I can hear cars honking from a distance and planes flying up above for 30 minutes or so. The table creaking as I cut pieces on the sintra board for the project that I am working on. The air conditioning humming a few feet away from me.
"Here we go again," I said to myself.
The lonely feeling of once again training for a competition.
Do not get me wrong. Training is my anchor. I would never not train. But with training comes the feeling of being alone. All alone in the training room nothing but hearing yourself typing and the sounds I aforementioned above.
And with being alone comes all the thoughts and feelings that you kept buried while you are trying to keep yourself busy, at least for me.
in the echo of nothing to fill your mind in, with only you staring at your computer, anxious thoughts started caving in. the unworthiness. loneliness. feeling of abandonment. imposter syndrome. pain. grief.
however, my mind, now, starts doing something differently. it shows me shreds of evidence that those aren't true. it brings up the warm memories that I have with the people I love, the memories of when I was satisfied with my designs, and the joy that I get from receiving and giving compassion.
I've had three training periods before this. And I now know that this is the process that I usually go through during training: feeling like I'm not good enough, unworthy, and lonely. And I feel grateful because I now have evidence that those aren't true.
And it makes me think how strong my younger version has been. Having gone through all those past training periods with all those feelings of doubt and confusion and self-sabotage, armed with nothing but her faith, naivety, and optimism.
Similar to a phoenix rising from the ashes, my younger self has gone headstrong even with all those doubts and emerged with stories and pieces of evidence so that her future self would never doubt herself again given what she had gone through before.
interesting how I kept shedding and adding layers of who I am,
with every new piece of evidence from every experience that I go through provides, comes another piece to the never-ending puzzle of my identity.
I'll go collecting puzzle pieces—as I do know I will have a lot—on this last training period ahead of me.
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