August 17, 2015

Stick-It-Out-And-Let-The-Day-Surprise-You

I had a small bout with self-harm as an 18-year-old. In addition to an eating disorder and various other forms of depression.

The teenage years can be tough for some girls.

The reason I mention this today is because I’v realized how important ‘sticking it out’ really is. I look around at my life these days, and I’m so incredibly grateful that my depression didn’t cause me to be hospitalized or dead at any point. Look how much fun I would have missed out on!

I’m sitting in an abundantly beautiful apartment with air conditioning, with my feet up, watching the Dodger game. I’ve just finished putting the finishing touches on my new website after about 3-4 hours of ‘WTF how do I make the text in this header bigger!‘ I spent $40 at the grocery store getting food for the week, smiling and grateful that I worked hard to put food on my table (which I also helped buy with hard earned dough).

It’s been the best Sunday ever, and in fact it’s been the best summer ever, and I can’t help but go back and think about what would have happened had I not ‘stuck it out’ back in the dark days. Even when I was going through terrible anxiety, the one thing that always soothed me was knowing that I just had to stick it out and let it pass.

And sticking it out sometimes is all you can do. Everyone’s situations are different, and we have the power of course to choose what we ‘stick’ out, but if you’re going through a really tough time in your life, whether it be you can’t find direction, or you’re depressed, lost, or anxious…I urge you to stick it out and have faith that everything really is going to work out in your favor. Times are always a changin’. You don’t know what the next five or ten years of your life will look like. You don’t even know what the next five or ten minutes will look like.

And what I didn’t understand when I was younger was that there was light at the end of the tunnel, and now I’m in the middle of it.

You have to do what you have to do to take care of yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to turn the beat around when you’re in the craziest funk ever, but the funk can’t stay forever. Funks can’t even process forever. And in fact they’re blessings because they remind us of our humanity. We get to feel things. I mean think of a pillow, it can’t feel a thing!

I really just wanted to take the time to think about this whole ‘sticking it out’ thing today, because we put up with a lot of shit that we think is going to last forever, and it affects our moods, and our relationships to ourselves and other people. There’s comfort in knowing our current reality is all there is, and there’s no scary predictions of the future that bad things are certain to happen.

I used to think I could predict even the really immediate future, like Mondays for instance. We’re all guilty of thinking we can predict this. We think we know who we’re going to see and who we’re going to talk to and what we’re going to eat and what we’re going to be working on, but we know nothing about tomorrow. Nothing happens the same way twice, and this opens you up to so much adventure, and so much anticipation! Let go of the internal forecast and let the day surprise you. :)

Monique Muro

Monique is an exceedingly happy human from LA. She runs the blog A Novel Quest, and writes. A lot.

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