Hello Coco : A diary

Tag: blog

  • an overwhelm.

    I am in another phase of change in my life and because of it i have been spiraling into insecurities that laid dormant for the last 10 or so months.

    This new relationship I am in is getting serious. He told me that he loved me, introduced me to his family, and we spent thanksgiving together all in the same week. I’m still navigating how I feel but on top of that we’ve been having some misalignments & miscommunications that have me cautious. Last night being the worst one which caused him to walk out of my apartment, send accusatory texts, and flat out say, “You don’t respect me.” We’re having a talk tonight.

    With all of that happening, i’ve been a little outside my body and letting my mind just take control of everything. over analyzing.

    additionally, i started to advocate for my career this year and tell my boss that i wanted to get into HR eventually. Now that I’ve made it real and said it out loud, I find myself self-critiquing how I am at work as I would imagine the Hr team is doing of me – perhaps watching me, seeing if I can make it on their team. the imposter syndrome is telling me that I’m not cut-out. That i’m too impulsive and I’m not super calm and soft spoken like some of the other people on the team. Comparing.

    Luckily enough, past all of these internal monologues, my mind shuts off when I go to dance class. I have an outlet that I need to take advantage of more. I have my writing that I’ve left to the wayside these past few months and I haven’t picked up my book in 2 months at least.

    I’m taking care of myself physically, but emotionally and mentally I’m on these other planets trying to make them make sense in my orbit. Do they belong here? Am I on the write trajectory?

    I keep trying to bring myself back down to earth and touch grass but it’s been difficult lately. I want to control things. I’m torn between the thought of ‘make it happen for yourself’ and ‘let things come to you when it’s right’ and balancing both.

    I’m not sure if my boyfriend will be the long haul considering his conflict resolution skills are lacking, and his emotional intelligence is on a PIP. I’m not sure if I will get into HR or if the roles on that team will even make me happy.

    truth is I’m just uncomfortable in the uncertainty of it all, not so much whether each works out or not. I just want answers, but I know I can’t force it.

  • Redefining the ‘Comfort Zone’

    I still laugh to myself when I say that I’m casually [short-term / he is moving] dating a man who has a wife and a six-year-old kid. Ethical non-monogamy & polyamory in general is a concept that I’m still trying to wrap my head around comfortably.

    The truth is I haven’t been comfortable in a long time even before he came along. I have been working outside my comfort zone for six months navigating what it means to be a single woman at thirty from spending more than half of her twenties in a serious relationship with a woman.

    I’ve been navigating working at a start-up for the first time ever where being ‘scrappy’ and being comfortable with ‘building the plane as we fly it’ minus well be the values rather than the wordy ones they picked for the investors.

    With all of this being said, I’m trying to find my comfort zone again. I’m scouring every part of my brain and heart to feel something familiar, but when I look around everything is new. My apartment, my body, my thoughts, my boundaries, and my relationships. There isn’t anything around me that reminds me of a ‘comfortable’ place.

    Some would say that, that is a good thing. That I am on the precipice of growth and establishing a new, hopefully better sense of ‘self’. When things get hard though; like when your parents don’t talk to you anymore because you set a boundary, like when your apartment catches fire and you are forced to grieve your old life, you’re navigating a new relational lifestyle where jealousy is something you’re actively fighting, AND you’re trying to find your new self underneath all the discomfort?

    Where’s my blankey? My nightlight? My stuffy or my cuddles? They’ve been tossed due to the smoke and simply, no one is here but me.

    That in itself is another major discomfort after living with someone for the past 4 years or so up until January. The cherry on top is she has already found another girlfriend and is bringing her to mutual friend events. Today I left my friend’s house before they could show up for the fourth of July festivities because I didn’t want to watch the live action of her moving on. Even if I was the one to break it off in the first place, I didn’t want any more discomfort than I already have.

    I think the point of all of this is that in times like these, how do people build new comfort zones from unchartered territory?

    Do we force it with hook-ups and sex? What about food, drinking, weed? Perhaps comfort in taking care of ourselves and movement. Comfort in going into the deeper past and memories; going through old photo albums and journals.

