Whose narrative are you using to live your life?

Whose narrative are you using to live your life?
Isn’t it time to write your own story?

The thing I dislike most about myself is my anger. I grew up in a household with an angry father and watched him consistently overreact. I remember one time, he lost his pen and started screaming as he looked for it, accusing us for losing it only to find it tucked away in his book. His anger didn’t leave much room for us to have a lot of other feelings and I see so much of him in me.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I spent last year exploring my shadows and looking at the parts I’ve been judging and rejecting. I’m really learning to embrace and feel comfortable with my sadness but would like to work on my anger too. My old approach used to be this – get mad at myself for being angry and then promise myself I wouldn’t do it again. Fail, repeat. Now, I am learning to have empathy for my anger. She represents the needs I didn’t get filled as a child, the words I wasn’t allowed to speak, the safety I never felt, the abandonment I was never allowed to process… Anger was a strategy I developed to help me feel something in the face of not being allowed to feel anything. It was a necessary part of my development and helped me cope, served to protect me, to let me know my boundaries had been crossed and that my needs weren’t being met. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I committed to loving myself when I started this journey and it means loving every single part of me, even my anger. As I extend compassion to this part, it gets easier to understand and instead of reacting, I can give myself the space to choose. It’s a long process and won’t happen overnight but I trust this is the key. A gift of all this has also been the ability to extend the same compassion to my father, which allows me to take a breath and not react when he’s angry. This compassion can be extended to everyone. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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When we learn to love ourselves wholly, we also learn to love others the same way too. Love yourself as you are. Letting go of the things that don’t serve us is so much easier to do when we do it with compassion rather than with judgment.

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash