Recently I have been doing a lot of self-reflection and trying to understand myself better. It has come to my knowledge that I have been living life in a somewhat unhealthy way, and it has been this way for a very long time. Even though I am realizing that there are things that are going to have to change in the way that I deal with some things that come up in life I know that this is also going to take me some time to learn new ways of dealing with everything and a lot more learning.
When I was growing up I was always reading books, and while I am an avid reader I am coming to understand that this was a way to escape some things in life. I know there are a lot of people who get drawn into the book they are reading and I do the same thing, but I am realizing that I also used the books as a way to
While this is something I felt I needed to do in order to get through life, I have been doing it so long that I do not know how to change it. I am trying to learn new ways of dealing with hardships in life and how to be a different person.
A few of years ago my family found that in the process of moving to a new location we did not actually have somewhere in the area that we needed to be able to accommodate us and our animals, so my children I and our roommate went to stay with my parents while my husband rented a room and went about six hours away to work and live. While this was what we had to do for our family so that we had somewhere to live, I do not feel it was at all good for myself in a lot of ways. While we lived apart like that for about four months, after being reunited in our new home, we only lived there for four months before we returned to live with my parents due to my husband being let go at his job.
I feel that living with my parents was good in a lot of ways because we had somewhere safe for the five of us to live, we had good support from family, yet there are things that have come back from living with them that I thought I was done with. As I mentioned before about people being able to hide things so well that they hide them from themselves to protect their lives. I have come to realize that I have been doing this the majority of my life, and to a degree, I am still doing it now. Truthfully I do not know how long I have been doing this, but maybe one day I will figure it out.
Turns out since I never really dealt with things and I just moved away from them, there was no way I was going to be done with them until I am able to deal with them.
I have learned that when you don’t want anyone to know something about you and you hide it away from everyone, you can even end up hiding things away from yourself without realizing it. Sometimes things that happen in our lives end up having a very big impact on the rest of our lives. At the time of it, we may not realize the impact things have on us and sometimes it can take years for the realization to happen. As a child, I went through some things, that while I knew they impacted me, I did not realize to what degree they affected me. Other people can sometimes see things that we hide from ourselves and so when someone is trying to help us we should listen to them a little more than we actually do.
Whenever I have had an assignment for school or church or anything that had to do with telling people about myself, there was very little I had to tell. This happens to be what I mean, I do not really know myself because I have spent a lifetime of trying not to know about me so that things were not revealed to those around me.
I did not understand that I was hiding all these things from myself and from everyone I came in contact with. I had no idea that when I was given a topic to think and write about something about me and having very little to go off of was because I did not want to dig deep into my life and have to deal with the things of my past.
One of the things I have done to try and understand myself more is to make a book about me. As I was working on this book I came to see that I had no idea what to put in it and what kinds of things it should say. This was not anything new since this is pretty much my thoughts anytime I have been asked to write about myself. As I have been asked to write anything about myself for classes I have taken or been asked questions to introduce myself I never know what to say.
Over the years I have tried to keep a journal and at different times I have tried to write using suggestions on things like my favorite song at the moment and why, or writing about an event that had a big impact on me and why I feel it did, but have never been able to use them.
Since I have been trying to understand myself I have been talking with my Therapist and asking her for help in working on understanding myself. She told me that since I am a mother I should be focusing on reinventing myself over understanding myself since most of the last few years have been dedicated to taking care of my children the most. While I know that I am not done with that since they are still so little it still makes sense that since I don’t really know myself at all I can reinvent who I am.
One of the things that
An art journal is just a journal that you use to express yourself in an artistic way. You can draw in it, punch holes, paint, glue, basically any form of art that you are drawn to using. By doing this it can help you bring out the things that matter most to you or that have the most meaning in your life. While I have just started on this I do not feel that I have figured out much about myself, but then I am still working on it.
Mark
Thanks for your blog, nice to read. Do not stop.
Dixie
Glad you enjoyed reading this.