Decade Lessons
feat. pics circa 2013
I am smack dab in the middle of my Saturn’s return & celebrated my Golden birthday last week - turning 30 on the 30. I don’t feel 30 yet but I’ve been reflecting on what the last decade has held for me. It’s been full of drastic changes, with each year consisting of a move (until it didn’t), two degrees, many tattoos, travels, good food, good friends, grieving endings with gratitude, starting over again and again and again. I never could have pictured myself here, where I am now. I’m not sure what I had in mind, but THIS is so much better than I could have predicted. Scroll on!
Before we take a trek down memory lane to 2013 Emma, I have a gentle reminder. There’s only 8 more days to enrol in the Sensitives Program - 6 weeks to learn the magic of boundaries for overwhelmed empaths to harness the power of their intuition. It’s time to turn down the volume of your Inner Critic so you can listen to your Intuition. This program is a step-by-step tangible guide through self-care, boundaries, intuition so you can take up space, use your voice and actualize your potential. This isn’t just another self-study course - this is a community of change.
Now memory lane. 2013 me was purposefully & intentionally single & celibate. I was working 3 jobs while in university taking 4 classes all year (including spring / summer semesters). I volunteered in 2 different places and felt ill from the motion of public transit I took daily. I changed my hair colour every 6 weeks, like clockwork, with drastic changes being my way in the world. I enjoyed having a multitude of friendships and availed myself to them without fail - sometimes having 3 or 4 hangouts in a row, in the same day. I lived in an apartment with a friend and lugged vegetarian groceries up three flights of stairs whenever I could afford it. I painted my nails every week, usually bright red, and wore two different earrings - even if I had a matching pair. I had already decided to get a new tattoo every year and unlike most, I wanted my tattoos to be very visible. I wanted them to be seen - I wanted to be seen. My second tattoo was a peace sign on my hand - before Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus, mind you.
I was prone to panic attacks and depressive episodes - what I called the Mean Reds, a reference to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, my go-to Audrey Hepburn flick. At times, I would emotionally crumple, curling in on my existence and wonder if life was supposed to be this hard. I felt a nagging lacking and was constantly performing to get ahead of judgement I was always waiting for from others but always punished myself with, instead. I overdid everything - school assignments, work tasks, caring for friends - I did everything with such an intense fervour. On the outside, it might look like I just cared a lot - but I was actually just terrified. I was terrified if I didn’t do well in school I would have no identity. I was terrified that if my professors didn’t like me, I’d get nowhere in life. I was terrified if my boss wasn't impressed with me at all times that I’d get fired and my reputation would be too. I was terrified if I didn’t shower people in my life with gifts and other forms of love that they would leave me, too. I was terrified of being alone, of being with myself. It’s not necessarily I didn’t like myself, I didn’t know myself.
Being alone with myself was like being left alone with a stranger.
So it was easier to perform to please others because I at least knew them. I was known as the happy hippie but at home, I would collapse. The expectations were too much. The pressure was too much. And I was the one conjuring them both. I was the one who set myself up and I knew it. I rejected all of these feelings that were “bad” - I only knew how to feel joy until I only knew how to feel despair. Feeling despair isn’t really a feeling, anyway - it was like a possession. It would sneak up on me and take over like a kidnapping of my being. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to feel “bad” things (though I didn’t), I also didn’t know how to feel them. I didn’t know what they wanted from me.
And that was the question I always asked about others - what do they want from me? It was way easier to anticipate the needs of others than it was to listen to the needs of myself.
It wasn’t until I exited the bypassing world of religiosity and the frantic, hectic chaos of academia that I was able to actually meet myself. It’s like I had been turning around in dizzying circles to avoid the stillness that came from Self Knowing and when I finally stopped spinning, I finally met myself. Here she is.
In meeting myself, I found an unadultered truth. I was deeply sensitive, creative even if I didn’t want to be, curious and prone to be just a little controlling. I desperately wanted to do the right thing. I had been doing the right thing for other people for so long that somewhere along the line, I decided to do the right thing for myself.
In dedication to this version of me, whom I love for her individuality, passion and heart, here is what I’ve learned since then.
It’s good to be weird. Weird is good. We’re all a little weird. The more I accepted my weirdness and the less I wanted to be “normal” (whatever that is), the more peace came into my life. The way I see the world is unique. And the way you see the world is unique, too. This was the beginning of the Big Work for me - that I wasn’t the problem.
External change isn’t all that if it isn’t matched with the inner work. I hurriedly changed everything in my outer world to compensate for the frenetic dissatisfaction I had with my inner world. I changed my hair colour, rearranged my entire apartment, go on shopping sprees and purges and moved nearly every year because I wanted to be unrecognizable. I didn’t want to recognize myself. At different points of my life, external change has been a punctuation to inner change - travelling to California pre-divorce or moving to the UK pre-30 but the outer change has been a reflection of inner change, not the other way around.
To know what you want, sometimes you have to start. I didn’t know really what I wanted out of my undergraduate degree. I actually started in political science. It was through experience, I discovered my love for psychology. In my practice, I’ve discovered more of what I love by starting and trying. We often hold off on making decisions until we know what we’re working towards and there’s merit to making choices that way - but sometimes we say “yes” to the unknown. We trust in the unknown because we trust ourselves.
The adage “you have all the answers within you” doesn’t have to be as bypassing as it sounds. I spent so long looking for answers outside of myself - in academia, relationships, religion, work. There were answers, for sure - but they weren’t answers for me. They were generic platitudes often used to ensure docile control. Trusting my own authority means so much to me now because I’ve worked hard to be this soft. Hearing insight from outside of myself now - whether tarot readings or therapy sessions - I can always measure its truth against what I know is within me. To access all the answers within myself, I had to get to know myself. I had to discover WHAT was within me.
It is for my 2013 self that I was inspired to create the Sensitives program. She was exhausted, boundary-less, creative, inspired, caring, intuitive and yes - sensitive. She just didn’t have the words for it yet. She was scraping by in life, only motivated by fear of what would happen if she slowed down - or worse, stopped. She spent so long believing she was the problem, I grieve for the time she lost looking for herself outside of herself. Yes, she was strong but more than that, she was soft. But she didn’t know how to protect that softness, how to care for the soft parts of her.
If I could say anything to my 2013 self, it would be something like this:
I want you to feel the same radical power of softness I’ve discovered. You deserve to feel the same radical power of softness. It isn’t easy to be soft in such a hard world. It isn’t easy but it is necessary. Sometimes we have to work to hard to be soft. It’s so worth it to be soft. If you’re going to be soft in a hard world, I want you to protect your softness. Your softness is a gift (you are a gift) that deserves to be protected. You deserve to protect yourself. I wish I had known myself and protected myself sooner.
The Sensitives program may be for you but it is actually a gift to my younger self. This is what I needed and maybe you do too. You can learn more about the program here or if you have any questions, send me an email at emma@syconium.ca - I’d love to hear from you. Remember that maybe you aren’t the problem, that maybe you can trust your intuition and that maybe you can harness the gift of your sensitivity. Maybe life isn’t supposed to be this hard, maybe you aren’t supposed to be this exhausted. Maybe there’s a different way of living. A sensitive way of living.
