Presently Char

Made a video about how gratitude has shifted my perspective on life and how it can shift yours too!

How to help yourself when you know absolutely nothing about who you are.  

I feel anxious, but that can’t be what anxiety is. I was diagnosed with depression when I was 14, not anxiety.

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The only things I knew about myself were the traits that other people mentioned about me in passing. I would beg for people to tell me more if they mentioned something like “you say ‘like’ a lot”.

Yeah? What else do I say often?

Every time somebody would ask me what I do for fun, my response was literally

“Haha, I’m lucky because my work is also my passion!”

I had nothing else to say, because I would literally work, eat two bags of chips, do more work, then go to sleep every day. The idea of being alone without any type of electronic stimulation literally made me nervous because of how deeply I hated myself.

Let me give you some examples. I was deemed messy by my entire family, so it was a free pass to always be messy and disorganized.

I was deemed as political. I was good at excelling in ego-dominated fields - winning elections, only so that your friends could get an endorsement, type of ego-dominated.

Actually… that was pretty much it within the last 5 years of my life. That is all I knew about myself.

I knew that I was good at politics. I knew that people told me I was messy, so I just ran with that.

I was called, after I watched Wild Wild Country, a documentary about how Rajneesh (Osho) started a commune in Oregon and had a civil war with the locals, to do some research. The documentary depicted that people who lived on the commune and followed Rajneesh lived in a very individualistic way.

Hey, I’m an individualist and feel totally trapped in every aspect of my life. Maybe this can help.

After I started following Osho, I realized that I knew nothing about myself. I couldn’t even sit through yoga class without incessant negative thoughts. I needed to become my own best friend because I’m the only person I’ll ever have.

Becoming Your Own Best Friend

Inner Child Healing

In the very early days when I started discovering my own relationship with God, I went on Reddit and found a quick post about Inner Child Healing and started immediately. I found a picture of myself as a child, said “Hi, you deserve love” and then sobbed for 20 minutes.

Inner Child Healing is basically talking to a young you! How cute is that! If you’re a people-pleaser like I was, here are some tips to help you to get started with talking to yourself.

Dates

Take yourself to the art gallery, a coffee shop that you like, or just out on a walk for your first step. Overcoming feelings of social anxiety is not easy, but the best advice that I can give is to find yourself a date in your calendar, and plan out everything about the day before you do it. Put it in your calendar, and do not remove it for anyone.

The first time that I decided to take myself on a date was in the Fall, and I decided I would go get a bagel and go to an art gallery that I always wanted to go to. It was a Saturday, I would wear my favourite outfit, and wake up early that morning.  It was one of the best experiences of my life and the only time in years that I had spent time outside of my bedroom by myself. (Dramatic, I know)

I just walked around with headphones in, looking at art for as long as I wanted to. This was a huge revelation for me. At the age of 21, I realized that if I wanted to do something… I could just… do it? You can too.

Go Outside Alone

This ties deeply in with the last one, but go on a walk alone. You will not regret it.

God, I can’t believe I am blogging about going on a walk alone. Seriously though, this advice could’ve been helpful to me for a long time.

Spending time with nature by yourself will give you ample benefits. It will teach you to be more patient with yourself, to be able to make decisions on your own, to be able to be alone with your thoughts, cherish the time that I do have with my friends, have a kinder inner dialogue with myself and so much more.

Journal (a lot)

Everyone will tell you to the journal. You probably kept a diary when you were a kid, do it again.

Journaling is a great organizational tool for your journey with the universe and yourself.

Every morning, wake up and write down 3 things you are grateful for and 3 things that you want to accomplish that day. When you go to bed, write 5 more things that you are grateful for, and something that sparked joy in your day.

Reflecting on the positive things that happened in your day, or that are going to happen, is one of the best ways that I have found to rewire my brain to be happier and more at peace.

I’m not the type to keep a super neat journal, and I think that there is a misconception that your journal needs to be aesthetically beautiful. Journal however your soul tells you to the journal. Mine is a ripped up black notebook with angry scribbles all over it and weird drawings that relate to the emotion that I am feeling at the time. Don’t compare your journaling to others.

Here are some other great journal prompts:

For Self-Discovery

To Better your Mental Health

For Fun (I think these are for kids but who cares)

Practice non-reacting

This is a controversial one… oooooh!

Your reactions to certain situations are based on past conditioning. Breaking that past conditioning can be hard.

I used to react to every. Thing. I had a million screenshots of other people’s Instagram posts to send to my friends to say “did you see this?”

Who cares?

I used to feel the need to voice my opinion in any conversation around me, even if I wasn’t educated on the topic. When I learned about non-reacting, I decided to give it a go.

When a bee lands on me now, I don’t react. What are the chances that it is going to sting me if I’m just chilling? Start with small things like that and you will find a massive peacefulness in being able to keep your emotions to yourself and not overreact to situations.

