Inmyhead

Come with me as I find myself

recent posts

  • More than good, necessary

    Is a little chaos actually good for us?

    A little chaos that throws us off our daily routine is almost necessary for sanity in this world.

    Just recently I have re-learned that no matter how much planning, organization and communication you have something can go awry and that’s okay and it’s good to understand that’s life. 9 times out of 10 it has absolutely nothing to do with you.

    Sometimes the chaos can seem inconvenient or cause issues that seem more than you can handle but more times than not can bring you out of whatever redundancy you were living in or loop you couldn’t get out of.

    Sometimes all you can do is buckle in, embrace the chaos and laugh.

  • Be As Persistent As the Sun

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a chapter of your life you’d title "The Hard Years" — and what got you through it?
    View all responses

    My mom has had the same email signature for as long as I can remember:

    Be as persistent as the sun.

    If you asked me to title a chapter of my life “The Hard Years”, I’m not sure I could point to one stretch of time and say that’s it. Life has taught me that anything can change in an instant and the ground can shift beneath your feet without warning, no matter how settled things may seem. What actually matters isn’t which years to get to be called hard. It’s how you react when the shifting happens.

    I haven’t always been persistent. There have been plenty of moments I gave into the dark, sat in it longer than I needed to, let it convince me it was permanent. But the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that has actually carried me through nearly every time, is that there will always be light. The sun will always keep rising on schedule whether anyone’s watching or not. It doesn’t negotiate with the night.

    That’s the kind of persistence I strive for. Not the gritted teeth, force my way through kind, but the quieter kind that continues to show up because it knows whats coming. Even when I am surrounded by dark, even if i can’t feel it yet, remembering that the light is already on its way gets me through.

  • A Kinder Self

    I’ve spent most of my life being harsh with myself, and for a long time I didn’t even recognize it as harshness. It felt like the truth. It felt like the only thing standing between me and disaster.

    I am the first-born daughter who followed the rules, got the straight A’s, got into University, and then got called a “princess” for it. What it seemed like nobody saw was that the rules weren’t ambition, they were safety. The world felt scary and unpredictable at a young age, and stucture was the thing I built to survive. If I could anticipate what people needed before they even said it out oud, they couldn’t leave me. I was worth something. I had to be.

    That girl was carefree once. Wild and free, before responsibilities came crashing in early. The perfectionism came later, as armor.

    The problem with armor is it doesn’t have the ability to know when to stop working. I spent so long protecting myself from outside danger that I never noticed the danger had moved inside. My own mind started centering me in situations I was barely a part of. A friend goes quiet for a week during a hard stretch, and instead of just missing her, my brain goes straight to: what did I do, how did I cause this, what does this say about me? I told myself it was compassion, that I care, so I reach out, I need to know she’s okay. But underneath the reaching was somthing more self- directed, a need for reassurance, dressed up as concern for someone else.

    My brother once told me that the world doesn’t revovle around me. At the time it felt like the cruelest thing he could say, proof that he thought I was selfish, when everything I did was in service of making other people comfortable. It took years to hear what he actually meant, or maybe not but what I’d like to think he meant. Not that I don’t matter, but that I’m not the cause of everything that happens around me. I can’t control outcomes by being vigilant enough, I can only control myself.

    The distinction sounds so small. But I swear it isn’t. If everything is about me, then in theory everything is my responsibility to manage, to predict, and prevent which is exhausting at a cellular level, but it also feels like power, control even. Letting go of that isn’t really about self-esteem, but about giving up a kind of control I never actually had.

    Saying it out loud in the car…Not everything is about you…The world doesn’t revolve around you

    It made me laugh and then it stuck. Not because I’m putting myself down, but because I’m giving myself permission or rather getting myself off the hook. I don’t have to scan every silence, assign meaning to every energy shift, every delay and version of if I did something wrong. I get to just be one person, among people without a constant scorecard kept of what I have done.

    This doesn’t unlearn itself in an afternoon, the old habits are going to keep returning dressed up as something digestible, I should just check, Double-Check, I should have known better, automatically taking the responsibility for things that aren’t mine to hold. That’s fine, the mountain is a hill now and I can know I can make it. Moving foward from my own values instead of from whatever OCD is insiting I do to feel safe.