    Regardless, when I’m sitting in bed at 11:45 P.M on a Friday night watching Sex And The City on mute, I look around my apartment thinking, “this is so very different.” When I’m sitting alone on my balcony drinking my morning coffee and letting the thoughts free flow through my brain I think to myself once more, “this is so very different.”

    I’m not the same person I used to be a little over six months ago. If I went back, I wouldn’t recognize her. She was comfortable.

    Comfortably oblivious to how lacking her life truly was.

    Maybe sorting through my mind, heart and soul for a new comfort that isn’t so familiar right now isn’t a bad thing at all.

    What if comfort will now feel like:

    — Trusting myself more; that I can get through what comes next with how far I’ve come already.

    — Psychological safety from the people who were never there for me the way I asked them to be via boundaries.

    — Looking at myself in the mirror to find someone who cares about her body now.

    — The calm of walking into my empty apartment knowing its safe. It’s my home and my home only; a place to feel how I need to feel whenever I feel it.

    — Letting my body marinate in the discomfort and getting used to it so that I’m stronger going forward and don’t need to rely on temporary fixes like sex, alcohol, shopping, and food.

    Comfort will come in the way that I need it to. It will look and feel different but then become familiar once more. It will mold and shape with wherever my life takes me. I still have a long way to go before I reach it fully, but that is okay, and I will be okay.

    Who will I be in the next six months? I will look back at this post and this all will look completely different. It could be stretched, absent, abudant, confusing, chaotic, or carefree.

    Either way I got me and that’s comfort in itself.

  • Losing Everything to Find Me Again

    If you’ve been following along, there has been a fuck ton of shit happening in the last 6 months. A breakup from a long-term relationship, moving into a studio apartment, finding out my health wasn’t what I had expected, getting closure that my parents will never be what I need and now…an apartment fire started by my cat to top it all off.

    I’m looking around my place laughing at how empty it is. The couch, linens, food, and kitchenware that all had to go due to the chemical and plastic fumes. It echos in here now.

    Coming home to find what it was tore me up inside. It was one of the worst days of my life. With everything else tacked on I was pretty much crashing out and everyone around me knew – which has been highly unusual and uncomfortable. I cried for days grieving the items that I had bought mutually with my ex and how I was now forced to actually move on from them. I settled with the giving up the impulse purchases that I had held onto out of guilt. I went through every single item I owned and got rid of more than 50% of it due to the fire.

    Now that I have finally collected myself, 1 week later, I have come to terms with the fact that I really had to lose a lot these last 6 months so that I could find myself again. I have done a personal inventory on not just my apartment, but my relationships and my body.

    I have recently purged old, very gray boundaries with my parents for shiny new ones that protect me from perpetual disappointment. I have given up a lot of peace to indulge in sexual exploration with men; men that didn’t care about me but taught me valuable lessons that have raised the bar on many levels sexually and emotionally.

    I threw away the me that wore sweats every day and was consistently high, for a sparkly version that admires her body and all I put it through – enough to go to the doctor, exercise, eat healthy, and feel whole again inside of it.

    And now here I am literally throwing shit away. Items that I couldn’t quite part with on my own because I felt I had to keep them, maybe because I actually needed them – sure – but also because it was the only things left in my life that was from my old one. An anchor into something comfortably sad and an ugly shade of velvet gray.

    That couch was one of the last things that needed to go so that I could just move on already from my old self, life, and relationship. I mean I didn’t need the fire to do that, but it forced me to emergency eject out of the fog and into reality.

    So, as I look at my empty apartment, there’s no one here but the echo of my own voice talking back to me saying, “you’re alone now”. My initial reaction is to cry, tuck myself into bed and let myself drown in loud music that will fill the unknown parts of my brain that are too scary to hear right now. The ones that say:

    “What now?”

    “What if something happened? You don’t even have an emergency contact.”

    “What do you want to do with your life now?”

    I can choose to feel sorry for myself, which don’t get me wrong I lived on that train for a moment, but I started to take stops in “No one is expecting me – that’s nice” land and “I don’t have to stress out about making sure the dishwasher is loaded correctly for fear of getting snapped at” land. I jumped off that train altogether when this fire happened and I realized that if my life was like it was 6 months ago, this would have been ten times worse.

