# 29 - The Messy Middle

Healing often gets spoken about like it’s a straight line. Something happens, you fall apart, you do the work, and eventually you come out the other side. But the bit in the middle is where so much of the real change happens. 

In this episode, I’m talking about the quieter cognitive shifts that come with healing. The way your perception changes, the way you stop managing everyone else’s comfort before your own, the way you begin trusting yourself differently, and the reality that nobody can actually do the integration for you.

This one is about the parts that can feel unfamiliar, confronting and lonely at times, but also happen to be the parts that change you the most.

If you’re somewhere in the middle of it, I hope this makes it feel a little less isolating 🫶

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

G'day folks and welcome to That Makeup Girl. I'm Stevie and I'm That Makeup Girl. I'm gonna be perfectly fucking honest. I've had to try and record this three times because my sound keeps fucking up. Bear with me while I check for the fourth time. So, yep, we're good to go. Welcome to episode 29. I am gonna be talking about healing, but I reckon the parts that not many people talk about, and in my personal opinion, the parts that you need the most fucking support in. And how do we get to a place where we understand how to give support, how to receive support, um, is by having conversations about it or hearing conversations about it. And the healing process or the grief process, because you know they kind of go hand in hand, everybody has a brief understanding of what that is. The five stages of grief, the denial, the anger, the sadness, the mourning, whatever. Everybody kind of has that understanding of healing, right? Like to heal from something, there has to be a significant event that has taken place. You have the heartbreak, you have maybe the anger, the resentment, the bitter, who fucking knows. And then you have the rebirth, you coming back to life after such a big event and being a baddie in the world again after a really fucking hard thing happened. But what I have found is that nobody actually talks about that in-between fucking messy ebb and flow between anger, resentment, bitterness, utter heartbreak, isolation, uh recklessness, all of that. Ugliness. Nobody talks about that because yeah, it's vulnerable and it's it's pretty brutal to be honest. And I get that it's not a comfortable thing to share, but it's also not a comfortable thing to feel. And when you're feeling that level of discomfort, and it's also really unfamiliar, and nobody seems to fucking talk about that to give you a relatable kind of pillow to land on, it makes the whole process a lot fucking harder. And I've found that that in-between bit is where you learn the most because you you are doing the reckless shit, you are feeling the big emotions and the the unusual emotions. And I I battled with a lot of that, just like I don't know what to fucking do with this. But they're the parts that changed me the most. I was I was just a gal experiencing all of this unfamiliar, new, life-altering shit with absolutely no light shining the way ahead. But like I said, I can now safely say that those parts were the bits that I did the most growing and the most reflecting, and um yeah, I have been given the ability to feel less awkward, I guess, in front of a microphone to talk about these things because I know other people experience this. I know that what I experienced personally as my grief process or as whatever I've moved through is not dissimilar to probably the person living in the apartment next door to me. You know, we're not that unique. Everybody has a different interpretation, and obviously, you really fucking unique things happen to us, but everybody really does have a story. And I'm not saying that I think everybody should be brutally opening up and sharing every bit of their story. I'm just saying that if you have the ability to offer a relatable perspective to shine a light for somebody on a path like this, yeah, why not? Because if you have experienced the kind of mental shifts that that really fucking hard times offer you, then you know what that feels like. It's life altering, it's unlike I feel like I've said unfamiliar a thousand times, but it is unfamiliar, and you're looking at this unfamiliar person of the past, and then looking at this new version, going, I also don't know who the fuck you are. All these new emotions are showing up, and it's all just so fucking big. But yeah, it's part of growth, and I don't want people to continue feeling uncomfortable in a chapter of growth because how fucking cool to be able to give yourself that chance to experience heartache, to feel all of the fucking nitty-gritty, and to then grow and evolve from that. That's making the most of your fucking life, I would say. So I guess the main sort of body of what I want to talk about today is that healing changes you. It changes the way you see things, it changes the way you perceive things, it changes the way that you feel and interpret, perceive, same thing, whatever. Uh, but it does, and it has to start with the the cognitive healing, the cognitive change, the invisible shit, before any of the other stuff can actually happen. It starts with you inside German. So, one of the biggest changes that I noticed was that you stop managing everybody else's comfort before your own. And that gets perceived really quickly by the outside world because all of a sudden these people that you gave full unguarded access to you with no need of your own have blockages, and for me personally, that was the first thing that happened because I don't know, I I have no answers for the process of grief, but yeah, for me, the absolute ceasing of managing everybody else before myself happened immediately, and I think it was because of my um capability. I was rendered pretty fucking useless when grief first knocked me down, and I didn't have the actual physical ability to do it, and then just me being me, it I sort of went very, very, very into the mind and started thinking about like, hang on a minute, why have I done that forever? And why did I think that that was the correct option? And why were you managing a room that you didn't actually want to be in? Like, I was so afraid to feel discomfort or to feel energy that wasn't right. I was so fucking scared of that that I would manage every place that I was in before even considering if I wanted to be there or how