Birthday Reflections

I'm turning 35 this month and my mental health and mental reflections have been haunting me and dramatically affecting my day to day life. I feel myself at a crossroads and am unsure how to proceed.

It all falls back to this reluctance to fully speak my truth. In the last couple of months, I did reach out to a few old friends, people I hadn't talked to in a long time because of my need to hide inside my shell from the outside world. It was difficult for me to reach out to them and tell them of my pain, but what I found gave me strength. Even after all this time of me hiding, they are still there for me. No one pushed me away or treated me like a burden. In fact, they usually told me that they wished I would have come to them sooner.

Turning 35 is really starting to change my outlook on life. This teeter totter feeling I get is making me feel mad: both angry and crazy. I want to find stability and peace, and part of me is not sure I will find that by staying in the position in I am in now. So as this passage of time from one year to the next occurs, I have decided to set some goals.

1. I need to work on what is best for my mental health. This includes but is not limited to shutting people out of my life for being toxic. It doesn’t really matter what their relationship to me is. If they are not a positive force in my life, then they don’t need to be in it. This concept is much easier said than done, but it is a goal I plan to work on.
2. Finding where it is I want to be. I know I don’t want to live where I currently am. Living here is not good for my mental health, or really my safety as a whole. I don’t live in a good neighborhood, and the violence has increased a lot over the years. Not to mention, while I love the size of my house, there are a lot of things wrong with it, and the owner doesn’t seem keen on the idea of spending money to repair it properly.
3. I want to get back to focusing on me. I have let my emotions take complete control of my life. There are days where I am so bogged down by them that I find it difficult to function. I will just sit there, brooding, or worse, crying. It also sent my diet and workout routine into a spiral. I stopped caring about all the hard work I had put into being healthy and just let myself go. I put back on weight, I started to feel tired all the time. It was quickly becoming a situation of turning myself back into the person I did not want to be. The person I had worked so hard to get rid of.
4. I want to find companionship. For the last several years, my social group has consisted of the people who live in my house and my family. I miss having friends and going out. I want to hold BBQs and get-togethers. I even thought about starting a monthly book club or writers group. There has to be some time that is about me and not just what the majority wants to do.

I am not sure what 35 really has in store for me, but I know whatever it is, my mental health must be part of the things worked on. I know it is going to be about me finding my truth.

35 is going to be about me finding me.

Still in the Dark- The Truth Inside of Me 1

Start of the Fall- The Truth Inside of Me 2

Apron Strings- Truth Inside of Me 3

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