    She would have made it worse. The person I was then would have let her drag me down into a shame hole on how I’m not responsible enough, reminding me of how this inconveniences her through pouting and passive digs, that this fuck-up (though not my fault) is just another example of me letting her down and not having my shit together.

    She made me feel less than her all the time and I put my blinders on for what – an emergency contact? ‘Stability’? A family that was way better than my own and invited me in wholly? Safety? I would say comfortability, but it wasn’t comfort. It was people would say, ‘delulu’ and not the good kind.

    So, I’ll sit here eating my chicken pot pie in peace knowing that no matter what comes my way, I got me. I will never let myself down the way I did then. That no matter what the fuck happens, no matter how much I ‘lose’, I still have me to fall back on and she’s pretty fucking awesome.

  • Rewiring Past Decisions: My 40-hour+ Work Week

    I’ve noticed as of late that my job holds little in my brain for debate considering it gives me stability in the world we live in today. I have a mountain of debt as well that keeps me tied to it in a way that feels a little repressive. With that, very slight sour feelings arise when I think of my job and the pressures they entail. I’ve noticed when I ask myself about it, I want to clam up a bit because I don’t feel like I have an option to debate right now.

    I’m making big decisions in my life right now regarding the possibility of moving out of state, my sexuality, and lots of other personal life choices, but this is something I find myself avoiding more often than not. I’ve let myself do it too and in this moment I feel the courage to see it head on even if just for this post at first.

    Being in Recruiting, my value is held by metrics of how quickly I can close jobs and how happy I can make my hiring managers in the process. Being that recruiting is a people business – candidates are half the equation – it can be unreliable, yet we still feel the brunt of the deadline regardless of that variability.

    I’ve been doing my line of work since I moved here in 2017, though in various settings and angles. It was the first job that offered enough money to eat more than Rice-a-Roni and PBJ sandwhiches. I clung to it and put every effort I could into making those numbers and deadlines my mission for survival. I eventually worked my way up and now am senior in my profession making over six figures. Since I was bad with money in my twenties though and moved to another state on a whim with no money in my savings, I accrued a fuck ton of debt that has my salary wrapped up, so I still come from a state of scarcity and lack.

    I feel shame around my debt and my financial decisions that I had made, but with everything going on in my life I’ve been able to compartmentalize and have fun in the present with everything else I’m up to. Reaching into my truest desires elsewhere has allowed me to take a breathe from over thinking my finances and live in moments that don’t cost a thing. It’s been helping me have a more healthy look at my relationship with money and even so my debt.

    This entry isn’t about my debt though. It’s about the job I choose to have for 40 hours+ a week. With me initially getting into this field out of fear, lack, and need for stability (rightfully so), I look back and ask myself that if none of those feelings were present what profession would I have chosen for myself. If I had came to Colorado with a safety net and could take my time, what would I have explored? Would I have used my Professional Writing degree?

    There’s always been a part of me that has considered writing as a job whether it be professional writing like technical, editing, proposals, etc; or fiction writing like the stories that I’m verrrry slowwwly working through right now.

    Impostor syndrome creeps up when I think about how I haven’t had the motivation to work on my fantasy story in over a month, how I am taking a very long break from my psychological thriller novel, and how I over-critique myself which sucks the joy out of projects/this blog sometimes. This blog is something I just started up a little over a month ago and I’m addicted to it. It’s a season of writing that I’ve really leaned into unexpectedly.

    This type of writing though really requires me to dig into my internal monologue, personal psychological analysis, internal conflict, and traumas. It can be too much sometimes, or I harp on the same things over and over again as I’m processing through it. I can run through loops, get lost, distract myself and end up looking back trying to reverse outline because of my ADHD. Even with all of that though, it’s been keeping me very present in my life and letting repressed feelings bubble up to the surface so that I can see them for what they are.

    All of this said, my writing fluctuates. It’s inconsistent, doesn’t have a clear theme or direction for a career path, and I’ve always told myself I’m not a good editor and technical writing would be too stiff for me to do daily. Additionally, what if I do it as a career and the pressure and critique of it ruin my love for it?

    So, then I sit with myself on other ideas.

