Even though I’m drafting on Mike.Sierra.Echo like there’s no tomorrow – I want to speak for a moment on the Matter of Mattering. Yes, of course you matter. I matter. Yes, I’m writing like a madman – I want to finish this draft by 12/31! Yet, I don’t want to forget that working on me is important, too. All my background work is helping the writing process move forward – I realized something the other day and I posted it on Mastodon:
Okay, now hold it: Now is not the time to devolve into ‘who hurt you’ discussions or meaningless requests for validation. When you come from a background of trauma and you’re working on healing, you’ll find these little nuggets of sad scattered through your life. Two things you cannot do when you find them:
- You can’t skip over them to immediately go ‘problem:solution.’ That fails to show yourself compassion and that is a method of trauma unto itself (“you feel pain – here’s the solution – thanks, I’m cured!”).
- You can’t spend the rest of your life talking about the nugget of sad. Pain is to be processed, not procured. Suffering is not a personality.
Talking about it, getting better at processing those nuggets, that’s the matter of mattering. If you didn’t learn how to meet your needs in the past, you can either live without those needs (Yay, being a hermit!) or learn how to do so in the future. Yes, you matter, but you must learn the habit of talking about your needs, acknowledging their existence and importance, and meeting them. All of those things are tasks that make up a skillset to be learned.
I’m going to get back to writing now, but wanted to share this. I hope you find it useful in your own personal growth journey.
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