it made me feel or how I was actually processing it. That's my stuff. I'm not that's got nothing to do with anybody else, and I reflected heavily on that, going, wow, I actually haven't ever really considered myself. Deep down when I think about it, I have never actually considered what I truly want from any situation. It's always been through the lens of how I would be perceived or received by whoever was in the room or situation, whatever it might be. And everybody chooses, you know, the personality they're gonna wear sometimes when you're exhausted. You're like, fucking pick it up and just put that front forward for work today. Choose the professional one, bitch, wear the hat. We've all done that, but this was deeper than that. This was, and it was very anxiety-led, which is something that I have been very, very, very aware of, and you know, there's lots of other shit that I could fucking put a label on it with, but bottom line is that I never actually considered myself, and that was a really fucking hard thing to realise. And then realizing that the way that you receive love and care and patience is all different because you're like, well, wait, wait a minute. I'm actually I'm actually worried about me first. I'm not standing here considering how I'm going to be perceived by certain people. And yeah, god, it's it's a lot, it's a big one. But a lesson that I do hope everybody has the chance to learn, if you are the people pleaser type, because putting yourself first, I've said it I think in every fucking episode thus far, is seriously the be all and all. Like, if you are not coming at everything in your life with yourself first, what's the fucking point? Genuinely, if you aren't putting your needs to be the best version of you above everything else so that you can pour the absolute max into what you have in your life, be it kids, be it pets, be it jobs, whatever, you can't pour the most of you, you know, you can only pour to your capacity. And if you're not putting yourself first and you're dr fucking burning the candle at both ends, and you're just a shell of a human, then you're not actually showing up and putting them first. They're getting a shitty version of you because you're fucking absolutely wrecked. And for what? For the benefit of everybody else. And it really doesn't actually cause that much detrimental fucking change when you when you center yourself. Yes, there will be people that you know yes, there will be change, there will be, but I hate to sound like every cliche that talks about it. You don't lose things in your life that are meant to be there. There has to be acceptance in every loss, and that's something that I have chosen to believe wholeheartedly in. If something is meant to make its way back for you, something will happen. And I'm not talking magic, it's it's so deeper than that. You know, like if you lose somebody from your life because you weren't being the best version of yourself, and then you go away and you do the work and you reflect on the fact that that happened, then sometimes those relationships can repair because you've become a better version of yourself, or they've become a better version of themselves. It's part of life, but I truly believe that two people that aren't on the same path aren't meant to be in each other's life at that time, and that's alright. It's actually so more than alright. Loss is inevitable when change this big is happening, or change actually of any any scale is happening. Loss is inevitable. Another thing that I really noticed um when my capacity changed, and I was doing all of that reflecting about the way that I showed up in certain places, and I realized that I was genuinely responding to situations and managing scenarios at the benefit of other people in the room before I had even checked in with how I felt about any of it. I was so desperate to manage the energy and the mood and to make sure that I don't know, I don't know what I was so fucking scared of. But I used to watch my mum actually. I don't know if I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but whatever. I I remember mum always being what I would call confrontational. Now I just call it direct. And the reason that I used to feel like I was treading on eggshells was because I felt like I needed to protect my mum from the response she might get from her being so direct at times. And I was constantly trying to manage it instead of just being like, fuck it, she's saying what she wants to say, say it with your whole chest. I support it. But coming from that place of managing other people's perception, I now look at it through the lens of fuck yeah. Of course, you should always do that. If you're uncomfortable, if you don't like something, if you're talking to somebody and they say something shit, you can absolutely interject and be like, you're being fucked. Actually, what you're talking about or how you're speaking is gross. And, you know, don't be afraid to disrupt the room. The other thing I noticed really strongly, and I spoke about it quite a lot for a chunk of time on the podcast, was about perception and perspective. I've actually mentioned it already on this episode, but about how your perception changes before your actual behaviour does. And obviously, like that's the way it should happen, right? I think we should absolutely tweak our perception or perspective or lens, whatever you want to fucking call it, to allow us to understand maybe poor behaviours, what we don't like, and then really consider the behaviour that we want to move forward with. I think your percep your perception has to change for that to happen properly, anyway. But yeah, I think that discernment comes as a result of the perception change and the way that you actually view things and you you you gain this level of discernment of like, huh? Hang on a minute. Like a room that you maybe walked into a couple of months back, you're now standing at the front of looking at with you know you know screwed up, going, what? And that's why it becomes visible because it's almost this automatic response of like, no, I'm not gonna be going in there, and maybe it's brutal. And for myself, absolutely I approached it with um little to no acknowledgement of how it was being perceived because A, I knew the people around me were really fucking safe, um, and I'm very lucky for that, and I could be fully unguarded, but also I had a massive fucking level of fuck you if you can't handle how cunty I am gonna be right now, because my dad just died and I