    When I was young I wanted to be like Nancy Drew – a Detective! My dad told me to choose something more realistic so I landed on a Veterinarian for a while, but I quickly found out that I couldn’t handle that emotionally and another factor is they aren’t paid well. Also vet school is so expensive. I took a web development boot camp a few years back to see if my brain could handle something like that, but absolutely not. I was always creative and liberal arts focused in high school and college – math & arithmetic were never even an average skill set of mine.

    I’ve taken career quizzes, personality tests, legitimately Googled jobs and just peeked around for ideas. It’s ironic that I’m a recruiter and doing so much as if I haven’t seen every job (in corporate land) out there already.

    I’ve considered being a career coach/government career assistant because I love helping people find their potential and getting them on the right path – teaching them about interviewing and resume development. I’ve considered getting into the operations side of Human Resources like being a business partner, and I even completed my PHR last year before switching companies. I just don’t know if I will be able to transition into that department being that I’m at a start-up and everything is quite small. The job market is trash right now, so the chances of a company taking an opportunity on someone without direct experience is unlikely considering they are probably getting people who do have the skill sets already.

    Out of everything I explored, leaning into HR will be the best match for me. Keeping writing as a hobby I think will be the healthiest option, and if I want to publish something down the road – if the stars align – then fabulous.

    Considering my initial point, my job holds my heart in a binder of sorts. It’s more difficult for me to be risky with my job than it is with anything else in my life. It makes me feel too dependent, and weak thinking that if I lost my job I will be in ruin due to my financial situation. This means that taking leaps feels like an immense effort. Advocating for my growth at my current company, asking for more and leaning in feels scary. On top of that, because HR isn’t a ‘passion’ of mine – it’s a paycheck that offers more stability than recruiting – it’s not necessarily something I’m like “Oh, I want to do this!” it’s a means to an end where I’m thinking, “I should do this because it will make my life simpler, but I need to start making the decisions.”

    Perhaps changing my mindset around going after an HR job will help motivate me into making the risk feel even more worth it. If I put a deeper ‘why’ behind it, it could leverage me to take the risks. I think one thing too that I forget often is what I ‘deserve’.

    One day, a few years back, I was visiting my therapist and she prescribed me a higher dose of antidepressants. My internal monologue found its way out as I was debating when I would start the new dose based on logistics of my schedule and picking up the prescription. None of the logistical factors were all that daunting- it was more coming from a place of laziness when she asked me why I couldn’t just pick them up that day. She followed my rant by saying, “Don’t you think you deserve it?”

    It stuck with me because I do find that I talk myself out of what I deserve based solely on the weakness in my mind tied to lack of motivation and laziness. That was the depression and anxiety talking to a certain extent. Though I’m medicated completely now and happy, I still run into that internal conflict from time to time – including right now.

    You want to change fields so that you can be more stimulated and seen as more of a business partner than transactional- Don’t you deserve that?

    You want to keep working on your writing projects because it fuels your heart and creative spirit – don’t you deserve that?

    What all do I deserve? And when it comes to a job, what do people deserve from me but my best self? I can only give my best self when I feel like I’m stimulated, challenged, and living up to my own potential. Do I feel like I have all those things now in recruiting at my current job? I’m definitely challenged, but stimulated is another thing. Recruiting is something I’ve always done therefor I know all the ins and outs of it – every job I may work on might be vastly different from the last, but the way you go about it is truly the same. If you experience obstacles there are similar ways out of them as you’ve done prior. But I could say that same thing with every job out there.

    I think I just want to feel valued in my role as a partner rather than someone that needs to hit specified numbers, metrics and cater to the needs of a stakeholder as if they are my client. I have ideas and a voice that I want to use. Recruiting can almost feel so transactional and I want more depth and challenge in my day-to-day. I want projects on enablement and process improvements. I want to uncover gaps and think logically about things that could have a high impact. I believe I can meet in the middle and do that within a HR based position – I just need the opportunity to get there. I deserve that opportunity.

    So, if Mel Robbins says that each decision I make can change my entire life then what decisions should I make at this point regarding my job? What risks can I make to get me out of ‘stuck’ and stimulate my day-to-day life?

    Instead of living in the state of scarcity – how can I go after what I deserve?