Like A Bird

Like a bird trying to batter free of it's cage, there are two habits I have been trying to get free of. Two entanglements that has tied me down in some ways. The minimalist prompts always give me cause to reflect on different areas of my life through a lens. It's like watching videos of your life, then taking notes about the video and trying to edit it to be better. Before I saw this prompt, I went through a sort of metamorphosis during the week. Maybe it was something that I had been going through for a while but I only took notice now.

I have always had this inability to let things go. Every single thing in my life meant something to me or I tweaked my brain to believe that. I thought every single item in my life has a story behind it. I would buy a pen and when the ink had run out, I would not throw it away. I would attach some sort of irrelevant value to it and keep it for a while, just storing it, giving it meaning that it did not have. That was how it was with almost every item. It was only until I got tired of seeing it around, then I would throw it away. This week, my phone storage got full and I needed to tidy up my phone a bit. I started going through my gallery and I saw a lot of irrelevant media. This was not the first time I was seeing this media but then, I attached value to them. I was thinking I might need them again or they would come in handy which has not happened.

So when I saw them now, they did not make any sense to me. For what reason was this trash still existing on my phone?? That was the thought that kept running through my mind as I deleted and deleted. I saw screenshots of texts that didn't even matter anymore, because I didn't even have a relationship with the recipients of such texts. So, why were they still in my phone? I saw pictures and videos of people that I had no sort of connection with, stored on my phone. They were just clutter now and I deleted. Last year or the year before that, I had kept them because they might come in handy. That had been my excuse. When I came home from school for the holidays, I went on a cleaning spree, trashing clothes and shoes that were not useful or could not be upcycled, items that had no value or ones that reminded me of sad moments of my life. And when I was done, I felt free. It's an habit I hope to be able to adopt more. The ability to let go of things that do not have value.

The second entanglement is worry. I worry too much. And worry is like a rot eating into your mental, emotional and physical health. Worry is like faith, but in the negative way. Worry is like believing that things could go wrong, believing negatively without proof or evidence that things could actually go wrong. And fear is the constant companion of worry. I can't count how many times I have self-sabotaged because of worry. Quitting before even starting something because I worry I would fail at it. Cutting off emotional ties early because I worry that I would get heartbroken later. Downplaying myself in the eyes of people because I worry that I would come off as unlikable if I was my true self. I constantly battle with worry for the past, present and future that I rarely allow myself to hope. But when I do hope, I hope brightly and in radiant colors. I have tried so hard to let go of worry, i’m still trying to. It has not been an easy battle and I fear it's a long way off in winning the battle [look at me, still worrying 😅]. But I have hope that I would disentangle myself from this cage and soar free. Like a bird.

Thanks for reading.✨