“The crossroads you described – not knowing which direction to go? That’s actually exactly where you need to be right now. You’re between the old identity that doesn’t work anymore and a new one you haven’t defined yet.”
The year is 2012, and an 18 year old Liz is crying on her bathroom floor, wishing to stop feeling everything all at once. All she wants is a quiet mind, because all of the things affecting her are things outside of her control. There’s no answer in fixing them. The morality beliefs, the fear of something bad happening to me or my family. The never-ending feeling of every single emotion that got me to this place. That Liz was suicidal. She had thoughts of standing in the middle of the street so that a car can hit her. She had thoughts of allowing all of the bad things happen to her because she felt like she deserved it. She lived in this mindset for years until one day she found a solution. Being selfish with herself.
What she didn’t realize was that she was even being selfish to herself, subconsciously limiting her access to get any deeper than the surface level of every worry and negative situation. She saw the change as being overprotective; to make sure that she would not ever fall back into the place she was sitting on that bathroom floor, alone and scared for the next day.
But the year is now 2025, and 31-year-old Liz is softer. Kinder to herself. On the path to break generational curses by knowing she deserved so much more than what she grew up around. The stoic and emotionless version she created doesn’t serve her purpose anymore. It’s now hurting her. So, where does she go from here? Does she continue to sacrifice herself and drown, or does she survive?
She survives, and survival sometimes means to be uncomfortable. To feel discomfort.
Hi, my name is Liz, and I am learning to practice the art of discomfort.
Lemme explain.
In my short journey navigating what OCD looks like for me, I realized a lot of the internal (and external) work has been difficult because I’ve masked what I was truly feeling. I’ve explained in the past that in the last couple of years, I feel like there has been some sort of disconnect with my mind and body. I feel like I’ve done a lot of the mental work over the years, but I still didn’t have control over my behavior (or body) when things were happening that I had no control over.
Life since the COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed in my life, especially when it came to the relationships I had with those I grew up with. Getting older means that you start to see things for what they are, whether that’s being aware to the familial issues that you didn’t see as a kid, or the other adult-like problems that we didn’t have to worry about as kids or teenagers. The pandemic made it hard for society to develop and grow; it feels like it hindered us as a society, even years later. For me, it was changes within my family. It was changes with my own body, and it was changes with my psyche. I was no longer letting the surface level petty shit get to me like it would in the past, to be quite frank: I had bigger fish to fry. But, it doesn’t mean I was processing everything correctly. As a matter of fact, I learned the act of avoidance without ever having to teach myself, but now it serves no purpose in life. I have to feel the emotions in order to process them, even when they are extremely heavy to deal with in the first place.
Last night, I processed something for the first time in a really long time. It was one of the first times in awhile that I cried, and although that feeling sucked, I was still allowing myself to feel an emotion in order to process it. I didn’t need to find a solution to fix it or feel better, I just needed to be okay to feel it in its entirety.
I needed to realize that feeling the emotion was an option, and discomfort is a part of the process.
For me, this directly applies to my OCD and my core fear of inflated responsibility. “I need to find a solution to this so that everyone can feel better afterwards.” “I need to be strong for other people because they rely on me to feel better, or help give them some clarity on their issues. The fact of the matter is that thought process will always be impossible to satisfy, because I can’t control other people thoughts, beliefs, and actions. I am not a superhero, and I can’t fix, or save people. I can only be my own superhero, yet for years I’ve been my own villain in my story.
It’s not going to be easy to allow myself to sit in the discomfort. It’s going to feel like I’m doing something wrong, or that being uncomfortable in processing the emotions means I’m a bad person. It’s going to take tons of internal work to be okay of discomfort; whether that spectrum is fighting the urge to engage in hair pulling, or processing a distressing, or negative emotion.
See it through this lens: we think that avoidance is strength, that being nonchalant towards real situations is strength. What we fail to realize is that it’s a lot easier to avoid than to fully take things on without any certainty, and to sit in the discomfort of not knowing how things will turn out. That’s true strength.
I am leaving this year with a new outlook on adulthood, and how it looks like on me. I am in this in between space where my old self, my old “identity”, and the lessons I’ve learned in that stage of my life simply don’t work for me anymore. It means I am changing. I am growing, learning, and challenging these things, all while still trying to define who I am in this stage. I am sitting in discomfort, and it’s exactly where I need to be right now.
Letters From Liz. 