Rain is another good example. What is the reason that you might get worked up about it raining? Because you can’t go for a walk? Okay… why though? It’s just water? Take a walk in the rain. Appreciate the rain, it is giving everything on this planet life. It’s a pretty solid thing.

You can learn more about the benefits of practicing non-reacting here.

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Tips to overcome your immense feelings of debilitating anxiety on a day to day basis.

I’d just like to start this post by saying that I am not a medical professional. If you have debilitating feelings of anxiety inside of you, these are tips that worked for me to be able to still go to work, eat, and leave my bedroom. If you are suffering from something similar to what is detailed in this blog post, if you are able, please talk to your doctor and see what type of help you can get.

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I’m outgoing and I’m fun in an office environment. I can talk to strangers on the street without being worried about it. I’m probably considered somebody who is pretty socially apt on the outside. That is why it is so hard for me to talk about anxiety.

There was about a 2 year period in my life where every time I knew I had to leave my house, I would feel overwhelming feelings of needing to trap myself indoors because I was terrified to even show my face outside in fear of having to strike a conversation with somebody that I knew from work, school, or even my friends who didn’t like me.

It got so intense that it impacted my ability to work, get groceries, or go to school. Eventually leading me to drop out of university and cut hours at work, which leads to less income, which leads to more anxiety. A very fun cycle to find yourself in your late teens and early twenties!

Overcoming these feelings, I’ll admit, is something that I still struggle immensely with.

I’ve always been worried about things like this, I wasn’t able to eat in school when I was growing up and would never bring a lunch to elementary, middle, or high school because I was too scared of others thinking that I was fat. Whenever my family would laugh at anything, I would start crying and run away as a child because I assumed that they were making fun of me. I couldn’t leave my bedroom in houses I lived in because I was too scared of not knowing how to act when I saw my roommates.

Those were feelings of anxiety, that I now realize.

How do we silence feelings like this? Here are my small pieces of advice that may be able to help you at the beginning of your journey towards healing. These are some things that I would do daily to be able to still provide for myself.

Tell one person the full truth

If you can find one person to be completely honest within what is going on in your life. Even if this is a new person who you meet on a dating app, being unequivocally honest about yourself is going to help you accept who you are and feel more comfortable in your skin.

I’m not suggesting you open a conversation with “Hey, I have crippling anxiety issues”, but just ensuring that you are being your fullest version of yourself will help you understand yourself better.

Telling anybody about my anxiety was something that I wasn’t able to do until years after those feelings had dulled down within me. It is hard to express how severe your negative thoughts are, especially when you’re perceived as an extraverted person.

“Who Told You That?” - Observe your thoughts

When your head is overrun with thoughts that are anxious ask yourself “Who told you that?”, the answer, will most of the time be “nobody”.

Say, for example, you feel anxious because you heard two of your co-workers talking together and laughing, and your thoughts tell you that they’re laughing and gossiping about you and not talking about the billion other things there are to talk about in the world.

Step back, recognize your thought, and think to yourself “who told you that?”. Your mind loves to trick you into thinking that you are less powerful than you are, and identifying that your thoughts are only thoughts is an important part of your journey towards healing.

Imagine your thoughts being spoken to you by a person outside of yourself or a bird on your shoulder. I always visualized my thoughts as being inside of my brain, which means that they were trapped there. If you imagine your thoughts as a separate entity with all of the characteristics of your thoughts, you will be able to organize your thoughts into productive and useful information, and negative space-filling thoughts. I’d recommend the book The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer to anybody who’d like to learn more about this practice.

Wear a style that you don’t typically wear

This is very weird. But this is something that helped me leave my house on days when I was feeling tremendously anxious. I would put together outfits that were completely out of the ordinary for what I would typically wear. This helped me convince myself that if somebody saw me on the street, they wouldn’t know who I am. Or even better, because I was dressed so differently than I regularly do, they’d be intimidated by my (fabricated, at the time) self-esteem and would never come anywhere near me.

Pull your craziest and whackiest clothing out of your closest and throw it all together into one outfit and you’ll feel brand new, and like nobody you know will recognize you!

Wired Headphones and Sunglasses

Headphones with wires can be a saving grace. Even if I wasn’t listening to anything at all, I wore them everywhere that I went in order to ensure that nobody would speak to me or think to approach me.

Sunglasses are also a great way to ensure that nobody talks to you. It makes you look mysterious. PS. Walking briskly makes you look even more mysterious and cool.

Unusual Hours

Wake up! It’s 5 am! Time to go to the grocery store (and only buy nonperishable food items that I didn’t have to cook so that I would never need to see my roommates in the kitchen)!

Getting up early, and staying up very late helped me because I knew that at those hours it was going to be rare that people I knew were awake. I was able to feel a complete feeling of solitude and not being overwhelmed by the thought of other people’s presence or activity.

Though it left me very exhausted and in the need for constant naps, it was worth it for me to be able to go on walks and get outside of my bedroom.

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