Urban Habitat

I enjoy the greater amount of time I have now to enjoy my own hobbies and spend time with myself. But when I end up spending too much time on my own, I feel depressed and anxious and sapped of energy and like I don’t want to do any of my hobbies! It can be a hard balance to strike, and I wish I had some advice for how to strike it.

I’ve found that the advice we’ve all heard a thousand times at this point, label what you are feeling and then allow it to be there, is the only thing I know to help me. Like, I don’t feel like this is my best writing right now – and that feeling is there, and I’ll let it be there and just continue to write because it feels good to write even when it’s not good. Even when no one reads it (in case you didn’t know, I really don’t write to be read. I just write to write and appreciate when people read.)

I have this restlessness in my heart lately. It’s a kind of restlessness I’ve felt on car rides and beachside occasions and sunny summer bike rides all across my life, but that I never gave myself the time and space to leave there, to let be. Usually I filled it with something, whether that something was impulsively starting a romantic relationship, feeding my insecurities, or trying to fit the outline of someone else. It’s a feeling not that my life isn’t where it should be, not that I’m unhappy; it’s this feeling that I truly am interesting, I am special, I have talents and inspirations and motivations that I deserve to follow, even if it seems scary or difficult or open-ended.

I wonder if that restlessness is why I feel frustration with folks I care about when they’re engaging in their passions and not engaging in their relationship with me. Because I have passions that I want to engage in more, maybe.

And that’s where it comes back full-circle in that I treasure my time enjoying my passions alone, and I treasure a certain amount of time with certain others. I’m still trying to strike the balance.

There are also the shadows of things that have upset me in the past, shadows of the way I was raised or words said to me that hurt like a physical blow. They don’t bug me most of the time, but in difficult moments they still hide in my mind and torment me a bit. And I think, again, that advice is sound – to let those feelings be there, to realize hey, this still bothers me! , to set my boundaries, and to go on.

✿