If you follow my blog or social media, you may have wondered, what has Youn been up to and been doing all these months?
To answer your question, I think I’ve spent the past two years mourning my grandma’s death. I wasn’t sad or crying during this whole time but I was emotionally and psychologically stuck.
If you’ve seen the TV show Dark, it was like I was making progress on moving forward but then I would hit an invisible roadblock of feelings that I could not overcome and that I was going through over and over again.
When my grandma passed away, I was on the edge of building my first million dollar business. It was a huge deal for me, something I had been working on for years- but when my grandma passed away, all I could think about was how I wasn’t able to be there for my grandma because I was freaking out about scaling my business.
I was overwhelmed not only by my grief but by the grief I saw in my family. My multi-millionaire uncle crying because he hadn’t been able to spend enough time with his mother.
The anxiety I felt towards scaling my business and the grief I felt over my grandma’s sudden death collided – and when I thought about making bank, I only felt fear, sadness, and remorse.
I didn’t stop, I tried my best to chug along, do the best that I can. I learned some new skills. I did some research and drowned myself in the sorrows of the world from climate change to menstrual poverty trying to find meaning.
I learned new business models. I helped million dollar businesses become two to three million dollar businesses. I started coding software that I might be able to sell for a pretty penny someday.
But at the end of the fucking day, I had never overcome my feelings over my grandma’s death and it sat there whenever I got close to succeeding again.
In the beginning, I didn’t even want to try. I wanted to mope around in my sadness. But when I accidentally started succeeding because I’m a perfectionist, I self-sabotaged.
A few weeks ago, I finally started talking about my feelings, my embarassing shameful feelings. Feelings I refused to acknowledge that they existed because they hurt so much. My grandmother practically raised me and was one of the only people in my life who had loved me and had never hurt me. She had never asked for anything but time that I didn’t give her because I thought we would have a lot of it. I was never able to repay her. I wish I could have.
I share this because I think this whole grieving process was me bullshitting myself. If I had cut the bullshit and confronted my feelings, I would have been able to process these feelings a lot quicker. If I hadn’t run away from my feelings- I would have felt the pain, realized that the world wasn’t ending, and the feelings would have passed. After ugly crying and finally talking about these feelings that I refused to even acknowledge or think about, I felt a huge relief, like a boulder had been lifted off my chest. A stupid boulder might have been crushing me for two years.
I think seeing Randall Park’s character in Always Be My Maybe helped me see what I was doing to myself. In the film, Randall Park’s character loses his mom and he ends up never going to college, still living with his dad, refusing to act on his music dreams.
Ali Wong’s character confronts him and tells him something like he needs to stop being scared and grow the fuck up.
I’m writing this because I think a lot of people in my life are dealing with their own shit, especially trauma from the past. Bad romantic relationships, mistakes they may have made, wishing they could change the past, being haunted by nightmares.
I’m writing this because I think I know what that feels like. I feel like I’ve overcome my fair share of traumas from childhood abuse to sexual assault. If trauma were girl scout badges, I’d have tons of them!
So I’d like to share some things I learned in the past few years:
1. Be more aware or mindful of your thoughts and feelings.
You are what you eat. If you are always consuming negative news or entertaining negative thoughts, that is the type of person you are or are going to be.
Focus and attention, our mind, is one of the only things we can barely control, and it is so important to keep that garden healthy.
For example, I know that if I read some panic CNN articles for a week, I’m going to be an anxious POS. So this might be terrible but I stopped reading the news. Fuck that shit. I have a lot of shit on my plate already and I can’t afford to make space in my life for any additional weight. Sorry but not sorry.
I can look at someone’s Facebook or Instagram profile and every post would be negative. Complaining about this and that, this sucks, blah blah blah.
If you love being negative that’s great, but I don’t like being aroud negative people. I think most people have enough shit to deal with. So if you want to, just try to be a little more self-aware of your feelings or behavior, what you do or say, and think- is this the type of person I want to be?
Sometimes I find that people will complain and do nothing to change their situation. I consider that bullshitting yourself. Stop bullshitting yourself unless you want to be a bullshitter. There’s nothing wrong with being a bullshitter, just be honest with yourself.
2. If you have some unresolved trauma that you’ve been dealing with for over a year and that is affecting parts of your life like work or relationships, consider seeing a therapist.
Maybe you’ll be able to process your feelings on your own, but if you haven’t after a year, it’s probably unlikely. I think therapists are skilled at creating a safe environment where you can feel those shitty feelings you want to run away from because it feels like it’ll end your world, and help make them pass.
I HATE my feelings. I hate irrational emotional thoughts. I hated them and avoided them for two years and look where it got me- psychologically stuck in a shit swamp of feelings. A therapist is that guy with the rope when you’re in an emotional tar pit. Don’t become a dinosaur that’s fossilized in shit.
You know who I’m talking about. Toxic people who are awful because their shit have just fossilized around them like a protective layer of bullshit.
3. Let it go.
It’s probably not personal. They probably did not mean to hurt you. I’ve come to believe that most people aren’t insidious, they try their best, but people aren’t perfect, and that they make mistakes. Mistakes that could have unintentionally hurt you.
If you hold onto negative emotions because someone wronged you, you’re just hurting yourself over and over again. The person who wronged you probably doesn’t even realize or give a shit. No one cares but you so why are you still giving a shit? Let that shit go.
4. Take responsibility of your life.
This is your life and life is unfair. Deal with it. Overcome it. Don’t make excuses. If there’s something you want to do it, do it. Try.
In my experience, it gets easier.
5. When you figure out what’s important to you, cherish it.