, I hope you can offer me some grace, for I fear my confession this month might differ from the usual. But I promised you honesty, didn’t I?
Let me begin, I’ve started 2024 with a couple of punches to the gut.
I’ve outgrown classifying the stages of my life as good or bad, they simply are —no objective quantification of it is necessary. But let’s just say this: it’s been pretty shitty.
The new year is often a confusing time, isn’t it?
Many of us spend these first couple of months chasing some sort of idealized version of ourselves that we’ve created in our minds. We put together vision boards and commit to resolutions we know we won’t keep.
And if I’m being honest with you, as much as I would love to create a completely new persona for myself — to override my old save file and start anew — my recent reality has backed me into a corner.
I seek salvation, not a detour. So, instead of starting over, I’m trying my best to go back— to connect with myself once again.
To not bury myself under the guise of a new person.
You might be confused: are you saying you’re sticking with last year’s bad habits, Sierra? Don’t you want to get better, be better?
Woah woah woah, please don’t misinterpret my sudden introspection as a tactic of avoidance — I am not trying to escape self-realization.
I disagree that I have to be a new person to be “better”. I can carry the good with the bad, I can accept both sin and virtue.
But we’re getting off-topic. You expect a confession out of me, don’t you? I can’t shy away from that, I asked for it.
In the midst of my misery it turns out that I’m feeling generous so I’ll do you one better, here’s an oath:
I vow to witness and love all the different versions of myself that I’ll encounter. I commit to attending a thousand funerals of myself — of the woman I used to be and the woman I’ll become. I will not show up with distaste but with pride, I will bury each coffin with a better grasp of myself, of who I am, and who I hope to be.
So no, I’m not hoping to emerge as a new person this year — I’ve started growing quite fond of myself. However, there is a gnawing desire in me to want to know more, a desire to dig deeper inside myself.
You may be asking: how do you plan on achieving this inner salvation, Sierra, this understanding of oneself? Seems like a toughie. (Spoiler alert: it is.)
Well, since you asked! By doing some serious soul-searching, reconnecting with my moody inner child, and letting go of any self-inflicted suffering.
I know, I know — I’ve been on a bit of a self-reflection journey lately. But I made a promise to you, dearest reader, and myself.
I promised both of us that I would view this as a season of transformation rather than hibernation, and that starts within, doesn’t it?
I also promised honesty, so I won’t lie and say it’s been an easy battle thus far.
After some time in the field, I regret to share that this journey requires boundary setting, honesty with yourself and others, and an unshakeable vow to always show up for yourself, especially in painful moments.
I tend to want to run away when faced with adversity, everything in me begs for the easy way out.
In the moments you need it most, strength is hardest to find.
I speak from experience — I spent a significant part of my younger years evading my reflection, afraid that the person staring back at me would be someone I couldn't bear to face. It is a tiring race, trying to escape yourself.
And trust me, You can’t outrun yourself, I’ve tried.
The further you run the blurrier the path back becomes.
To put it poetically: the journey of our existence is nothing more than finding a way back to ourselves.
Listen, it takes guts to seek solace within oneself, to begin the journey of introspection, and to embrace the uneasy task of accepting both the good and bad aspects of who you are.
But if I have to do it, so do you, bestie, it’s only fair.
It’s the side-quest, you know? The one that separates a hero from mundanity. How can you expect to start the game without the backstory?
In my experience, my inner child has been rather temperamental. When you begin the effort to reconnect with them, you'll discover that they cling firmly, extremely firmly, to the most authentic aspects of themselves ourselves.
We can’t blame them, it can be scary to open up, especially to a stranger, and if you’ve never come back to say hi before, how do you expect them to even recognise you?
If you’re a stranger to them you might as well be a stranger to yourself, and the longer you run the harder it is to reconnect.
But don’t worry, you won’t be bound by the misery of introspection forever.
In fact, this whole “finding yourself” thing is a bit of a lifelong journey.
Yes, the beginning of this quest is hard and tiresome, but I can promise you that it’s worth it: a level-up meant to be completed before you can even rank in the game.
You can’t expect to win when you’re still figuring out the rules.
The fear you might encounter along the way will not be unwarranted, it’s terrifying to get to know yourself. The closer you get to yourself the more you lose, everything that doesn’t serve you slowly fades.
We change. We grow. We evolve, for lack of a better word.
Growth demands change, and change sucks, trust me, I get it, I’m not a fan of change myself.
But why bother? Why am I choosing to subject myself to such misery and why am I urging you to follow suit?
Simple, all the pain is worth it. Finding yourself feels like finally coming home.
I don’t consider myself a philosopher (just a girl who spent her teenage years on tumblr), but I’m quite confident that at the core of human suffering is a feeling of constant self-abandonment.
So, dearest reader, I suppose my confession for this month is this:
I am tired of running, I’m ready to go home. I hope to see you there.
I don’t expect you to go into this alone, allow me to guide you a bit, we all need a bit of help sometimes don’t we?
First and foremost, I urge you to approach this delicate matter with as much compassion as you can muster.
You may not like everything you come across on this journey, so it's important to arm yourself with enough compassion to comprehend why you did what was necessary for survival: it was simply an act of self-protection.
And you did! Isn’t that wonderful! You survived!
However, now it is time for you to let go of your suffering. You never made bad decisions on purpose, only to escape the difficulty of the world.
And I understand, I still look back at some of the things I did and want to curl up into a ball of shame, but it’s time to let go now. You can put down your strength now, you can come home without fear of a battle: you are safe.
Grant yourself some compassion for getting here, I’m quite impressed by your fight and I’m happy you’ve made it this far.
As part of my commitment to fully equip you, I ask that you accept my blunt truths. This is not to discourage you but to prepare you for what’s ahead.
Expect a scary journey. Expect to feel unknown to yourself for a bit.
There will be moments when you feel like giving up, waving the white flag and isolating yourself once more. Having found myself surrendering before, it’s only ever pushed me back into the fray with greater force.
I’m sorry, but the only way out is through.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this month’s edition of Confessions of a 20-Something. I encourage you to share this with your close friends if you feel like it’s the kind of thing they’d be into.
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Until next month …