Episode 73 - What I'm Working On At The Moment

This episode is all about honesty and vulnerability as I share what I’m currently working on in my life. While I’m a coach, I’m a person, too. As a person, I struggle with and navigate many challenges, especially those specifically related to womanhood. These experiences, part of my ongoing journey of growth and learning, make me a great coach and, despite what negative self-talk might try to convince me, a great human, just like you. So, if you’re struggling with anything or working through something, I want you to know that I’m in it with you, and I’m here to support you. Can’t wait for you to listen. 

Here’s a link to Episode 59: Transparency as a Woman in the Self-Help World, referenced in this episode. 

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Transcript

0:51

You are listening to the ex good girl podcast. Episode 73. It happens from time to time that in a client session, I will share something that I am struggling with or something that is hard for me. And sometimes clients have a reaction that makes me think. That I need to do a better job of being a regular person because I'm an amazing coach. I have so much love for the people that I work with. I know people pleasing in and out. I am good at what I do and I'm a person. I'm a human. And so this little episode is just about what I'm working on, what I'm reading, where I am finding joy and where I'm processing a lot of grief and sadness. Because, number one, I think that in the wellness industry. And I did an entire podcast episode about, you know, what it's like to be a woman in this wellness self improvement space and some of the challenges that come up. Um, I think that was episode, let me look, let me look 59, but I also, I just always want you to know that I'm a regular person. I am dealing with a tremendous amount of. Anger and rage right now. I think the perimenopausal journey is just shifted into overdrive. About three months ago, it felt like my brain just hit a wall and whatever hormones estrogen I had kind of helping me out before, like it had been declining for a while, but about three months ago just hit a wall. And at the same time, I was feeling terrible. My gut issues really kind of ramped up. And then I had an issue with a cyst in a breast exam that came up that caused some concern. And so I'm just dealing with this really unique mix of grief and overwhelm and rage about all of these changes in my body. That have already happened and I'm just feeling the effects. I think that if you are a woman and You are, you know, navigating this very, you know, Western health care system that we have. It's failing women, and I'm feeling failed, which is also so interesting because I also know that I have a responsibility here. So it's that weird give and take the complexity of a relationship with the health care system. What should I have been reading? What should I have been preparing for? I don't know, because no one told me. But what I do know is that the grief, the anger, the overwhelm, the frustration of having, you know, three prescriptions of three different things to help my ADHD not work. And so it's nothing but side effects and things not working. I'm, I'm in that right now where everything seems like it's wrong. And I can hear, you know, the, the, The overstatement in that everything is not wrong, but being in my body is a fundamentally different experience than I've ever had. And there's so much grief, there's so much grief about what my body used to be able to do and can't anymore about things that are hard now that were never hard about how difficult it is to just think. and produce ideas and get them out in a way that is satisfactory. So that's a big thing that is just really human for me right now. I'm also working on the next level of honesty with myself. Two of the emotions that I'm watching really closely in myself are envy and dread because The things that I envy are the things that I long for. Usually, um, if I walk into the other room and my husband is laying on the couch taking a little nap, I feel the envy rise in me when I see a woman doing Mmm. Big things, taking up space, sharing her opinion, not apologizing in ways that I still don't have access to yet. I feel envy and I used to feel shame about that because women are not supposed to feel envious. Go read on our best behavior by Elise Lunen. And now I look at it as really valuable information because it's a place where I'm not being honest about what I want. It's a place where I don't yet feel either capable or aware of what I want for me. And I noticed it in other people, but I haven't yet either given myself permission to say that I want it or made a space for it to happen. Dread, uh, I'm dreading something that's coming up in a couple of weeks. Um, yeah, because I really don't want to do it. I said yes. And have committed some financial resources and other people's time to it. And so I'm just kind of sitting with, am I, what am I going to do? Because dread always tells me when I have over committed or when I have not been honest, Or not taking the time to really forecast what that experience is going to be like for me. And I just said, yes. And sometimes my brain says, well, just say yes. And we'll figure it out later. And sometimes