I sat in my dorm room feeling puzzled, frustrated and defeated. I felt puzzled because I did not know what to do. I was frustrated because a solution seemed impossible to reach. I considered myself defeated because I was so angry at the decisions I had been making and had lost all self-compassion, letting myself plummet into cycles of negative thought and pain. I felt I lost all power. I felt lost. These feelings all stemmed from my inability to understand that I was, indeed, human. I was allowed to make mistakes, I was allowed to feel and I was allowed to fall. But time after time, I fell deeper into what I call the classic “emotional grave” – a funk that is a blatant result of my flawed perspective. This made me blind to what was more accessible to me than ever: my own advice.
Instead, I naturally resorted to the Internet – the ultimate source of extremely valuable yet simultaneously irrelevant information. I also resorted to the people around me. But after reading and listening…I realized that sometimes, your state of being cannot be explained. Sometimes, how you are feeling cannot be communicated. So I asked myself, what advice would I give to a friend who was coming to me about this exact issue?
I took out my notepad and began to write. I began to write advice to a friend that was feeling low, defeated and had a loosened sense-of-self. Because if a friend came to me with these problems, I would immediately remind them of their worth, remind them loved they are and remind them of how incredible of a human being they are. I would tell them they are human, that humans make mistakes, that it is okay to fall. I would tell them to celebrate the inconveniences of life, for they are what make life worth living. So, I told my friend those things in the form of a letter. I then crossed out the recipient and put my own name. I wrote a letter to myself. And I began to heal.
We know more about ourselves than anyone else. We know how we are feeling, we know our circumstances and we know what is going on more than we could ever put into words. We are so capable of helping others, yet it comes so hard to help ourselves. This pattern must be reversed. I have found that writing letters to myself can be a concrete, simple method to achieving “self-help.” It is straight-forward, it resonates and it can be powerful. At the end of the day, you know what is best for you, so rekindle that. Dig deep and heal yourself.