A year of anger, depression, loss of purpose, imposter syndrome and personal growth
It’s been a busy year for realisations, mixed emotions and finding a deeper part of myself for sure. I have always lived my life mentally in the fast lane, and I think being forced to slow down over the past year has really allowed me the time to sit with a part of myself that I have ignored over the years. When Covid hit last March, straight away I threw myself into it, busying myself by not only trying to keep my own small business alive, but looking to help people around me do the same. I had a sense of anger within me towards people that weren’t fighting to do the same, which later led me to ask ..Why did it bother me so much what other people were or weren’t doing? Looking back, this anger I had been feeling was something I really didn’t like about myself and would turn out to be the engine to facilitate growth, change and becoming a little more vulnerable.
After spending the next little while stressing over learning enough technical skills to stay a float, I finally allowed myself to slow a bit, that’s when quietness hit, for once in my life I had to sit with myself and met myself on a deeper level .. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have to go live in a cave or anything, I was still working somewhat, homeschooling and doing the normal day to day stuff, but I guess there was enough slowing down for something to happen. Firstly depression hit with a sense of loss of purpose, which I’m sure a lot of people have experienced and are experiencing right now. As time went on I began to lose contact with some people and went through a period of self doubt and feeling quite low. Luckily throughout this time I didn’t lose that little voice in the back of my head saying “well what are you going to do about it?” which was the driving force that pulled me out, but it pulled me out on a different level, a level where I began to question things. Rather than being angry and trying to blame others as some kind of defence mechanism, I began to ask myself questions. It has been through this questioning that personal growth has taken place, which brings me back to where that anger came from, why I cared what other people were or weren’t doing and I knew that it had to be something deeper, something in me, and through exploring this realised I had been angry at myself, cared what people thought of me, and that I had felt I wasn’t good enough at what I do. Often we will project what we are feeling about ourselves on others. The realisation was, I have been living with imposter syndrome for many years.. Apparently I’m not alone and research shows 70% of women and 50% of men suffer from it. So what is Imposter Syndrome?? In short it is a feeling of self-doubt, insecurity and the fear that others think we’re not good enough to be doing what we’re doing. Why is it, that so many of us feel this way and what can we do about it?.. I guess that’s probably different for everyone and stems from something in their own personal story, but in a general sense, self compassion seems to have a big part to play and there are tonnes of really good podcasts available on this topic online which is a great place to start. Self compassion helps us to make changes in a healthy way rather than critical way which helps us to switch towards parasympathetic response . When we are hard on ourselves it activates a sympathetic response, which can have the opposite affect and lead to increased inflammation in our system and health issues. Delving into these nervous system responses is a huge topic and has been something that has interested me for years especially because I work with a lot of people in chronic pain. Could the source of this pain be coming from something deeper? So if you do anything this week, try being a little kinder to yourself, and see what happens ❤️