A letter from you, to you:
You can handle this — you’ve handled worse, you can handle anything — you say as your nails are digging into the palm of your hand, you say as you bite down so hard you think your molars might break. The pain grounds you into reality, for a second. You know yourself well — that’s what you think. That’s what you tell yourself constantly. Are you trying to convince yourself, by repeating these affirmations on a loop? Why do you feel like you’re burning from the inside, then? Where do all your emotions go?
Hyper-independence is a killer. You are good at being alone, yes, so do what you do best, isolate yourself. Give up searching because you are too much for yourself. Too much for yourself, too much for everyone. You say you know yourself well, but did you ever see yourself behaving this way? In a way, you did. In a way, you know you always let yourself win.
You think you know yourself. Then you try to meet your gaze in the mirror and realize you don’t know yourself at all.
You’re so self-aware to the point you’re out of touch. You’re out of touch with your emotions, your identity, your relationships, your sense of being. God forbid you feel something. Go ahead, suppress your emotions until it finds you on a Friday evening. It will find you, and it will bite you, and you will have to dress the wound.
It doesn’t have to be like this. If you haven’t figured out yet, you don’t need to know yourself all the time. Sometimes, there is nothing to figure out. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to stop thinking about yourself. Just let yourself be. You don’t need to have the perfect reaction to everything, you don’t need to keep the peace, you don’t need to analyze everything.
When you’re too hyperaware of yourself, you tend to neglect relationships in your life. You think that by knowing yourself, you know them, you know how they will act. You must be able to see outside of yourself. You are so focused on recognizing your feelings, behaviors and attitudes, that you forget you are not the only one. There is a line dividing between self-awareness and self-focused. Both can be an illusion. That illusion will break when something outside of you shatters it, and suddenly, you feel like you’re right back at square one.
That is not to say self-awareness isn’t important — it is crucial thing to develop. You just need let go of that need to be hyperaware of yourself, at all times. You don’t always know the answer to everything. Just because you can recognize something, does not mean you figured it out. There is always room for growth, for change. You will always be searching for your identity, and you will never find it. There is no road that leads you to you. You will always be constantly defining yourself — you are always evolving, and thank god for that. Don’t let self-awareness block growth. Excess amounts of self-awareness may seem like self-care, but it’s equally important to remember that you are not going to always know yourself — and that is okay. You should not always know yourself. Let yourself be surprised. Surprise yourself to be someone better, to be someone you never thought you’d be.
Sincerely, the you who doesn’t know themselves at all (and is learning to be okay with that).
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