Dear, guys – Welcome back to Letters From Liz!
New month, new letters, new adventures, and a new installment of:
We are just jumping into it this month! 2020 thus far has been such a great year; between the new experiences I’m having, new milestones I’m hitting for myself, and the work I am doing to forgive myself and my past, it’s been bittersweet.
Back in January, I was able to go to my first Kpop concert by myself, in February I went out with some of my coworkers for a happy hour, and now in a couple of weeks, I’ll be traveling to Florida to see one of my closest friends, Tori, for the first time. It’s things like this that make me feel proud of the progress I’ve made within the last year; it’s crazy to think that this time last year I was just this anxious mess of a person that just felt really lonely for most of my days.
If I didn’t believe this before, I truly believe in it now: everything happens for a reason. My last chapter of life had to end in order to begin this new chapter. I started my job at the bookstore six months ago, I made some great friends in the process, gained some confidence when talking to customers, made moves to make new friends, and starting to work on myself, by myself, for myself.
Therapy has played a major role in this transformation, to be honest. As I mentioned a couple of hundred times, I’m using my therapy sessions to talk a lot about my past to diffuse the energy it still has on me so that I can learn to forgive myself and move on with my life. Since then, there have been plenty of opportunities that disguised itself as a fresh start and something new, but still had many of the undertones of who I was in my past and I really had to remind myself that I deserve better and I deserve respect, and not just from others but from myself as well.
Sometimes, I don’t remember the person I was because she feels like a distant memory. She feels like a different entity like she lived in someone else’s body and I only know of her by observing her from the outside. She feels like someone I haven’t known for a while, and maybe I haven’t – it has been a half of year already, but it doesn’t even feel like I’ve only known this version of myself for that short period of time.
I feel like I’ve known her my whole life.
I feel like this is the version of myself that I knew I was always supposed to be and wanted to be, and once I got here, I feel like I don’t know who and how I was before now. Sure, I know how passive I was and how anxious and depressed I was as well (and there’s always going to be parts of myself that have those traits embedded in me), but if I’m this far into this transformation, then I feel like I can do anything.
So, three months into 2020 and it’s going better than I expected. Of course, things can happen because that’s just how life is, but at least I’m mentally in a better place in order to handle whatever comes my way. I’ve had my fair share of really good years and thought that I was cured of the sadness and anxiety that I’ve always carried with me, not knowing that I was even carrying it around. This time will be different.
This time, I’m working on myself while trying to live my best life. I’m learning to break out of old habits so that this time around, I don’t allow bad things to affect me as severely as they used to. I want to learn how to process things as they happen, analyze them (as much as I can in a healthy matter) and ask myself what can I possibly learn from this experience to make me a stronger person. I have my whole life ahead of me, so sadness is inevitable.
This time is different.
Letters From Liz. 