And just like that, 2019 is at an end and with it, an entire decade. A decade that, for me, encompassed my entire adolescence, my high school years, and much of college. So many memories, so much growing up, and so much transformation. For me, the ending of this decade feels even more momentous because it signifies graduation and an official transition into “the real world,” whatever that really means.
Though I am not too concerned about knowing right now exactly how life will look next summer, I know that it will involve significant change. 2020 is bound to be full of new experiences and adventures. And looking back at 2019, I think that was exactly what this year was preparing me for…
Going into 2019, I remember feeling so tired. 2018 was a good year, but it was one of the most exhausting ones I had ever had. More than anything, my body and mind were aching for a nice long break. Some time to be free of obligations and responsibilities, and instead just focusing on doing what feels good. Study abroad was precisely what I needed, a magical unforgettable chapter in my life that left me forever changed.
For the first time in years, I gave myself the permission to relax and rest.
I focused on doing things that felt good and right, and let everything else fall to the wayside. As I cleared space in my schedule and in my day, I found myself clearing space within as well. Slowly, I began to let go of all the limiting beliefs I had adopted over the past few years, the ones that had me convinced that life had to be hard or that good things had to be worked for. I slowly began to trust that life could be joyful and fun and magical, and I could just sit back and allow it to be so.
With ample time and newfound space, I plunged into a journey of deep inner work and spiritual development. I developed a meditation practice and began to carve out intentional time to be with myself and my thoughts. I learned more about the things that had been calling me for ages but that I’d never had time to devote myself to, things like the law of attraction, manifestation, and spirit.
I will not go too deeply into those lessons, partially because my spirituality is deeply personal to me and is not something I necessarily want to discuss at length yet, and partially because I don’t think these lessons will resonate unless you yourself have come to the place of being ready to hear them. (But please, if you are interested, let me know in the comments, and perhaps I can focus more on spirituality in the coming year.)
My spiritual practice brought me deeper self-awareness and inner peace than I had ever experienced. For the first time in my life, I felt infinite trust, peace, and joy. I felt supported and guided and safe, and life felt easy and fun.
I also was fortunate enough to have the chance to travel to places that looked like something straight out of a fiction book (many of them were!) and have experiences that touched me to my very core. I fell in love with spending quality time with myself but also rediscovered how easy new friendships can be when you are being your full authentic self.
The first half of 2019 was all about peeling back the layers so I could find myself again. It was about allowing myself to feel all the joy, light, and magic fully without fearing it would all be taken away. It was about relaxing and trusting and allowing myself to surrender fully to the unknown.
Coming back to Georgetown in the second half of 2019 felt like the ultimate test of all the lessons I had learned over the previous few months and all the growth I had done. Here I was, back in the same place as before and yet I felt profoundly different. I found myself worried about how I would fit in with all the people I hadn’t seen since I’d left last winter, and I felt uncertain about what I wanted from my final year of college.
I found that the infinite flow of joy and peace I’d experienced abroad was harder to hold onto when I was no longer traveling to fantastic destinations every other week and living a life free of obligations. It was a whole other challenge to stay aligned with the incessant responsibilities, stressors, and challenges of college life.
As I found myself in the old familiar environment of Georgetown, I found it difficult to reconcile the new me with the one who left for Edinburgh last year. I knew I was different, and yet life felt strangely similar. It was as though nothing had changed, and yet everything had.
There were moments in this semester when I felt truly lost and disconnected. I was craving the alignment I had found abroad, and yet by continuously trying to force it to come back, I was only pushing it farther away. Though the mantra of “Relax & Allow” was constantly echoing in my mind, I wasn’t truly practicing it anymore. In the discomfort of my external surroundings, I closed up, wanting to avoid the difficult feelings and just go back to feeling good.
Yet perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned this year is that you have to feel, really feel, the hard uncomfortable emotions in order to move through them and come out the other side. For so long, I had numbed myself to all negativity, wanting to stay positive and joyful no matter what was going on in my life. I thought that made me strong and would allow me to support others. I had a multitude of tools in my arsenal for getting myself into alignment, for finding joy, for feeling good. And yet as I did all these things that normally make me happy, I only felt more lost.
This isn’t necessarily new for me. My whole life, I shut myself down from experiencing negative emotions, crafting a facade of positivity. It’s not that any of it was fake at all. It’s just that it perfectly represented how I wanted to feel without showing what was really going on inside. Truthfully, I didn’t fully know what was going on inside myself. This had served as my way of controlling my environment and making sure I was always okay. If I could just use my “joy tools” to get back into a place of feeling good, it didn’t matter what mayhem was encircling me. I would be safe.
And so I found myself turning to these old habits when the going got a bit tough this year. On the outside I looked like I was flying high, doing what feels good, and living my best life. On the inside, I felt like a house of cards, one gust of wind away from breaking down completely.
The Nicole of a few years ago would never allow herself to break, not even when she was all alone, hidden from the judgment of others. She would force herself to “be strong,” to keep her head up, and just keep going. But being abroad had taught me that in order to truly feel alive, I had to allow myself to fully feel. As the great Dumbledore so wisely said, “Numbing the pain will only make it worse when you finally feel it.”
Intuitively, I knew I had to process all these negative emotions to truly feel like myself again. And no matter how much I tried to delude myself that I could bypass negative emotions by forcing joy, I always knew deep down this wouldn’t be sustainable. And so, as the semester went on, I consistently chose to sit still and just feel. And I know how simple that sounds, how utterly primitive. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll understand how big of an undertaking this is because it goes against every self-preservation instinct I’d chosen to follow for much of my life. But I let myself feel all of it. And then I did what has always been the hardest thing in the world for me to do. I allowed myself to break.
I sat with the fears, the doubts, the sadness and allowed myself to feel it all fully, to let it pass through my whole body, and erupt out of me in tears. I allowed myself to be vulnerable with my friends and let them know that I wasn’t totally okay, and when they hugged me and made me feel so loved, I felt myself being put back together again.
It turns out that there is an unexpected beauty in leaning into darkness and truly feeling the hard feelings. Much like it feels good to sometimes watch a really sad movie, I found it cathartic to be fully honest with myself about how I was feeling and just breathe into it. Instead of feeling tensed and closed, I experienced expansion and openness. As I leaned into support from my friends and family, I found myself feeling closer to them than ever. And as I consistently gave myself space to fully process my emotions, I also felt closer to myself.
It turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong when I thought succumbing to negative emotions would mean I was weak. Facing everything I was feeling made me feel stronger than ever. I’d done what I’d always been terrified to do, and it was all okay. There was nothing to be scared of after all.
Similarly, allowing myself to feel all of the positive feelings of the first half of the year was key to being fully present in those magical moments. I miss abroad, but I have no regrets or nostalgia about it because I know I was completely and fully present in every moment. Because I experienced it fully, I was able to move onto the next phase of my life without feeling like I was holding on to the past.
And so it is now. As this year comes to a close, and I look forwards toward 2020, I truly feel that I lived this year. I can’t say that for every year, as I’ve done the autopilot numbing out thing far more often than I care to admit. But we’re leaving that in this decade.
As I enter this new decade, I feel stronger, braver, and more confident in exactly who I am than ever before. Here’s to continuing this trend of presence, authenticity, and trust.
Please stay tuned for one more post this year, highlighting a longer list of my lessons learned, my top posts of the year, and my very favorite things and recommendations of 2019. Early in the new year, I will be sharing a post with my intentions for 2020.
Thank you for reading, my friends, and please leave me a comment if this post resonated with you at all. Love you always. <3
Merry Christmas!
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