I've been struggling with anxiety for a long time & a little bit of depression, sometimes a lot depending on the day. I've been trying to pin point where exactly this started in my life, why I've become so fearful, shameful, and felt unworthy. Where did this come from? I could blame it on a million different things, but I could never actually figure out the root of the problem. Until one day during my research, I looked up the definition of anxiety.
anx·i·e·ty
aNGˈzīədē/
noun
- a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.
If we are worried about an event with an uncertain outcome, then we have a fear of the unknown and being nervous or uneasy might mean we aren't confident enough to face whatever that "uncertainty" is. So for me, having anxiety boils down to not having enough confidence & feeling like I need to control the outcome of everything, which is impossible. I started looking on Amazon for self-help books about how to grow my confidence, and I came across a book that had a review about Brene Brown's TED talks. One afternoon I took 40 minutes out of my day and watched the following TED talks by Brene Brown, I highly recommend these by the way.
After I watched these videos, it clicked. I started looking at my blog posts with the most views over the past year; besides the coconut oil hair growth (because everyone wants to grow their hair), and the guest post by the amazing Lisa over at Copper Anchor (because she's got great insights to marriage). I realized one thing, the rest of my most popular posts that got the most views were the times I was the most vulnerable. The times where I would over-think writing about it, and once I did write about it, it sat in my drafts because I'd ask myself "what if it wasn't good enough?" "what if no one cares to hear about it?" "what if it's TMI?"
(Just like this post, that has been in my drafts since March)
One of my favorite parts of the second TED talk is when she talks about shame, and she talks about it being gender organized.
She explains that both men & women experience shame, but they experience it in a different way.
She uses a commercial to explain what she means, an ad for perfume that says;
"I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work from 5-9, I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan & never let you forget you're a man."
She goes on to say that for women, shame is; "do it all, do it perfectly & never let them see you sweat."
It was this part of the talk that I realized how shameful I am, how often women are comparing themselves to each other, how often we think we aren't good enough. A good enough wife, a good enough Mom, a good enough daughter...etc. All of this stems from our confidence, we would never have to ask ourselves if we were good enough if only we had the confidence to know that we were. We wouldn't need people in our lives to compliment us, because we compliment ourselves. We wouldn't NEED to have someone in our life to love us, because we loved our-self & when we did find that person that loved us it would only add to the love that we already have for our-self.
