Some insight about letting yourself dream again
I’ve been on a long healing journey and I feel like I have made a serious breakthrough today that I wanted to share in the hopes that it might help someone else who feels stuck.
I began my 'healing journey’ when I was around 17 and it is continuing to this day, I’m 30 now. There have been ups and downs, including some re-traumatisation and a psychotic break along the way. So it has been rough. I have in large part recovered from this.
But until literally today, I have had a pain I just couldn’t get rid of or deal with in any constructive way. It was this tortured kind of feeling that I ‘should be x’ or ‘wish I could achieve y’. It was longing mixed up with just not wanting to do anything at all really.
It would lead to indecision about hobbies, interests, and the future. I felt torn into a million different directions, some of them pretty ‘fantastical’ - I want to be a published author who wins the Nobel Prize, or I want to take up a serious photography hobby, or I want to learn to ice skate, or I want to get another degree in physics etc etc. But I would start something and then stall.
This all led to serious paralysis. I couldn’t decide what to do. I couldn’t even concentrate for long before a part of me changed their mind on who they want me to ‘be’. And I couldn’t really tell anyone about this - I mean it sounds silly talking about dreaming about winning the Nobel Prize :’)
But here’s the thing - I realised today it’s just that, dreaming. I never really allowed myself to … dream. And just accept that they were just that … dreams. And that that’s ok. And that it’s wonderful to have such a vivid imagination and be drawn to all these different parts of life. And I started to let myself just indulge in the day dream, without having to judge myself or even to act on it.
And it’s led to this bizarre feeling of relief. Like ok, I wish I could do this. I wish my life could play out in this magical way. And it feels good to let myself wish. It doesn’t have to mean anything. And after so long feeling numb and trapped and despairing, it felt good to just …love myself.
It’s hard to explain, but I guess what I’m getting at is that I’m learning to love the parts of myself that aren’t purposeful. Day dreaming is something that I stopped doing at one point. From a very young age, I was very goal-oriented because it was how I had to survive. When my re-traumatisation occurred age 20, I lost all capacity to dream. I shut down completely. It feels good to relax now and let my mind relax too.
I know that maladaptive daydreaming is a thing, and this doesn’t feel like that. Nor do I see it developing into it. I’m not trying to escape from anything, as my present life is peaceful for the first time in a long time. It’s not perfect, but my external circumstances are pretty stable compared to what I’m used to.
So yeah … I guess what I wanted to share is that is ok to love the parts of yourself that don’t serve a purpose. Parts that might be weird, unlikely or don’t make sense. It’s ok to love a million different things in this weird world, and to feel like they don’t always add up to a coherent Self. It’s ok to love all the different pieces of that Self, that might resemble a kaleidoscope. Having trauma means we often feel like this about the bad stuff, but I’ve found that the good stuff can be ‘fractured’ into a million pieces too, and that the point of healing isn’t to makes all these pieces make sense, but to love them as they are.
Anyway, that’s where I’m at in this crazy journey. Hope it helps someone out there.