Last September I made a choice to throw myself into living instead of analysing everything. I told my therapist I didn’t need therapy now, I needed to live, I needed to say yes to life.
I was going to enter my YES era.
I had been in a no era for too long. No to almost everything I wanted… the existence of my own soul… was crammed into a life that felt too small for me. I was squashing myself into some palatable, more likeable version of me.
I was exhausting from therapy that kept me there. I was tired of psychoanalysing what meant what and reframing things that ultimately kept me in a cycle of suppression and crawling out, sometimes exploding out and back to stuffing down.
For several months post separation I refused to go out, I wouldn’t even have a sip of alcohol becyase I knew my vulnerable state. I didn’t want to date or talk to anyone. I wanted to live.
I just wanted to stop thinking and just say yes to stuff that aligned with me. I didn’t say yes to things I didn’t feel or want to do. I said yes to what scared me or made me feel alive or ways I would have suppressed myself.
I shook loose the parts of him that were not me but that became me to please or fit or be enough in someway.
I wanted to stomp the egg shells in which I had been treading and prove to myself that my very existence wasn’t some sort of mistake because I couldn’t bend myself enough into a more likeable version for him.
Unknowing what that was on any given day, met sometimes with conformity and other times with the abandonment of someone who was exhausted from trying to be enough.
This yes era was about being me, being honest about who I am, what I want, exploration and self discovery. It was dressing the way I loved, talking and writing with a truly uncensored tongue.
It’s been a time of just saying yes - to the day on the boat, to the sleep over, to the movie, to family, drinks, shots, nights out, deep conversations, yoga, meditation, skinny dipping, dancing, hiking, trips, concerts, saying yes to the drummer, online dating, hook ups, reading, writing, and most importantly, healthy friendships and all relationships that were green flag energy.
It was saying how I felt even if the person was angry. It was ending people pleasing and telling people they couldn’t talk to me that way.
It was not being hard on myself for missing a workout, letting my injuries heal from the car accident, my yes era was surprisingly fulled with nos.
It was yes to me and my needs, my truth, my wants, my desires. It was yes to things I hadn’t done before or in a long time. It was admitting what I wanted and didn’t want. That was filled with as many nos as yeses. I spent much of the last three decades hating my body, trying to bend it into what society, and he, wanted.
I let people think what they wanted. Am I easy? Only to discover I am not. I let people look at the surface, to think I am only what they think I am and let only so very few pass the gates into truth and depth and power.
As a human behaviourist I often understood the logic and research into people but as a deeply conditioned woman I far too often ignored the truth of people and wanted to see them as better than they were.
I opened my world, my life, my heart, my processes to people, expecting they would treat me the same as I would treat them. In this season of yes I found myself very selective and discerning in what and whom I shared with.
I was incredibly closed off to virtually everyone with just a very small inner circle who knew the truth of my experience, what I was going through, working on, how deep the pain and grief ran.
People are easily fooled by the image that’s available. Not all of us though. One of the biggest challenges for me and so many of the people I’ve coached over the years was the ability to see through people and not believe the persona they put out.
Through my most difficult season I chose to be incredibly selective in access to me.
And I have no regrets.
I have no regrets about the entire year that I gave myself to be slightly unhinged, to make decisions in the moment without hyperanalasing everything and worrying about who knew what or who thought what.
I have no regrets about isolating myself and shutting out the world of people who would walk in and take and take until there was nothing but bones left to me.
In the words of Meredith Grey “I make no apologies for how I put back together what you broke”. Someone else did the breaking. More than one person. But I embraced that shattering and I let myself use the time to shake loose what wasn’t me, who I wasn’t and should never have been to please those around me.
I decided to bring all of me to things, the too much, the yes, the no and embrace the shaking free of my soul from the imprint and expectations of who others needed me to be and I became.
The yes era was about freedom.
It was about non conformity.
It was about doing what I wanted, when I wanted and with whom I wanted - unapologetically. It was letting go of of the rigidity of perfection and the need to fix and make everything right.
My. Entire. Life. Shattered.
Not a single thing from my physical health, career, relationship, home, pets and routine weren’t touched. My life was swept through a tsunami and it changed the landscape of my very existence.
This existence I chose how I would deal and heal and put back together again. And in the end I chose not to repair. I let the shattering rip away the exterior of who I once was and let the rawness of the truth be my constant companion.
I didn’t fill my relationship with someone else. Or get a new dog or any of the things that I wished I had the capacity for. But after a decade of unravelling my conditioning I knew that now was the time to feel every once of the pain and discomfort.
I just acted like I wasn’t to most people.
And most people believed it.
But I gave myself a year to go wild, to go a little unhinged, to take the break I needed from helping other and put that energy into myself, my own healing and keep that sacred and private for me.
As I’m stepping out of yes era and into my feral era whats changing is the lack of routine and focus. I didn’t want to be regimented in this phase. I didn’t want to be consistently holding myself to a standard of perfection. I wanted to feel and heal and move with the wild abandon I knew I needed.
I needed my cells to purge the pain and the life and the conditioning and the former me that I was.
The feral era is wilder than wild. It’s regimented and risky. It’s bold moves and big dreams and massive goals.
That era is only possible because I let myself freefall into an abyss of nothingness. I didn’t want to be anything to anyone except myself.
I didn’t want to have to put on an image to be with people.
I didn’t want to hold back.
So I didn’t.
I just kept saying yes and in that era some incredible things happened.
And now because I let loose and let crash all that wasn’t me… I am ready to step powerfully, feral, into the future and build an even more powerful dynamic of helping women unravel the social constructs that continue to hold us back.
My year wilding showed me just how much work we have to do and I’m ready for it.
When I showed up at my therapist office a few weeks ago I said “I’m back and all I want to talk about is me, not him, not it, not them, not anything other than where I’m going”.
Sometimes it’s in the letting it all completely fall apart that we have the deepest most beautiful experience of ourselves.
Don’t be afraid to let go for sometimes thats exactly where you’ll find yourself.
Tonya