I've mentioned her many times before but tonight I had a Skype date with my best friend and, like always, everything is just that little bit clearer. I got to talk about everything that I'd had buried within me for the past few months and I finally feel as though I can breathe again. I, "came up for air", for the first in a while and it couldn't have come any sooner.
What I realised while we were chatting was that it's so easy to become trapped within your own mind, immersed within your own thoughts of "what if". I've done it, she does it and I'm sure there are many other girls out there who do it too. What helps is having somebody to talk to without fear. For me it's my best friend, for others it's a partner, a parent, a sibling and often a psychologist.
So many people don't talk. They don't deal with the small issues and they certainly don't deal with the big ones. Many people suffer from depression and often it comes from burying the thoughts that would be better off addressed. I am one of those people and that's why Skype dates play such a major role in preserving my sanity because if I couldn't talk to her, I wouldn't talk to anyone.
I'm so grateful that I've managed to express to somebody the things that have been on my mind lately. I finally feel like I can breathe again. What's interesting is how much she needed to talk to me too. Her thoughts had managed to run just as rampant as mine had.
We shouldn't underestimate the importance of deep relationships for without them, I feel, we would all drown within the pool of our thoughts. Trusting relationships serve as the hands that wrench us up and out of the craziness that that is our own musings and force us to breathe. . If anything they teach us to see the bigger picture with the help of another's eyes and remember that everything passes, no one mindset sticks and, at the end of the day, life goes on.
Last week I was not in a good place at all. I wrote two, very depressed posts but I'm glad I did. Writing them allowed me to get it all out, express what I had been supressing and take a deep breath out. I felt better as soon as I knew it was out and it meant that the weekend I just spent in Sydney for one of my closest friend's birthdays was a lot less tense.
I had an epiphany over the last few days. One of those, "I can't believe I didn't realise this before", moments that has left me feeling free and a little bit giddy.
It takes me a long time to settle down in a new environment but once I do, I become incredibly attached to the people and life within that environment that the prospect of moving on scares me. I think this has a lot to do with the amount of moving around I've done over the last couple of years. It seems as though I just become comfortable and happy in a place and all too soon I'm moving onto another. This time my anxiety over took me and I panicked by freezing.
I've definitely learnt a big lesson over the last couple of weeks; you need to live in the moment. Thinking too much about what tomorrow could be will drive you mental and enjoying what you have right now is a lot more likely to preserve your sanity.
My next step? To regain everything I let slide over the past four months. I'll let you know how that goes.
By Cherie Carter-Scott
1. | You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's yours to keep for the entire period. |
2. | You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, "life." |
3. | There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately "work." |
4. | Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson. |
5. | Learning lessons does not end. There's no part of life that doesn't contain its lessons. If you're alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned. |
6. | "There" is no better a place than "here." When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here." |
7. | Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself. |
8. | What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours. |
9. | Your answers lie within you. The answers to life's questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust. |
10. | You will forget all this. |
Albert Einstein once said, "Life is like a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving".
This is a line I should learn to remember. I've lost balance, it's true, and it's all because I stopped moving. I've become so overwhelmed by everything that's happening and all the decisions I need to make that I started neglecting, what once were, the constants.
I should take a leaf out of Elizabeth's Taylors book of wisdom, which says, "I feel adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened and I'm not afraid to look behind them". This says a lot about creating one's life actively and living fully rather just existing. Right now? I'm just an existence. Life is so many things – good and bad – I managed to forget that fully living means embracing all of it, not ignoring it. We all have choices to make and as soon as I get around to making mine, I'll be able to influence what happens from her. That's a much better option than my current stagnant existence.
Here's to channelling Elizabeth Taylor and looking behind every door for my new adventures.
