Ep 148: The Absurdity and Necessity of Personal Growth in Dark Times

Today, I want to talk about something that has been weighing heavily on my heart. We’re living in a time when so many terrible things are happening in the world. Families are being torn apart, healthcare is being stripped away, and fundamental human rights are under attack. In the midst of all this, it can feel absurd—or even pointless—to talk about setting boundaries or practicing patience. Like I’m offering a band-aid when the patient is hemorrhaging.

And yet, I keep showing up here because I believe this work matters. I believe your healing matters. No, working on your relationship with yourself won’t fix everything that’s broken—but it can create ripples of good that we desperately need in the world. 

Maybe you’re too overwhelmed, anxious, or shut down to even consider personal growth right now. But here's what I want you to know: you can hold space for the pain of the world and still work on being your favorite you. If you’ve been feeling torn between caring about the world and caring for yourself, I hope this episode will help.

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

Transcript

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey there, my beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. 

I am still your host, Melissa Parsons. I want to be really honest with you today about something that's been weighing on my heart. Sometimes I sit down to record an episode about patience or self-loathing, yeah that too, or self-love or setting boundaries, or I go to write a post on Instagram or Facebook or I go to write you guys an email and I think, what the actual fuck am I doing? 

How can I talk to you about loving yourself through the mess of becoming a favorite version of yourself when the world, at least here in the United States, feels like it's coming down around us? How can I encourage you to work on your relationship with yourself when we're watching families being torn apart, health care being stripped away, and honestly, basic human rights being trampled? 

It feels absurd. It feels pointless. It feels like I'm offering you a band-aid when the patient is hemorrhaging. And yet, and yet, I keep showing up here because I believe this work matters. I believe your healing matters. 

I believe that you get better at loving yourself, setting boundaries, and speaking your truth. And that creates ripples that the world desperately needs right now. If you've been feeling torn between caring for yourself and caring about the world, this episode's for you. 

I'm going to guess that you've been feeling some version of this idea lately. So some version of how can I focus on my problems when people are literally dying? How can I work on my boundaries when families are being separated? 

How can I invest in coaching for myself when other people are losing their access to health care? Maybe you've been feeling guilty about wanting to improve your life when so many people are suffering. 

Maybe you've been wondering, like I have, if working on yourself is selfish, privileged, and tone deaf. Or maybe you've gone the other direction, you've been so overwhelmed by the state of the world that you've shut down completely, you can't bear to look at the news, you can't handle thinking about what's happening, so you're just trying to get through each day without falling apart. 

I've also been in this conundrum myself. And both of these responses make complete sense. Here's what I want you to understand. We are a social species. What happens to one person in our orbit affects the others. 

Even when the terrible things aren't happening directly to you, you feel the ripples. Your nervous system knows that your fellow humans are in pain and it responds accordingly. You definitely are not being dramatic. 

You for sure are not being oversensitive. You are being human. And I want to thank you for that. Thinking about it this way, when someone you love is hurting, often you hurt too. When your child is struggling, your heart aches. 

When your friend is going through a divorce, you feel the pain that they're in. When someone that you love is sick, you carry that worry in your body. Now expand that out. We're all connected in ways we don't always acknowledge. 

When people in our communities are suffering, when people in our country are having their rights taken away, when people seeking a better life are being treated as less than human, all of that creates ripples of pain and fear and grief that we feel, even if we can't always name it. 

Our nervous system doesn't distinguish between a threat to our immediate family and a threat to our larger human family. It just knows that people are in danger, that the world feels unsafe, and that terrible things are happening. 

So if you've been feeling anxious, depressed, overwhelmed, shut down, or just generally off lately, that makes perfect sense on the collective pain and your body is responding to it. 

Here's what I want you to hear today. You can hold space for the world's pain and still want to improve your relationship with yourself. You can be devastated about injustice that you see happening and still work on setting boundaries with your brother. 

You can grieve for what's happening to other people and still want to learn how to love yourself better. It's not either or, it's definitely both and in fact, I would argue that the world needs you to do both. 

The world needs you to care deeply about what's happening to other people and the world needs you to be healthy, grounded, and operating from a place of love more often than you're operating from a place of fear. 

When you're running on empty, when you're consumed by anxiety, when you're so overwhelmed that you shut down, you can't help anyone. You can't help yourself either. You can't be there for your family, you can't contribute to solutions, and you can't even take care of yourself, let alone anyone else. 

When you're doing the work to heal your relationship with yourself, when you're learning to speak your truth and set boundaries and love yourself through the mess, that creates a different kind of ripple effect. 

And here's what I've learned in my years of doing this work. When one person heals, it doesn't just affect that one person, it affects everyone around them. So when you heal, it doesn't just affect you, it affects everyone around you. 

