Welcome to field notes, my casual blogging platform within my Substack Messy Dialectic. If you are looking for refined essays and discourse, check here for the latest posts. If you love rambling, brain dumps, and chit-chats about life experiences, then continue reading on.
You know what’s worse than working incredibly hard for something? Working incredibly hard for something, and then coming to the realization that the thing you’ve been working so hard for will never come to fruition. Yes, this is about helping someone out, fine, you caught me. But I think the most mind bending part about it all is the reminiscing on the time spent on workshopping, helping, and attempting to mold someone into not just a better form—but a better form that they claimed to have wanted. Hell, even trying to lay breadcrumbs so that they could follow me into the holy lands of growth and expansion, just to come to the realization that you can’t actually help people into change. They must help themselves.
I feel too old to be realizing this, but then I remember that I’m only 28 years young, barely on the move into her first Saturn Retrograde (Saturn in Aries baby), and that it’s actually a great time to be coming across this realization, so that way I don’t carry it into my 30s.
I donno, I think I just thought that I could carry all of my love ones with me, or grab them by their hands and drag them to where they claim they want to go, but I’ve come to learn that the things that we say are sometimes not the things we actually mean (both in positive and negative regards). Sometimes, we want incredible things that we are genuinely not willing to put in the work to achieve, and sometimes, we’re mean to ourselves when in reality, we meant to express our needs so that we can feel more loved and held, so that way we can fill in the gaps of the void that makes us express ourselves negatively.
It makes me sad, but it’s okay. I think that is just truly life. Que sera, sera.
After absorbing this lesson into my brain and then into my body, I took some time to think about what I would do with the extra energy, time, and mental space that I had suddenly acquired by no longer extending myself in this way. From there, I decided that the only rational thing to do next would be to use all of that newfound energy on myself. Just blast my being, my goals, my desires, everything with all of this energy that I’ve been reserving for everyone else’s growth and change. Pour all of the advice, the love, the determination, the optimism, the bad-bitch-energy, the everything into myself.
What happened next, or rather over the next couple months (I have been working on this part of myself since around… October of 2025? With it reaching a true zenith of being so forreal with myself around December 2025?) was that I really began to get into a deep flow state with myself. All of a sudden I could hear my thoughts and my desires louder in my mind, thus giving me a much better compass to follow in my day to day life. I found my conversations in therapy changing as I began to finally put the spotlight on myself and my innermost issues, versus how other people’s issues kept affecting me. I began to wean myself off of several individuals who definitely weren’t the best for me energetically (and also because they were toxic af lmao), and even found it easier to wean off of doomscrolling and being excessively tapped into the news. It just suddenly became easier to live my life as an individual, rather than my life as the person who kept getting affected by other people’s mess and messes.
I definitely still have the issue of wanting to give sooooo fucking much even to people who don’t really give much back to me, but at least I’m working on one part of the equation: the part where I am such an insanely active participant in other people’s journeys. I know, it probably sounds terrible to say, but idk man. I be so obsessed with helping others because I know what it’s like to literally suffer (yay trauma!), and that makes me project that desire to not suffer onto others when in reality, no one asked! So then I end up in this mental headspace where I’m not realizing why no one is reciprocating to ease my suffering, but again, the reality is that no one asked to begin with, so of course no one is coming to my aid.
In a way, I entered them into a contract that they never agreed to.
I think the most reassuring part of all of this though, is that my closest and dearest girlfriends have [digitally] looked me in the face and have said girl… stop… lol… Which, in a way was very reassuring to me. Being told by my own friends that even they wanted me to stop tending to them so aggressively was a relief that I’ve never experienced in my entire life. I’m just so used to people taking from me or having the expectation that I’m just here existing to be taken from, that I donno… it has definitely been a breath of fresh air to be told to chill out with that impulse, but at the same time it’s a very scary undertaking to finally be living a life that is fully my own, but tbh the alternative hasn’t been the most effective so it’s time to be a lil afraid and live this life of my own lmao.
Per usual, I’m workin’ on it, and I’ll deploy more rambles when the time comes!