And I hope this helps someone else. It blew my mind. It's another long post though, so stay with me! I think I just had one of those breakthroughs that makes years of studying manifestation, frequency, shadow work, and the subconscious suddenly rearrange themselves in your head. There are thousands of people on YouTube talking about reality shifting, manifestation, Law of Attraction, shadow work, frequency, etc. You can study the same concept for YEARS, hear essentially the same thing a hundred different ways, and then one person phrases it slightly differently and suddenly... Oh. My. God. It clicks. Yesterday, I was listening to Mitesh Khatri. He was talking about emotions as patterns—almost like habits. And the way he explained it completely changed how I understood something I thought I already understood. His point was basically that crises and emergencies don't necessarily create the emotional pattern we're experiencing. They magnify what is already there. The external event gives us something to attach the emotion to. "Whoever wants to cry will find a reason to cry." Whoever is carrying anger will eventually find something to be angry about. Whoever is carrying abandonment will experience an event and say, See? I've been abandoned. It caused me to look at the last two years of my life completely differently. My marriage collapsed. I lost my home. I got a job and then lost the job. I've experienced uncertainty, rejection, grief, instability, and this recurring feeling that I need someone or something to choose me so I can finally feel safe again. I've spent a lot of time thinking: Of course I'm grieving, I'm sad, angry, etc... Look at everything that happened to me! But now I'm asking a different question: What if these things didn't create the emotional pattern? What if they amplified an emotional pattern that was already there? 🤯 Were these events the first time I had ever experienced these emotions? No! When I looked backward, I could see it... I grew up without much emotional safety. My mother wasn't emotionally or psychologically safe for me, and although I adored my father, he worked nights and wasn't available much during the week. Somewhere very early in life, I seem to have learned something like, "Safety can disappear" or "Safety doesn't exist" or "Support isn't guaranteed" or more importantly, "I have to handle things alone."

Do you really think things will go bad forever? Maybe you’re in a job you don’t like. Maybe it’s school, or something else entirely. Do you feel like it’s going to go on forever, that it will never end and you’ll suffer for the rest of your life? You are wrong. Let me tell you why. Back whenever I was younger I remember my final few months of school. I just wished it would end but it felt like it never would. It felt like it was eternity. Sure I knew that the exam leave was going to be in May or some time like that but it felt like it was so long away. It felt like it would be ages until then but in reality what happened was that time flew. Before I knew it I was at May time and then I was out for school. All I had was my exams a few more times in school and that was over. It was done finally. I thought that would go on forever and it's the same with, for instance, whenever I was building my copywriting business. I felt like forever I just have to send out these boring cold DMs repetitively to help people with a problem I didn't care about forever. Before long it was over and I just had dealt with it and got on with it and it was over then. (10 months) That's why you should just understand that things will not go bad forever and that's how it is. Remember that your mind just makes up problems to be worse than they actually are and that's something that is powerful to know in your healing journey. And a final lesson I learned is to stop waiting for a completion of anything and live life authentically now.

Here I go again uncovering my patterns... I had a major realization recently: one of my deepest fears is being abandoned, but I have also been abandoning myself for years. This realization came in part from reading Existential Kink by Dr. Carolyn Elliot two or three times (I revisit it). In that she often quotes Carl Jung and states that "Having is evidence of wanting." Meaning that when you have something in your life (even something you don't like) some part of you - your shadow - wants it. So, in part of my shadow integration... I think there was a part of me that wanted to be abandoned because it gave me a chance to always be the strong one. But it was also a pattern from my childhood with a narcissistic mother. I learned early to orient myself around other people’s moods, needs, approval, and ability to withdraw love or security. Later, I repeated that pattern with relationships, jobs, authority figures, and external outcomes. When life is difficult, I often return to myself. I walk, meditate, focus on my frequency, sleep properly, write, study German, rest, have fun, and take care of my needs. Life begins to feel good again. Then, as soon as something promising appears, I leave myself. I throw myself into the job, relationship, opportunity, or problem. My routines disappear. My standards and boundaries soften. My attention becomes consumed by something outside me, and I forget what I need in order to thrive. I started looking more closely at the different forms self-abandonment can take: • Ignoring my body’s need for food, sleep, rest, movement, or recovery until it becomes an emergency. • Allowing urgency, fear, or another person’s crisis to take over my entire life. • Letting someone else’s judgment determine how I feel about my competence or worth. • Performing, overgiving, staying agreeable, or becoming “easy” so that people will choose me or keep me. • Betraying my own boundaries because I am more afraid of someone else’s disappointment than my own discomfort.

Back not too long ago I used to think negative emotions/emotions where you didn't feel the best were a bad thing that we should strive to avoid but only recently have I realised how foolish that was. Let me explain. For example boredom: everything around you in your environment is designed to keep you hyper-stimulated constantly and boredom is a rare thing these days. It really only happens rarely, like in the rare case that whenever you're out on a road trip and your phone dies or whatever. Those are the only times that, for most people, it actually hits them and they get hit with the feeling of boredom. But actually it's a good thing because you see all the greatest ideas, all the most brilliant things, were made by people who had a lot of boredom of course. They came up with these brilliant ideas for making the iPhone, things of that nature, because they allowed themselves to get bored. It's something that I do daily. I like to just stare at the wall and just think, reflect, plan out ideas, for 30 minutes. It's a really brilliant thing and I just want to say that too many people try to avoid it. Too many people, as soon as they are just waiting for the food to come out of a restaurant, they'll just go straight to their phone. I'm not gonna lie, sometimes I do that as well. I am not perfect with this but sometimes it can be really good for you, valuable, to get by that boredom and to embrace it. You'll get your best ideas and it's good for your nervous system too whenever you're not hyper-stimulating it all the time and always being in a mode where you need to reply to message and etc. It's good to shut off from that every now and then.

I'm reading Vadim Zeland's Mastering Reality, he has a chapter called Superstition Vaccine, which basically states not to count our chickens before they hatch - not to boast about anything before you have it (or anything you can lose). So, how do we balance acting as if what we want is already ours, already having our desires without doing this? For context, I recently went through 3 rounds of interviews for a job I really wanted. It felt perfect - the location, the responsibilities, etc. I told my current colleagues because I was excited and we are all looking for jobs since our current company is headed toward insolvency. I booked hotel rooms in advance for weeks I knew I had to travel (luckily, with the option to pay later and cancel if needed). I thought this was all part of acting as if... They told me I was their top candidate...then chose someone else. I started questioning everything I thought I knew about manifesting/attracting/ quantum leaping, etc. In hindsight, I think it's good that it caused me to reexamine my beliefs. But I'm still not grasping the difference between acting as if, and not telling anyone.