What Are You Feeling?

Welcome to Hot Girl Breakthrough, where I provide actionable ideas and curated insights to help you do you, but better.

Today’s Breakdown

Question: How do you feel?

Let’s call my extended break a hiatus. A writer’s strike of sorts. Ironically, I abandoned you after patting myself on the back for 4 weeks of consistency. I could blame newfound motherhood as I now have a four-legged baby who has taken copious amounts of my time and phone storage due to my incessant need to document his daily experience.

The truth of my retrieve however is best articulated by author and psychotherapist Owen O’Kane who wrote “It’s difficult to be a light for others unless you are willing to take care of yourself in the dark.”

Over the last few weeks, I had a proverbial power cut and found myself without a reliable torch. It’s been messy and I’ve cried, meditated and breathed through it in an attempt to reset my own fuse box.

I had to ask myself, am I giving to myself what I’m giving to others? The answer was and probably still is, a resounding no.

Like a full coverage concealer, I’m alarmingly good at camouflaging my emotional discomfort but there had been a gradual deterioration of what are typically baseline habits.

I’d completely lost my appetite and had to force myself to eat one minuscule meal a day. I became reclusive with loved ones by not responding to messages or calls. I’d stopped looking at my list of things that energise me and bring me joy.

Healing, much like public transport, runs on its own schedule. Progress is sometimes so incrementally minute that you often don’t realise the huge leaps that are unfolding over time. The plateaus that feel like walking through treacle are so painstakingly frustrating that you think never you’ll overcome them, and even worse are the relapses which can throw you so off-kilter you feel yourself back at square one.

Fundamentally, a return to the start is never truly possible. You have the experience, scars and metaphorical cheat codes of having already survived the level. You might feel like you’re back at the beginning, but the reality is you now carry wisdom, a toolkit and most importantly the evidence that you overcame it the first time. It becomes a slightly delusional trust exercise with yourself that things will get better.

To start course correcting, I try and work out what I’m feeling. Acknowledging that you feel something is fundamental, even if you’re not entirely sure what it is. Allow yourself to feel it without judgement or shame. Like seeing your ex at a club, you don’t have to go and say hello but be aware that they’re lurking.

My next step is to try and identify the feeling. This is not a simple task for those like me who have historically suppressed their emotions as a means of survival. If you’ve ever had a therapist ask how something made you feel and your mind went blank, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

I regularly look at the emotion wheel to help me decipher what I’m feeling. Turns out, when I’m raging, it’s normally frustration. A lot of my recent sadness has actually been grief, not necessarily the loss of a person but grieving situations, old versions of things, and perhaps even old versions of me.

The not-so-secret secret of emotional awareness is giving your brain some space to think. My conduit of choice is meditation. I love lots of woo-woo practices but never thought meditation was for me. I’d tried it several times before this whole ordeal and found it wholly mundane as my mind would predictably wander to something unequivocally more stimulating than breathing cross-legged in silence.

Consider me your brown-skinned Gwyneth Paltrow because I am a convert, particularly to guided meditation because I need some steering. I may meditate 2-3 times a day, sometimes for 25-ish minutes or sometimes just a quickie because you’ve got to get it in while you can.

Unlike sex, there’s no bad way to meditate. At worst, you indulge in a bit of a lie down while listening to a soothing voice over some dulcet pan-pipe tones. But more often than not, your mind can quieten down to ask the questions your protective mind would rather avoid as you tap into yourself enough to find an answer.

When I slowed down and gave my mind the time and space to think, I realised I am struggling with not feeling good enough. More visceral than imposter syndrome, there is something deeply rooted in me which is stopping me from making big decisions, therefore holding me back.

I was able to identify where in my present life I wasn’t feeling good enough, how it showed up in past choices and identify the cause of where it stemmed from. By this point, I was ugly crying on a Friday night on my sofa, which sounds like hell but was deeply cathartic. I wrote down a not-hugely-legible-yet coherent list of where and why these feelings came from.

Purge over, I wrote myself a manifesto of how I choose to feel moving forward. If I'm the architect of my own life, writing a set of rules and reminders felt crucial to changing my narrative.

If like so many others I’ve spoken to recently, you’re feeling out of sorts, don’t focus on what the emotion is, simply begin by accepting that it’s there.

Guided Meditation Recommendations:

Hypnotherapist Jessica Boston creates personalised meditations for her clients. I paid for her 12-week Homecoming programme and it was the best investment I ever made. I now have a bespoke arsenal of meditations at my disposal depending on what I need.

Chrissy Rutherford recently shared this free resource. I’ve listened to a few and would highly recommend.

Apps such as Insight Timer, Headspace, Calm or even YouTube have an abundance of practitioners.

A thread of personal rules

A tweet I’d bookmarked that I find fascinating because I’m intrigued by how other people get shit done.

Three of my personal rules:

1. No meetings before 10am.

2. Always take time off on my birthday.

3. Never buy cheap butter. If going to France, bring at least 6 butters back. Yes, the French customs at Eurostar look at me weirdly.

What are yours? Send me an email here of your top 3 and I’ll collate some into next week’s newsletter.

Breakthroughs

📹️ Durand Bernarr’s Tiny Desk performance is just pure musical happiness. I saw him live 5ish years ago as he sang back-up for Erykah Badu. This is 22 minutes of a vocal range and control like no other, supported by an otherwordly band. Press play, turn the volume up and I’ll be shocked if you don’t smile throughout.

📱 This affirmation app has shockingly made a big difference to my mood. As the only app on my phone with notifications on, I’ve set mine to 4 pushes a day and it’s a welcome boost. It’s free, although there is a paid version which I recently bought and tbh there’s not much difference.

💻️ Fragrance lover? Scent & Song newsletter explores the connection between perfume and music, given the shared use of “notes”. This edition explores the distinction and evolution of celebrity endorsements and the surprising fragrances that famous people wear. Hillary Clinton apparently is a Thierry Mugler, Angel fan.

See you next week!

Rhea x

PS. Thoughts, feedback or just wanna say hi? Email me here