When you learn to set boundaries, you teach other people that they can set boundaries too. When you learn to tell the truth, to speak your own truth, you give other people permission to speak theirs. 

When you learn to love yourself, you model what that looks like for everyone in your orbit. Your kids for sure are watching how you treat yourself and learning how they should treat themselves. Your partner sees you standing up for yourself and learns that it's safe to do the same. 

Your friends witness you prioritizing your well-being and they get permission to prioritize theirs. And then all of those people, they create their own ripples. Your boundary setting teaches your daughter to say no to things that don't feel right. 

Your self-love teaches your friend to leave the relationship that's training her. Your authenticity teaches your coworker to speak up about the injustice they've been witnessing. This is how change happens, not just through the big obvious actions, though those matter too. 

Believe me, I've been to my share of protests and marches and rallies, and I have my senator and my congresspeople on speed dial on my phone. But change happens through the quiet daily practice of treating ourselves and each other care, with more love, with more compassion, with more respect, with more humanity. I can't stop Alligator Alcatraz from being built. Believe me, I would have if I could have. I cannot single-handedly protect everyone's healthcare. 

I cannot make it so that all of the amazing humans on the ACIP are reinstated so that our vaccination recommendations can go forward. I cannot fix the immigration system or restore all the rights that are being taken away. 

But I can help you heal your relationship with yourself. I can help you learn to love yourself through the mess. I can help you find your voice and use it. I can help you become the kind of person who stands up for themselves and for others, who creates safety in their small corner of the world, who refuses to pass on generational trauma to the next generation. 

And that matters. Your healing matters. Your growth matters. Your small corner of the world matters. And that's why I keep delivering this podcast. That's why I keep showing up on social media. That's why I keep emailing you. 

When you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself, you're not being selfish or privileged or tone deaf. You are contributing to the solution. You're making your family healthier, your community stronger, and your workplace more humane. 

So how do we hold both of these truths simultaneously? How do we care deeply about the suffering in the world and still invest in our own healing? First, we have to acknowledge that both are necessary. 

The world needs people who are paying attention to injustice and people who are doing the inner work to heal themselves and their families. Second, we recognize that taking care of ourselves isn't selfish. 

It's strategic. You can't fight for justice if you're too depleted to function. You can't create change if you're operating from a place of fear and scarcity instead of love and abundance. Third, we understand that personal growth and social justice aren't separate things. 

They are interconnected. The more you heal your own trauma, the less likely you are to pass it on. The more you learn to love yourself, the more capacity you have to love others. The more you work on your own relationships, the more you contribute to a culture of respect and humanity. 

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world, which I would be very surprised if you're not, here is what I would like you to try. Start with your own nervous system. Do what you need to feel grounded and safe in your body. 

That might be limiting your news consumption, getting outside, moving your body, talking to people that you love. You can't think clearly or act effectively if your nervous system is in a constant state of sympathetic activation, ready to fight, fight, flee, or appease. Then, identify your small corner of the world. Where do you have influence? Is it your family? Is it your workplace? Your community? Your friend group? 

Focus on what you can control and try to make changes in those spaces. Keep doing your own personal work. Keep learning to set boundaries. Keep working on loving yourself. Keep healing your relationship patterns. 

Not in spite of what's happening in the world, but because of it. And remember, you don't have to choose between caring for yourself and caring about the world. You can do both, and in fact, the world needs you to do both. 

This work we're doing together here on the podcast, learning to love ourselves, speak our truth, heal our relationships, this is the long game. This is how we create a world where everyone is treated with compassion, dignity, and respect. 

This is how we raise our children to know their worth. This is how we build the families and communities and workplaces where people can thrive. It might feel small in the face of everything that's happening. 

It might feel absurd to talk about self-love when the world is on fire. But I believe with my whole heart that your healing creates ripples that reach further than you can even possibly imagine. So keep doing the work, my beautiful listeners. 

Keep learning to love yourself. Keep setting those boundaries. Keep speaking your truth. Not because the world is perfect, but because it's not. Not because there's no suffering, but because there is. 

Your corner of the world needs you to be healthy, grounded, and operating from love as much as possible. And the ripples you create from that place, they matter more than you know. If you need support doing this work, if you need help holding both your own healing and the world's pain, that's exactly what we work together on in coaching. 

Learning to become your favorite you isn't separate from making the world better. It's how we make the world better. Again, reach out to me and let me know how this lands for you on my Instagram page @CoachMelissaParsonsMD. 

How are you holding the duality of caring for yourself and caring about the world? Remember, your healing matters, your growth matters, your small corner of the world matters, and for sure the ripples you create matter. 

Okay, I'll talk with you all next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!