I started this journey early last year with one goal in mind: to grow.

I know my mind, not fully yet, but enough to know that I process and learn best when writing. This has been true since I was a kid — if you go back and read any of my short stories from the creative writing classes I took, I’m sure you could find a lot of deep truths there that I had no name for at the time (underneath the mediocre writing of a 14-year-old).

Reading and writing were my quiet times; my form of escape. That hasn’t changed. When most other things have looked different over the years, that truth has always been the same. I lost my way for a while and forgot how much they meant to me, but I made my way back eventually. And here I am again. In that regard, I’m glad not everything about me has changed over the years, but I’m also grateful for the ways I’ve grown.

Lately it feels like I’m at a standstill. The air around me feels alive, humming with a sort of energy that only barely grazes my skin as it passes me by. I reach out for it but can’t grasp it for myself yet. My energy in comparison sits quietly, waiting to see what’s going to happen. I’m a little lost right now between wanting to move, to take action, thinking that’s surely how this will all start to unfold, but also feeling like I need to stay quiet and patient and wait for to all to happen on its own. I don’t know what to do.

I feel in the middle of a charged storm about to unleash enormous change in my life, but all I can do is wait and let it happen.

I feel exhausted in this waiting. Somehow, it’s tiring despite me not actually doing anything right now. And what’s worse is I’m such a restless person — I always want to be doing something. I’m fairly patient, but primarily in certain situations, and waiting for this energy to break and do whatever it’s going to do is not one of them. So, I’m trying to work on it by distracting myself with other things. If I can just give my mind enough to do, I don’t have to think about then when or what a huge change in my life could potentially mean. Is this healthy? I don’t know…

You could make the argument that I’m trying to find productive outlets for this eagerness that threatens to choke me from the inside out; you could also say I’m just avoiding my ongoing issue of not being able to be content with where I’m at now, and my impatience. Maybe both are true.

Either way, as a way of trying to distract myself, I’ve been going back and reading my old writings, which include the first posts I did on this blog. The surprise I felt reading through those words of pain had a familiar sense to it while feeling like a stranger wrote them at the same time. The words there have an undercurrent of vague hope muddied by the torment of my then present situations. There’s so much suffering woven in those posts, something that I still feel from time to time but it’s not an everyday occurrence like it used to be.

And that’s encouraging to see.

While my posts still have some intense feelings in them, I believe they’re generally a lot more positive and hopeful these days. While I’m in this state of waiting, I’ve been able to go back to the me I was a year ago and see how far I’ve come. This has helped me tremendously, because when you’re going through change it feels like it happens so gradually sometimes, you start to wonder if it’s happening at all. Had I not had those posts to look back on, I may have been stuck wondering if I really am changing or if I’m just imagining it.

This week, while I was reflecting on all this while in my state of anxious stillness, I heard something that felt too perfect for what I had been going through: Maybe you can’t see your progress because you’re always raising the bar.

These words settled into my bones like sand falling to the bottom of a lakebed. It was a slow impact so I could feel the full weight of the statement, and it opened my eyes a bit. It was just too accurate. I am someone who has always had high expectations of myself, so much so that I thought getting straight A’s in school was the bare minimum I could do. If I ever saw a ‘B’ on my report card, I was disappointed in myself for days, wondering why I was slipping up. I always shine in my workplace and work to become one of the most reliable people there because if I don’t become someone everyone goes to, I feel useless. There have been times when I’ve hit the highest standard in certain situations where there’s no room to progress any further, and I thought to myself, “Yeah, but surely there’s something else I could be doing.”

It’s not easy being so strict and expectant of yourself, because not only does it feel like whatever you’re doing isn’t enough, no matter how tapped out you already are, but you miss out on times to celebrate yourself and what you’ve accomplished — you don’t take the time to admire how far you’ve come.

I’ve been targeting certain areas of growth in my life so much so that I forgot this even needed working on. But it’s not something I want to ignore anymore. Maybe in this time of waiting, instead of going back and seeing how my pain now compares to my pain from the past, I should reassess the standards I have for myself in the present.

I shouldn’t dim my capabilities or do less, because I know what I can and can’t handle, but rather I should make my expectations more realistic and choose to celebrate myself a bit more moving forward. This is always something that I’ve struggled with — it feels awkward and selfish to acknowledge myself. But I very freely give my appreciation, support, and congratulations to those in my life…those are things I should be able to extend to myself as well.

That’s a lot of what this year has been about so far: loving myself as much as I love others.

I’ve gotten a lot better at it in many ways, and do I wish often that there was someone to come home to who could love me in the way I deserve, the way I’m trying to love myself? Of course — who doesn’t want that?

But while I’m in this period of being alone in my life, I need to learn how to be alone. And not just to survive, but to thrive; to be someone who can provide themselves with everything emotionally and physically they need so that when the time comes, I don’t settle for someone who gives me the bare minimum again. And part of that is celebrating myself and all I do, when the time calls for it.

This is an act of self-love I hope to master someday. Not just for myself, but so that, as I come to understand it, I can help others who struggle with the same position I’m in.

So, I guess in a way, this is all to say that I’m trying to give myself the time and space right now to feel proud of myself and how far I’ve come, by going back and reading those older posts and comparing them to my more recent ones. By recognizing the areas I’m still lacking but allowing myself to take a breath and say, “Yeah, there’s more work to do, but look at everything we’ve done.”

I have big plans for my life, and I don’t know when it’ll all start, but I know I need to be ready and fully secure in myself when they do. I hope you feel that fire in you, too, to take it easy on yourself from time to time and give yourself the moment to truly celebrate you.