    Being kind to myself doesn’t look like the tidy things I imagined. It looks like tolerating not knowing, not recieving the assurance you desperately are searching for. It looks like letting a friend’s silence just be a silence. Most days that’s the whole practice.

  • Layers

    Daily writing prompt
    What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger?
    View all responses

    Layers. Specifically, layers of clothing.

    I used to hate when my mom would drag me back to grab a sweatshirt, I never felt cold and was always on the go. I wasn’t going to wear it. So it ended up getting tied across my waist or being shoved under my arm…YUCK!

    As I got older I slowly started bringing the jacket with me automatically…not always wearing it but having it in case. Thats when I started to understand the actual point of layering; it’s not about what your mom thinks you need, its about your own comfort. As a kid, comfort is basically last thing on your mond.

    Now? Layering isn’t optional. It’s practically a way of living.

  • Just put me in nature

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
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    A forest ranger. A botanist walking through the rows of a greenhouse at dawn. Someone on a ranch who just exists alongisde animals and lets the guiet do its thing. I honestly don’t care about the title. I just want the feeling.

    No one calling me to solve something. No checklist that multiples the second you check something off. No hours burned going back and forth on a phone call that could have been an email, that could have been nothing. No food costs. No pipes. No one else’s urgency becoming mine.

    Just me, something growing, something breathing and enough silence to remember what it feels like to not be needed for a moment.

    One day of peace. One day of disconnect.

  • The Trump of it all….

    Daily writing prompt
    What public figure do you disagree with the most?
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    The fight for equality has always visibly existed. But growing up especially in the 2000’s there was still a sense that progress, no matter how slow, was still moving foward. Over the last several years it has felt like the walls are coming down.

    Rebulican vs Democrat. Liberal vs Conserative. A battle constantly over who should hold power, the states or the federal government. These tensions are not new, but the sides have shifted and so has the temperature.

    A new strain of conservatism has emerged over the last decade, that feels less rooted in policy, and more fueled by hate. One that has rolled back years of hard won progress and protections for countless communities , often in the name of religion, tradition or some version, of “America” that never was built for ALL of Americans. And here we are many of us with LESS rights than we had when we were born or even 10 years ago.

    The center of it all? One name.

    Donald Trump. Not just a president. Not just a politican, A known predator. A mirror held up to history and to exactly what too many Americans have decided they hold dear.

    He wasn’t always dangerous to me, just sickening and more of a punchline than a threat. The loud guy firing people on a reality TV show. Bigger than life, but easy to dismiss.

    He became the face of a “movement” that had been searching for one for a very long time. Because none of this was ever really his plan. It never could have been. It’s the people who fed his ego, who put him in power, who pointed him in the direction they wanted him to go and then stood back and called it a movement.

    A liar lies, and here we are, at war again.

  • Memories…


    There’s something strange about childhood events you don’t remember until someone reminds you they happened. They feel dreamlike and almost transplanted, like you feel it and remember it but not being able to trust the memory because you forgot it in the first place or your mind forced you to.

    The feeling of this innate sense of responsibility has loomed for the entirety of my life, now whether that be that I am the eldest daughter of the eldest son or one of the many other dynamics in play or a combination of it all… we are here to find out.

    Five years old was the first time, I felt that need to jump into the responsible role. It wasn’t until much later in life, probably around my late twenties, I was reminded that even at a young age I had to jump in and be the responsible one.

    Now, existing through a traumatic event at a young age can be life altering but somehow I never realized that it could be life altering while also never remembering that the event actually even happened. I mean, I’ve understood that as a concept but I have never applied it to myself and what I have experienced.

    Now that I can remember it’s one of the things I bring myself back to constantly. A manic episode that brought my mother to the conclusion that the only way to protect our family was to store the threat away. She began to grab the phones from the walls and grabbed the ladder to the center of the living room. She looked at me and I looked at her said,

    “ I don’t think that’s a very good idea mommy”

    That was the end of the cheerful “story” of her overprotective overbearing daughter who has always been this way and that’s unfortunately the end of the memory as I can not remember what came next.

    Being told this story as an adult and going through years of self -reflection, it’s truly incredible that while our memory can bury something so impactful, so altering, while still allowing it to structure the way we live and has really created this blind type of foundation.

    It’s weird now because I can see it, I can feel it and I only remember a handful of things from this period of my childhood, but this is different.

