To Find and Protect Your Own Inner Peace

“The fear of the unknown is so powerful it convinces us to stay in the misery of our current situation simply because we know it already.” – Tory Eletto

Hello readers! It really has been a long time since I have written and I mean that quite literally! I feel like my thoughts in my brain could be compared to a pile of  laundry sitting unfolded in a chair somewhere. There is no way to sort, organize, or place the laundry where it needs to be when it’s gotten so piled up that you do not know where to begin.

Lately, I have been wanting to practice this term I hear quite often called “protect your peace.” The problem with this phrase is that I do not know what “my peace” really is. I guess I struggle a lot with knowing what my soul needs sometimes. I often tend to stick to familiar places, familiar people, and familiar situations even when I know that they are draining me as a person. I don’t protect my energy whatsoever. I used to be able to know when my energy was becoming drained, but anymore, I neglect to recognize when I am empty and I truly have nothing left to give.

I neglected writing for so long because if you want the truth, I do not fully know what to write about and/or where to begin. I feel like I cannot organize anything going on in my head. I have felt very down on myself for a while now and I’ve spent a lot of time avoiding the time and energy to figure out how to get back to feeling like myself. Honestly, I wish I knew who “myself” was sometimes.

I’ve written a lot about feeling very lost in myself and in my life. I feel like most of the progress I’ve made on self-work and self-discovery has really taken a backseat for the last year and a half now. I stopped prioritizing growth because I always found myself regressing back to old patterns and bad habits. I often forgot the new perspectives I had gained in the times where I felt stressed or overwhelmed. I repeated patterns countless times that I wished I could have broken and truly tried to work hard on myself to break.

In moments of stress, conflict, or moments in which I just feel hurt, emotional regulation is not my specialty. I overthink things that are not worth overthinking. I become overwhelmed about things that should not feel so overwhelming. I don’t communicate well in these moments and most often times, I express these feelings of fear, anxiety and hurt in a negative and outwards way against other people. This can lead to irreparable damage to other people.

Hurting people because of my own personal pain, stress, anxiety and lack of emotional regulation is never something I will ever be proud of. In fact, it makes me really feel like a terrible human being and I sit and feel awful about it for so long that I start to spiral. I often times regress back to being the poor version of myself. I hate it. I stopped writing and I stopped caring about bettering myself because of this version of myself. This version of myself is holding me back from so many things I could experience in my life. I feel very frustrated because I don’t know how much more of myself and my life that I am willing to sacrifice, because I am stuck in my own pile of “comfortable” misery.

I re-read my old posts sometimes and the last post I made was about healing my inner child. This was over a year and a half ago. The hard part about reading a lot of these blogs back is that I still feel the same feelings I did when I wrote them. I feel like I have not progressed in my self-discovery journey sometimes and that I am remaining stagnant and in the same place. This makes it really hard for me to not get critical of myself and my progress. I genuinely want to believe and have hope that I, myself can improve as a person.

I want to find peace with myself and peace with my life but sometimes I do not know where to begin or how to even know what that means. What I can tell you is that for many years of my life, I have felt such an uneasy, anxious feeling. Realistically, if I want to find my peace again, I have to stop repeating the same habits and living the same life that cost me my inner peace. If I was not happy with the things and the life I was living before, I need to let go of it.

Letting go of things that I care about is not easy for me and I tend to hold onto people, memories, ideas, and things much longer than I should. I have rooms full of clutter, boxes full of things that I don’t even need or use, and situations with people that take up so much space in my mind that it is so hard to make room for anything.

Finding my inner peace might start with asking myself “what do I want?” I mean, it might not be the way of finding my peace but it’s better to start by doing something rather than doing nothing. Honestly, I don’t want much in my life. I want to wake up feeling grateful. I want my friends, family, and loved ones around me to be healthy, happy, and blessed. I wish I did not feel the burden of other people’s stresses but I do. As much as I try to distance myself from it, it becomes challenging for me when people close to me begin to “depend” on me to the point that it completely drains my energy.

I simply want to be…(ugh I hate this word)…happy.

Today is not going to be the day I find my own inner peace. Letting go of the things that have taken away my peace is not easy. I have realized that writing blogs is not to have some sort of conclusion to the story at the end, but to have an open-minded idea of what routes I need to take in order to achieve my goals. I don’t have a lot of those common goals a lot of people share. A lot of my goals are very personal and I know by taking steps somehow to reach those personal goals in my own growth, those common goals such as having a family of my own, a home, and a life-long partner who brings out the best version of me will come with time.

I just have to start by changing some of my environments, my mindset, and changing my approach in which I allow some people to drain my energy so badly. I say it all of the time, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” I think finding my own inner peace will come in time, but in that time, I just must protect the peace I am beginning to feel within myself. It might not be a lot of peace, I mean, my life feels like it’s quite the mess. However, the small amount of peace I have found in the last few months can *hopefully* only grow with time, work, and hope.

I’ve missed my readers a lot, and I am sorry for being so distant for so long. I hope I can get into the groove and write better blogs and share experiences again and connect with whoever is reading this and feels like it resonates with their own thoughts and soul. I have missed writing so much and it in itself brings me a lot of peace. Thank you for reading this, and for supporting me through the journey. Healing is a mess, but we are all in this mess together.