It’s all progress.

In my post about finally breaking down and hiring a wedding planner, I hinted at the fact that I’ve started seeing a therapist recently. It began with me trying to get a better handle on the stress of planning the wedding but has morphed into my therapist and I wrestling with much larger alligators.

We’re dealing with the big questions. Questions like, who am I? Where am I? What am I doing? Where am I going? These are questions that I think most people find themselves asking at some point during their twenties. I know several others my age who are going through a similar “thing” right now (call it a “quarter-life crisis” or whatever), but it doesn’t matter how old you are, everyone has to answer these questions for themselves at some point.

It’s complicated. I think part of the problem, at least for me, is that there are no rules. The world is my oyster, everything is there for the taking, anything is possible. And that’s f-ing scary.

I recently watched a TED Talk about happiness and how humans tend to feel less happy when presented with more choices. Seems counterintuitive at first, but when our options are limited, we learn to be happier with what we have. It’s actually a brilliant survival technique on behalf of our brains.

All throughout my life, I’ve had the structure provided by school and home. These were the foundations of my day-to-day life and I never questioned them. I made choices about what color socks I’d like to wear (went through a mis-matched phase for awhile) and which afterschool activities I’d like to participate in (hello, theater geek), but I never thought about things like, what city do I want to live in? What do I want to wake up and do every day? These were givens. Now I have the freedom to create my own life and my own surroundings according to what I want but I don’t know what I want.

I’m constantly reminded of this quote from Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying that I know I’ve mentioned before but it’s worth repeating:

The twenties are as frenetic a decade as the teens. You have a voice inside your head repeating I want, I want, I want, but you don’t know WHAT you want or how to get it. You hardly know who you are. You go on instinct. And your instinct mostly pushes you toward adventures you won’t grasp until you look back on them. Life can only understood backward, but it must be lived forward, some sage once said.

It’s a lot to sort through but, so far, therapy is going really well. This isn’t my first time seeing a therapist, but it is the first time I’ve ever completely liked and completely trusted my therapist. I feel like we’re making some real progress and that fact alone is exciting to me.

One of the things we’re working on is learning to listen to the right side of my brain. Tapping in to what I feel, instead of what I think I feel (or worse, what I think I should feel). For so long, my decisions have come primarily from my left brain and have been based on what is most logical and most rational. I realized I’ve been ignoring my intuition, and perhaps my true feelings, for quite some time. And that pattern is, unfortunately, something that will usually come back to bite you.

Learning to recognize what you really feel is hard. Even harder is learning to integrate those feelings with your left brain, that just wants to box them up in neat compartments with fancy little labels on each one. The world rewards logic. Those who follow their hearts are often labeled hippies, radicals, or just plain “crazy”.

It’s easy to do the rational thing, much harder to do the thing that’s true to YOU. What I’ve learned so far, though, is that if you can figure out who you are and be true to that every day, you’ll feel a lot more at peace. The trick is the figuring out part.

But as Jacob said on the Lost season finale: It’s all progress.

ps. I’d highly recommend therapy for anyone who remotely thinks they might need to talk to someone about their feelings – whatever those feelings may be. I’ve realized that everyone is varying degrees of “crazy”. No one is 100%, completely sane. Everyone has stuff. Some just hide it better than others. And everyone could benefit from talking to a therapist at some point in their lives.

Check out the National Association of Social Workers help finder here: http://www.helpstartshere.org/or the American Psychological Association‘s help center here: http://locator.apa.org/.

pps. Speaking of right brains, I was very fortunate to win the print above from Right Brain Terrain via The Bright Side Project. Many thanks to Miss B and Frederic Terral. I’m so thrilled to have won! Again. Just sayin’… I’m lucky.