    This one feels pivotal to understanding myself.

  • Why the Rage

    Anger was something I recognized early, I saw it around me growing up. But I never matched what I was seeing to what I was feeling inside. What I was carrying was something deeper than just anger. It was rage. A full body sensation that I couldn’t name until my late teens when my mom was diagnosed with cancer.

    I was truly enraged with everything

    But exhausted all at the same time. I remember sleeping nearly the entire end of my Junior year leading into Senior year when I wasn’t doing anything else. Overwhelmed with my emotions and overwhelmed with life and the lack of what seemed control of everything.

    The cancer was an entirely different obstacle in our family dynamic; let’s just say that my parents were not the happiest of couples. They have now since divorced.

    With that being said; I was the default. While I think my mother’s choice to keep me from the actual appointments was her way of trying to save me from it; It didn’t. I helped her get dressed, and was there when her hair was falling out, I slept in the living room with her every night ensuring that if she needed anything I was there.

    That was a different kind of rage I learned then. I had to be silent because everyone had much more important feelings to feel at the moment and I had to take care of it. Silently.

    That was my whole life, cancer. Looking back on it now I dedicated my entire Senior year to cancer. I joined, co-created a Cancer group in school in which we participated in a walk in which I spoke at. I based my entire portfolio to cancer. Cancer had crept into every pore of my life and expression at that point of time.

    The decision to leave or stay for school came with a very clear benefit on one side; staying home meant being close just in case. What if I left and something happened?

    And something did. The cancer came back.

    A year later but that confirmed it, I’m glad I stayed I was telling my self.

    I was right.

    And it kept coming back.

    Every time a text. When you have a chance can you give me a call. I remember where I was each time those calls took place.

    The beach. School. Work. Work Again. Work Again. Work Again.

    Every time Its the immediate heart drop and then racing needing to know exactly what is happening right that moment. The urgency, and all else goes out the window.

    Then the rage. The internalized rage towards her, why does she keep doing this to me this way? The rage back towards myself for feeling that way in the first place.

  • My voice, Not the Noise

    Something my soul has been craving but didn’t realize was writing. Writing has been an escape throughout my life. A way to dig a bit deeper and put my thoughts down on paper. Throughout the hardest times I have found myself searching for different ways to make me feel better, to quiet the noise, the never ending what if running through my mind, many of them less than productive but writing has always been cathartic for me but I’ve held back due to what people may think of what I have to say.

    Years ago when I would write blogs about whatever would come to mind, the internet wasn’t what it was. It was easier to be open, to what felt like a smaller audience, it felt safer then. Everything is so accessible but something is different this time. This time, writing seems necessary. Separating my voice from the noise. Sitting with my thoughts, my fears, my obsessions and getting through it rather than escaping.

    Recovery isn’t purging and never looking back. It’s sitting with the feeling and understanding that we can handle whatever imperfection, obsession, traumatic thought or urge comes our way without running the other direction. Instead it makes us powerful, it makes us alert and aware, it forces us to know ourselves if we want to.

  • That’s never been the problem

    Daily writing prompt
    Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
    View all responses

    That’s never been the problem. My problem is the exact opposite.

    I have a tendency to take action. To speak exactly what I am feeling, exactly what I believe whether I or anyone around me would like me to or not. I wasn’t always this way. Over the last maybe a decade or so, I have found it impossible to stay quiet when I see something wrong. Something wrong. A small injustice. A big injustice. They all infuriate me and everyone around me knows it.

    My body fills with heat and I obsess. I can not stop thinking about it and then I move.

    Fight or Flight and for me it tends to always be fight.

    Which leads me back to my whole thing lately. The OCD diagnosis. The needing everything to be just right. The being compelled to take action the second I see something wrong. It’s an interesting thing to sit with. Am I fighting because it’s right, or because my brain won’t tolerate the feeling of not fighting? And what happens when those two things overlap? When the compulsion and the correct thing to do are the same?

    Maybe that’s one strange benefit of the doubting disorder. Because I will always suspect I might be the bad one, I overcorrect. i think through every possible situation, every outcome, every angle. I make sure, I check.

    But lately I am learning something new.

    Taking a breath. Not responding immediately. Look around to make sure the space I am taking up isn’t taking up someone else’s.

    That one is harder than any fight I have ever picked.