What it takes to discover true courage is when you come face to face with your fears and are brave enough to share your vulnerabilities with others. Denial of one's vulnerability adds more and more stress to normalize being a human.
For me frequent migraine headaches meant I was walking on egg shells with my body and the stress from a dysfunctional and crowded joint family meant walking on a landmine where anything happens anytime. It's like I can never be too careful with a highly sensitive system and owing to fight or flight in each of us, I chose to flee or disconnect with my body as pain sensitivity for a spectrum of my health issues(Migraine was one of them) was significant, and my quiet struggle to process with rising fears that ebbed with numbing the pains from time to time through allopathy, homoeopathy medicines mostly was the quiet before another raging health storm that upturned any sense of stability and relatedness to reality that I wanted to establish. I fought this feeling of helplessness but it didn't quite help. It just added more emotional numbing and was woken up from it through physical pain, discomfort and vice versa, as if one feeds another in turns.
I just leaned more and more on numbing myself and not through any substances but overthinking, fantasizing, daydreaming, and floating like disconnected from myself in a vacuum just kept me sustaining through any unforeseen episodes of health issues. I started to relate myself or be defined by my health problems as if my adapting to that would help me stay in survival mode and as I thrived on negative expectations, my highly sensitive intuitions were keyed to alert me before the actual pain episodes start as if proving to me that I was right after all about having to go through this issue for this day.
Fear before incurring bouts of headache with an exhaustive episode of nausea, vomitings, dehydration left me with no energy to even feel hopeful for good health in the coming days as the next step or steps in the coming days would be to sidestep as much as I can to avoid getting caught in this knot that I seemed to not let go and kept getting wound up in it.
All this struggle to seem to do well in the intermittent time when there were no migraine attacks meant putting on a fake positive attitude and feeling so lonely and empty as if I was the only one in this planet going through this, and my world which I considered to be my family just went around and round me just observing, worrying, dominating, criticizing, unhealthily comparing me with my peers, my cousins, and when I got sick, with my late father (my mother would do that) and just letting me be with my overwhelmed inner world that was stretched and torn from all the overthinking and anxious to feel normal again pattern.
To get it that this is also called trauma and an unhealthy attachment to the way I had conditioned myself mentally owing to lack of support from my mother who is a single parent by the way and who I felt obligated to be good enough for all the money she put in for my medical costs as a working woman made me just want to remain conditionally visible to her - in the sense that she saw what she had wanted to see but never saw my struggle to keep up with this torturing cycle of migraines (I have other issues too but this stood out like a sore thumb) that made me want to stay buried in an unconscious land of make believe personality, confidence, expressing myself fearlessly and so on.
My inner voice was afraid to speak up as fear ran through the entire length of my body next to blood. Fear had kept me from feeling my life, that there could be more to my life than just coping up with health issues. Not knowing how to process through my fears and not expressing that to anyone, and assuming that people would get me proved to be just a constant stretch of this pattern no matter how older I got. I just had got stuck and didn't know how to grow up despite this and beyond this, as change got identified with only physically and its problems thereof and to cope up accordingly.
Childhood trauma needs to outgrow through one's age and unless those locked in fears, anxieties, and muffled tears, stifled sadness, and passive anger doesn't get released, until then I will remain a prisoner to my past. And in realizing this, releasing through tears, I have unlocked the way to let myself out by opening the door to looking at things from a different light. That courage is not absence of fears but acknowledging that circumstances no matter how uncertain, fearful, and overwhelming as they maybe can be changed if we choose to work through it, ask for support where it matters, and also accept that there's only so much that we can control. A shift towards a healthy attitude feels a new way to reconnect with my body, my feelings, and that attitude begins by being open to my life's possibilities and life experiences. While I can't undo all the stickiness with fears that I had gotten wound up in, but making this as an excuse to not live life fully is just not a way out.
The way in to stay connected to my life are through prayers, meditations, journaling, mindful self talks, observing nature, taking long walks, feeling my feelings, sharing them with select few who get me, listening to soothing music, and taking relaxing warm baths are some of the few ways that I have learnt and applied to reconnecting to this new version of me.
Fear does not bridge the gap between your outer reality and your likes or interests, it just widens it. Your belief in who you are and what you want to do with it needs your focus and attention to what gives you joy. Being mindful of your happiness no matter how small or big it is comes with your courage to own up to it. My acceptance that I allowed circumstances to define me and limit me is an eye opener and the real struggle sustained when I refused to let go those self limiting beliefs is bitter sweet but yet is part of my life experience.
So, my past does hold me captive still but becoming aware of it is discovering true courage to gradually let go and move towards clarity despite the chaos of mind voices.
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