can't process the world. So the last thing I'm thinking about right now is how I'm coming across to you, and maybe that's fucked, but I just I I couldn't possibly be anything but that, and then you kind of, yeah, maybe maybe you do get a sense of empowerment or enlightenment, like, oh fuck, that's how that's meant to feel. I like that, that's nice because I just stood in my power and I let myself say what I felt, and in fact, the room got safer and the hug was bigger, and that's again sort of going back to what I was talking about with loss. When your perception changes and your discernment levels the fuck up, you are okay to an extent, or you become more okay with the loss because you know that I'm gonna sound so fucking cliche again, but you know that the alignment is different, that that that your world kind of splits and it's so fucking clear. That kind of brings me to the next thing that I want to talk about, which is change and change in the way of your place in the world and how you show up in it. Change, you know, I could that's a a million different things, but this specific way is like realizing that you're allowed to change and then change again and then change back and then change again and again and again. Like you are so allowed, in fact, I encourage you to as many times as you can. It's that fucking simple. Fuck, most people are at their wits' end emotionally, so you know, implementing change and uh changing your thought patterns and processing is a difficult thing. But if I can really blatantly say some things, it's that if you want to change the way that you show up in this world, you can. It's literally that fucking simple to just decide and do. And maybe it'll take time, but you've decided and you've done. As you grow and evolve through hard times, the perception shifts are what allow you to look back at things and go, you know what we were talking about just previously, with the I don't I don't like that actually. I don't know why I was comfortable in that, but it definitely doesn't fit anymore, and I'm moving forward. Like you accept that you don't have to continue to play the role that you've always played, and it's okay for you to learn lessons through painful things and implement them in ways that change the way that you show up. That's great, actually. We're meant to change. We have to, we have to grow and evolve, otherwise, ew. And the final thing I want to talk about is my belief in the fact that healing is fully self-guided. I am a huge advocate for mental health support, however that looks for you. Um, you know, GPs, holistic, psychotherapy, psychiatry, whatever fits for you. I'm a huge, huge advocate. Our mind is fucking precious. If you outsource, I believe you are outsourcing knowledge and perspective and the ability to open up our worlds and our minds. We then have to take that and implement that and integrate that into our healing journey for it to make any kind of change in our life. You can't outsource integration, obviously. Integration is yours to do with what you will. And if you only have the knowledge and the understanding and you're not actually implementing it into yourself and your routines and um the way that you show up in the world, it's not it's not cognitive work, it's not cognitive change, it's just an understanding of something, it's just one part of it. The healing is you, the healing is integrating all of that and implementing it the way that works for you. And fuck, that is brutal, ugly. Peace be with you if you're doing it. But also, it is the most empowering realization to know that it is you. Like, how crazy that we somehow got fed this narrative that outsourcing was the way to heal entirely. Instead of looking at it as one of the tools needed in your healing journey, but the healing journey is yours, and it's one part of 357,000 billion, trillion, gajillion, fulfillion, you know what I mean. But trust yourself to implement all of the stuff that you've outsourced and understood and allow that to be the change. So, yeah, I guess um, I don't know, if this resonated with you because you're actually in the middle of this, maybe I want to say to you, don't be afraid of what's ahead. I think we all avoid things in the healing process because they're really fucking hard. And who has the space to fucking constantly face head-on um, you know, demons of the past or things that really need to be healed, but also require a lot of effort and attention. I get it. But please allow yourself the time to acknowledge it and know and trust that it's not gonna flood you and knock you off your feet like your anxiety is probably telling you. It's gonna hurt, but also you hold the power, right? And you get to choose how much of what you see and acknowledge you heal and you can do it bit by bit, and you can bite off and heal a little part of it, and then come back to it later. Because the only way fucking through it is through it, you know. So, yeah. As per usual, I will continue to just find ways to talk about the messy in between, and I you know, encourage people to not avoid it because the messy in between is where you discover yourself, it's where you discover your limitations and your a lot, a lot about yourself is in the messy in between. So let yourself see the shit that comes up in that part and trust your power and judgment that you can choose what to tackle when and just comfortably do it. Because fuck there is, yeah, we need we need it. We need to be fucking self-aware, we need to heal this fucking joint, you know, and if it starts with us, this place can't get healed if the people on it are still fucking walking on their head. So heal. Start, don't avoid, or don't don't be afraid to begin or to face things. I've said it a million times um over the podcast apps. If I can continue to just speak on parts of my journey that I'm learning about and you know the impact that implementation can have and being self-aware and acknowledging the fucking good and bad parts of yourself. If I can continue kind of allowing space for people to continue hopefully doing that, then I'll um happily do this for the rest of my life. Thank you, Universe. Will you pay me a millions and millions of dollars for the podcast, please? I don't know what I'm doing here, guys, but that's part of the fun. That is part of the fun. Sometimes you just gotta lead with fucking passion and know that if it goes wrong, I've got no one to blame but myself. Anyway, as always, thank you for being here. I will catch you in the next one. Bye.