I was looking through a post of journal topics about self-reflection and self-care. And a lot of the questions are like “How do you ____?” And the prompts include items about advocating for yourself, taking care of yourself, and nearing self-growth. I don’t know why, but they didn’t really stick out to me. Everything I thought about would take up maybe one paragraph max and that didn’t feel like enough (but I should probably aim for a happy medium between that and my usual 800,000 word posts). Maybe one day I’ll do one post with all of those questions. Ooh, that could be interesting.
But I want to talk about just doing it. One question was “how do you trust yourself to make big decisions?” Oh, that’s fun. Truth is? Sometimes I don’t trust myself at all — but I have to trust my instincts. When I make big decisions, I kinda just do it. I mean, each situation would have an entirely unique thought process, there’s no way I could describe it. Plus, I don’t really want to write 5 paragraphs about the mental gymnastics I do when it comes to making big decisions. Like why did I choose to pick up and move across the country? Because the job was EXACTLY what I wanted and we’re in a pandemic, I’m not in the place to be turning down jobs. Easy. Sometimes you just do it.
Another one asked how I share my feelings with people who care about me. I laughed at this one because some might say I even over-share…I just do it. I mean, I don’t do it with everyone. But not everyone cares about me enough to receive those feelings. Or maybe I just don’t really know who cares about me, or I don’t want to admit that more people care about me than I thought. Interesting. I’ve always been very open about my struggles because I am so analytical about everything, so when the emotions pass — all that’s left is the exact inner workings of my brain and the universe. So it’s easy. I just do it.
Other ones asked how I ask for help when I need it, or how I step out of my comfort zone. Again, I just do it. And I think it’s easy for me to ask for help because — I can be somewhat unaware when people need something from me if they don’t say anything. And it’s not because I’m unobservant (I mean, I can be, but that’s not the only reason), but because I expect people to just ask for help if they need it. I was not raised to be passive-aggressive (I don’t know if it was fully intentional from my parents but I’m grateful), so I will just be extremely direct. Which means I expect people to ask for help when they need it, or I ask people for help when I need it.
Ok, I promise I won’t list every question. I’ll leave that for another post that’ll be insanely long but fun and make me think a lot about who I am now, and how different I’ve become since the last year, or season, or month.
I thought about this today because I don’t think I used to be so “just do it”. I wonder if that just comes with adulthood and experiencing some wildly unfortunate and unforeseen events. Instead of having to calculate every little thing you do, you come to learn that you can’t really calculate anything. You can’t count on a single thing happening. So you either have to go out and do things for yourself or let things happen to you — but a making your own way and having a healthy acceptance of the latter would be recommended. I think I used to be able to describe a process for “achieving self-acceptance”, because I would calculate my exact thoughts and actions. And now I can say that I’ve been through enough really random, tough stuff that’s just gotten me there, somehow.
So, that’s how I figured out that adulthood is mostly pretending you know what you’re doing. And this is how I figured out that sometimes…you just gotta do it.
