Over the last 2 weeks of December, I ripped out and recycled papers from a bunch of notebooks, something I've been meaning to do for years.
One of the notebooks I found was from 2008, when I lived in Yosemite and worked at the employee recreation center, wiping down exercise machines and leading knit nights. This particular notebook was full of highlighted and underlined notes, all relating to my Chinese astrological chart.
I had gotten an astrology reading in the hopes of figuring out what my passion was, and I was determined to find some useful information in the 2 hours of audio recording that was my reading. While I don't remember much about the reading anymore, or how it's applied to my life, what struck me was how determinedly I was looking outside of myself for answers.
Up until then, I'd learned to not trust my emotions, but to put my trust in people who seemed like experts, who seemed smarter and more confident than I was. This meant that people who acted confidently were like catnip to me, and I would follow them with the hope that some of that confidence would rub off on me.
It didn't.
In fact, I questioned myself every step of the way, uncertain about what I wanted and what would be best for me and what I should be doing (notice that should?) but all the same, trying to live up to someone's else’s standard that I had absorbed as my own. I couldn't trust my emotions, and that meant I didn’t trust myself.
Return to 2022: Looking over these hopeful, desperate pages now, I wish I could hold that lost twenty-something girl-woman close to my heart and squeeze her tight. How I wish I could tell her that all the information she needed was inside her; when she'd been trained and taught to ignore and repress her emotions, but in fact, those emotions were what held the key to knowing who she was, and what was truly important to her.
I picked up the book, The Language of Emotions, by Karla McLaren, just a couple of years after this astrology reading, and with her emotion-welcoming concepts and practices, I began to shift from an outside-in focus to an inside-out focus; from placing my trust in other people's ideas and values to identifying my own, and trusting in them. Without this work, I don't know where I would be in the world, or who.
Learning to trust myself has been a long process of learning my emotions and my emotional patterns, which are unique to me. No one has developed a chart that says, "here is how you function in the world, Anchen." I've developed that for myself.
With the foundational concepts from The Language of Emotions, I have an understanding of how my emotions work, and how I can work with my emotions. And I trust my emotions. They’re always true to me.