I Live for Myself

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning. And welcome to Gentle Hours. I hope this morning is meeting you softly. Wherever you are right now, whether you're still laying in bed, you're driving to work, you're sitting in peace, you got your coffee, or simply just trying to gather yourself before the day begins. I'm grateful that you are here with me. This morning, I want you to relax your body. I want you to unclench your jaw. I want you to drop your shoulders and release the tension sitting in places that you haven't paid attention to yet. Now, take a slow deep breath in through your nose. Hold it gently there for a moment. And slowly release it through your mouth. Again, breathe in deeply and exhale slowly. One more time. Inhale with peace and release the heaviness that followed you into this morning. Good. Our phrase for this week is I can no longer live for others. I think this phrase requires gentleness and honesty because you know many people hear something like this and immediately associate it with selfishness. They think that it automatically creates distance or a lack for the care of people around them. But when I sat with this phrase, what I really heard was exhaustion. I felt the grief that comes from spending years shaping your life around everybody else's expectations while slowly losing touch with yourself in the process. I think many of us have become so accustomed to being needed that we rarely stop long enough to ask ourselves whether we are actually okay. We know how to show up for people. We know how to encourage others through difficult seasons, we know how to make room for everyone else's emotions while placing our own needs on the back burner over and over and over again. And then after a while, that that kind of living that we do creates a disconnect within ourselves. You recognize that you begin to wake up tired in places that cannot immediately reach because your spirit has been carrying the pressure of you performing for so long. You know, some of us have learned very early that love maybe it felt the safest when we were useful, when we are being agreeable, when we were accommodating, when we were anticipating everybody's needs before they even told us. So naturally we become adults who constantly measure our decisions against everyone else's comfort before ever considering what those decisions are doing to us internally. And over time, my baby, that gets very, very heavy. You start realizing that your entire emotional world has revolved around preserving peace and maintaining relationships and avoiding disappointing people and making sure everybody else feels supported while your own spirit is waiting for some kind of attention. And this is why so many people feel very disconnected from themselves because they have spent so much time studying everyone else that they no longer recognize their own needs without guilt coming into their form of living, and it's quite intriguing, isn't it? You know how to calm everyone else down, you are great at encouraging everyone else, and you've built this stamina to carry emotional weight with grace. But when it comes to your own exhaustion, your own loneliness, your own need for rest, your own desire to be poured into, suddenly there's hesitation there, suddenly you feel guilty for even needing something in return. And I must tell you, my baby, that is not a healthy way to live. You know, there comes a point where constantly living for others begins to drain the life out of you. Maybe your body can feel it, your mind can feel it, your emotions can feel it, you become overwhelmed by things that once felt manageable because your spirit has been surviving off emotional crumbs for way too long. And I think that healing introduces us to uncomfortable realizations sometimes. And one of those realizations being that some people become deeply comfortable with the version of you that consistently abandons yourself to keep everybody else comfortable. You know, that that version of you that I always says yes, that overextends yourself, that tolerated things you should have spoken about years ago, you know, the version of you that kept pouring and pouring and pouring while secretly hoping somebody would notice how empty you have become. So when you begin to change your relationship with yourself, people begin to notice. Sometimes they notice very gently, and sometimes they notice through resistance. Sometimes they interpret your boundaries as rejection simply because they were accustomed to unrestricted access to your energy. But I want you to understand something this morning. You know, your life cannot permanently belong to everybody except you. Maybe you deserve to hear your own voice, you deserve to experience your own existence, you deserve relationships where your humanity is acknowledged beyond what you can provide emotionally. I mean, I think many people are entering seasons where they are finally beginning to ask themselves the difficult but very necessary question. What do I really need emotionally? What parts of myself have I neglected trying to maintain everybody else's? What kind of life would fill the line for me if guilt was no longer controlling my decisions? Hmm. And baby, those questions they really matter. Some of us have lived so long in survival mode that we forget we were allowed to have desires and boundaries and preferences and emotional needs. We become caretakers of everybody while abandoning ourselves in the process. And I don't believe that the season is about becoming cold or you know disconnecting from people. I believe this season is teaching many of us how to stop disappearing inside of our relationships with others. There's a difference between, you know, loving people deeply and losing yourself entirely, trying to keep them happy, and you should not have to constantly betray yourself just to maintain connection. And to be honest, you know, many people are tired, tired of over-explaining themselves, tired of just carrying emotional labor for everyone else around them, just tired of feeling responsible for preserving everyone else's comfort while neglecting their own mental and emotional well-being. So, my babies, maybe, maybe this week. This is an invitation for you to return to yourself very gently, to begin to listen to your body when it begs for rest, to notice the moments where guilt immediately appears to second that you choose yourself to become aware of how often you silence your own needs to avoid disappointing other people. You know, awareness. Awareness changes things. Over trying to fix everyone else. So this week, you know, I want you to move with gentleness around you. Pay attention to where you become exhausted. I want you to pay attention to relationships and environments that require you to constantly abandon yourself just to remain accepted there. And I really need you to pay attention to how often you apologize for having completely human needs. And then I want you to offer yourself compassion instead of judgment. Now, before we close this morning, I want you to uh I want you to place your hand over your chest, and I want you to take one slow deep breath through your nose. I want you to hold it gently. And then release it slowly through your mouth. Again, breathe. And this time you are breathing in peace. And then you are going to exhale pressure. One more. Breathe in very, very, very deeply. And release slowly. And I want you to remind yourself this morning that my life belongs to me. I deserve rest. I deserve honesty. And I deserve to exist fully in my own life, and I no longer have to abandon myself to maintain love or connection or acceptance. Be gentle with yourself this week, my baby. Take your time returning home to yourself, and I'll meet you again next week, next Monday, for another episode of Gentle Hours.