“Growth isn’t never losing your shit. Sometimes it’s noticing you’re about to and choosing what happens next.”

Welcome to My Fucking World!!!!!

Today is NOT one of those zen, calm, cool and collected kinda days. LOL You know those mornings where you wake up, sip your coffee, look lovingly at your perfectly organized schedule and gracefully move from one task to the next while sunshine streams through the window? Yeahhhh... we're not doing that shit today.

Instead, I've spent part of my morning making multiple calls to the hotel I stayed at, followed by a call to my bank, trying to figure out where the hell my refund is more than two weeks later. Spoiler alert: I still don't have an answer, I'm still fighting with it, and I'm probably going to have to physically go into my branch to deal with the damn thing. Which would be significantly easier if I currently had a vehicle with WORKING BRAKES!!!!! Yes, the truck is still parked. Yes, we're still dealing with that. No, apparently I haven't been gifted the magical extra set of hands I was asking the Universe for yesterday.

So by the time I finally stopped dealing with that particular pile of bullshit and looked at the rest of my day, I could feel it. That energy that starts building inside me where everything suddenly feels like it's happening at the exact same time. I took a quick look at my to-do list and - shockingly - it has grown again. LOL. There are things that need to happen before we leave tomorrow, work that needs to be finished, things that need to be packed, technology that needs to be charged and approximately twelve thousand little details my brain would very much like me to remember simultaneously.

Ten minutes ago, I was anything but calm.

But the washing machine is going. I've started the charging rotation for all my tech. I've got my AO Scan frequencies humming through my earbuds while I work, and somewhere between starting one load of laundry, plugging in another device and sitting down to write this, I can slowly feel some of that pressure releasing.

And maybe that sounds silly to somebody else.

It doesn't to me anymore.

Because I've spent enough years inside this brain and body to know what it feels like when my energy is starting to burst at the seams - and not in the fun, excited, LET'S FUCKING GO kind of way. This is the other kind. The kind where everything feels a little too loud, every interruption feels ten times bigger than it actually is, and if I were sitting in an office surrounded by a dozen people, there's a pretty good chance one person could look at me the wrong way and I'd be thinking, Do you REALLY want to fucking do this today? LMAO

The old me wouldn't have cared much about that.

If I was pissed off, I was pissed off. If somebody happened to walk into the blast radius, well... sucks to be them. I probably would've justified it too. I'm stressed. I'm overwhelmed. I'm dealing with shit. They should know better than to poke me right now.

Except here's the uncomfortable part I've had to learn: it's not the world's fault that I'm in a mood.

That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to have the mood. Fuck that. I'm absolutely allowed to be frustrated that I'm still fighting over money that should have been refunded weeks ago. I'm allowed to be irritated that my truck is still sitting there while I need it. I'm allowed to look at the giant pre-holiday list and think, You've got to be fucking kidding me. I'm allowed to feel overwhelmed, angry, irritated, sad, overstimulated, excited, anxious or whatever else happens to show up.

What I'm working on is what I DO with it.

And there is a massive difference between controlling my emotions and burying them.

I'm not doing that shit anymore either.

For years, I thought being in control meant stuffing things down, putting on the face, saying I'm fine and carrying on until eventually all that shit came exploding out somewhere completely unrelated. That's not regulation. That's putting a lid on a pressure cooker and pretending there's nothing boiling underneath it.

These days, I'm trying to actually pay attention to what my energy is telling me and figure out what it needs to move through instead of pretending it isn't there.

Sometimes I need to go scrub the living shit out of something. lol. There is a special kind of therapy in angry cleaning, and I will stand behind that statement forever. Sometimes I need music loud enough to drown out my own thoughts. Sometimes I need to put on frequencies, close my eyes and breathe for ten minutes. Sometimes I need to go outside, sit on the deck and let fresh air remind my nervous system that the world is not, in fact, ending because six things went sideways before noon. Sometimes I need to vent to someone who knows the difference between Niki needs advice and Niki needs to say FUCK seventeen times and then she'll be fine.

And apparently sometimes I need to open my blog and spew all that energy directly into the keyboard. lol

Which is exactly what I'm doing right now.

The funny thing is, if you've been reading these Diaries for any length of time, you've probably already figured out that my energy isn't something I have a whole lot of control over. I FEEL shit. Big. The good stuff, the frustrating stuff, the excitement, the anger, the intuition, the overwhelm, the holy shit everything is coming together days and the if one more person asks me for something I may spontaneously combust days.

The difference now is that I'm actually paying attention to all of it.

And weirdly, embracing my emotions has made me notice the uncomfortable ones MORE, not less. When you stop numbing, hiding, stuffing and powering through everything, you also lose the ability to pretend you aren't pissed off. You notice the tension. You notice when your patience is disappearing. You notice when your body is practically waving a giant fucking flag saying, Hey girl, maybe deal with this before you interact with another human.

But I'm noticing the good more too.

I notice when the frequencies start helping me settle. I notice how much better I feel after I stop and take a few intentional breaths. I notice the satisfaction of hearing the washing machine going because that's one less thing sitting on my mental list. I notice the tiny little release every time another piece of tech gets plugged in and I know it's handled for tomorrow. I notice that ten minutes after feeling like I could explode, I'm sitting here drinking my coffee, writing this blog and feeling significantly more like myself again.

The problem didn't magically disappear. The hotel refund is still bullshit. My truck still doesn't have brakes. My to-do list is still ridiculous. I still have shit to get done before we leave, and I can almost guarantee something else will get added before the day is over.

I'm just not carrying all of it at a ten anymore.

And THAT is progress.

Not pretending I'm calm when I'm not. Not becoming some permanently zen version of myself who floats through stressful situations surrounded by fucking butterflies. LOL Not suppressing everything uncomfortable because I've decided anger or frustration somehow makes me less evolved.

Just noticing it sooner.

Feeling it.

Finding somewhere healthy to put it.

And then moving forward without making everyone around me pay for something they didn't cause.

I'm still a work in progress. I suspect I always will be, and I'm actually okay with that. The old me probably would've hidden days like today, because admitting I was overwhelmed, angry or two seconds away from snapping wouldn't have fit the version of myself I thought everyone needed to see.

The new me?

Well...

Welcome to my fucking world!!!!

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got laundry to switch, approximately seventeen things left to charge, a pre-holiday list to attack and apparently a few more frequencies to run before I attempt another conversation with the bank.

Time to Do the Dang Thang.