that still happens. And so I'm sitting with envy and I'm sitting with dread in service of this desire to be more honest, this desire to be, um, more honest with myself and with other people around me. I've mentioned a quote a couple times that has had a huge impact on me lately. Um, it's Friedrich Nietzsche. He said, most people prefer dishonest peace. To honest conflict and so I'm really using that as a, um, as a way of seeing the places in my life where I'm still in dishonest peace and places where I might be an honest conflict. And that's been helping me a lot lately. One of the places in particular that I am trying to have more honest conflict is in my relationship with family and friends. Um, I have, I often, after I leave a, a group, uh, you know, dinner or hanging out with friends, I often have these thoughts about how I'm too much. I said, I said things that were dumb. I was being weird. And it's really related to my exuberance. I am a very, exuberant person when I love something. And I always feel like it comes off as weird or dumb or silly or too much. And so I'm really watching the way that my parts talk to me after I'm with friends, because this is probably very normal. I didn't feel like I had a lot of good friendships growing up. I always had one or two, but. I always also had a lot of relationships where I pretended and I was very guarded and I only let people see certain things. And I still have some relationships, I think, where I act that way, and I'm trying to not do that in this honesty quest. I think, I think that doing this is one of the things that will benefit me the most because I really am taking on like the complexity of relationships and trying to work with my parts that are scared. That are panics that we won't have friends that are so worried. We'll be alone and to comfort them so that I can show up differently in the relationships that I have friendships, family, relationships as well. Parts work has become a huge, huge, huge thing that I do for myself and my clients. Um, It is magical to me to find parts of myself that need me to teach them, to comfort them, to show up for them, to be with them and to do that work and to see how instantly there is a result, how instantly I feel better, how instantly I'm able to see things differently. I've had several things come up. In the last little while I shared about an incident on the road, um, in another episode with Serena Hicks. So I'll share a different one here. There is a part of me that holds so much sadness and it holds a lot of sadness around friendship because I often experienced rejection in friendships. I think that's a normal human thing. And so this part just kind of took all the sadness. And there was another part of me that was like, okay, we've got to bounce back. We got to get out there again. We got to try again. We got to meet a new friend. We got it. And so the sad part took all the sadness so that the bounce back part would go out there and try again. And lately, and actually not even lately in the last six months, I've spent so much time with that sad part, letting her be sad, hearing all of her sadness. How alone she has felt with the, just the mountain of sadness that she's collected over my lifetime, hearing her, loving her, talking to her, thanking her, and it's working. I'm not as sad. I don't feel the repulsion to that sadness that I felt in the beginning. I feel like it is such a beautiful part. Of me. It's such a beautiful part of just the complexity of human relationships, and I can honor that sadness in such a different way. And I just don't feel it as intensely. It started out just by going on a walk with my sadness. If you've seen the latest Inside Out movie, um, or even the first one, it's exactly like just seeking that emotion on a walk, hearing whatever it needs to tell me. Sounds crazy, works like magic. I'm reading a couple of good books. Uh, I'm reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. I know that's kind of been out there for a while, but I'm really loving just the simple story. Um, and I'm also reading What It Takes to Heal by Prentice Hemphill. It's amazing. The way she talks about Reimagining relationships. And the way that she talks about how those re imagined relationships really change the world, that's, that's an incredible, you know, boiling it down to two sentences, but it is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. So that's what I'm doing. I would love to hear what you're doing. I would love to hear what you're reading. I would love to hear what you're working on. I would love to hear where you feel like your next work is not because we're broken. No, no, no. But because we want to change the experience that we're having and you can DM me and you can always email me Sarah at Sarah Fisk dot coach, because above everything, I believe we are in this together. And that by listening to each other, by holding space for each other, number one, nobody gets put on a pedestal because we're all just humans fucking up and trying to work it out. And secondly, we're all just humans trying to work it out and we can be there for each other in beautiful ways. Even just sharing the knowledge that we're all working on things and what's helping. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.