stop fighting yourself

Most of my life I’ve been fighting myself, fighting to get out of bed, fighting to love myself, fighting to want to live this life. And some of the fighting has been good, has been holy, but some of it was just fighting. 

For about the last month I’ve spent 5 days a week painting. I don’t think I’ve ever spent this much consistent time painting in my whole life, honestly my wrist is sore from how much I’ve been doing. And I don’t think I’ve ever felt so level headed, so emotionally centred and at peace.

Sometime last month I felt like I was struck over the head, it was this sudden running need and want to just paint and paint and paint. It was this nearly consuming desire to make good on what I had been saying for a year now. To make good on the promise I made to my younger self, that I would make my best run at being an artist and that we would crush the starving artist stereotype. 

In order to make good on my word I had to stop fighting myself. I wanted to paint, truly that was all I desired and still I couldn’t pull myself away from the tv. No matter what I said to myself there was no tricking, no coercing, no pressuring, no shaming that was gonna convince me to follow a different desire other than the numbing that I was doing. So I said fine, I give up, threw my hands up in surrender, and then picked up my computer and took it with me. If I couldn’t shut off the part of my brain that wanted to watch tv, I’d take the tv with me and hope it wasn’t too much of a distraction. 

See I had tried this before, multiply times, one even recently, and it just became a distraction eventually. But I was willing to try anything and I was sick of trying to fight my way to what I wanted. So I kept watching my show while I started to paint, and for some reason this time it worked. Somehow this time having the background noise worked, it distracted the part of my brain that didn’t want to function and let my desire to paint be free to do so without it feeling like work. 

I stopped fighting myself. If I had waring desires I just multitasked, it sounds so simple and in someways it is and I suppose sometimes that’s just what breakthrough feels like. It feels like a face palm, like a how did I not see that before. 

For the first week and a half I kept trying to run with the momentum as much as I could. I’m a creature of habit, doing old things in a new way doesn’t always sound exciting to me it just sounds uncomfortable. I normally sing while I work, and it felt so strange to not have music in the background but someone talking. 

As the days went by I started to want the music over the tv, and instead of trying to do things the same way just out of habit I followed the want. I still wanted to paint, but I’d change my mind every half hour or so on what background noise I wanted, if at all. It was this truly small change I was making, but it was life changing. 

I let go of the I have to do it this way because I’ve always done it this way, let go of the I have to do it this way because this is what it’s “supposed” to look like. I gave myself permission to do things the way I wanted, permission to let it look like whatever I needed it to. 

I’ve stopped fighting myself. When things need doing and I don’t want to, I ask why. Why don’t I want to do the dishes, why is getting out of bed hard, why don’t I want to paint. Most often the answer is that I need something, there’s a need or needs I’ve neglected to meet. Meeting the need, whether it be food, water, or a trip to the bathroom, it almost always solves the problem. Instead of fighting myself and forcing myself to do things, I find what is stopping me and fix that first. Sometimes its just the simple want for a cup of tea, and sometimes it’s needing to sit down and cry a little bit. 

Instead of fighting myself I’m learning to work with myself. To not view myself as the problem, but to think of me, myself, and I as the care takers of my life. I have spent too much time fighting in places where I should have been listening.

It’s okay, if it takes me a little longer, I don’t mind, because I’m finding the healthiest way the most compassion filled way to live my life. And I don’t mind at all if it takes me longer than I originally intended. Because learning to work with myself, that’s just one step closer to being more healed, one step closer to being more whole than I found myself.