Behind smiles - the other parts of ourselves

Today, as I was writing this text I had my picture taken and this was what I saw: a wide honest smile and a bit messy hair. This is how I usually see myself: a young lady starting her 40's, with a great amount of energy, ideas popping all around and ready for action (or already on it!).

But this (maybe too much) personal text has the intention of opening space for some other parts of energetic, positive, optimistic people. The side where emptiness, lack of inspiration or even not so optimistic perspectives arise too. Only the combination of these two sides create real Human Beings, honest people, completed creatures, in my opinion. And only creating open spaces for the existence of these two perspectives or moments of each of us we create a real combination of what it means to exist.

Inspired by the book I am currently reading - "The Upside of your dark side" - by Todd B. Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener and by the words of a young Ukrainian artist I was following and who recently joined the armed forces in his homeland and who openly spoke about the importance of taking care of his mental health and not only his physical survival in the heart of a war, I decided to open this sharing space.

I had two intentions with this text: describing in first person a bit more the inner deserts we can sometimes cross and create awareness for the point that the authors of the book I mentioned call our "wholeness", a space where not only our "good"self has space and a reminder that we are the perfect combination of our "positive" and "negative" sides and emotions (and that only this can lead us to fulfilment.

The fact that I am professional working within the area of Applied Positive Psychology for so long also highlights my message: even those who know a lot about how to take care and enhance our positive emotions and who are constantly working on our personal thriving have space for our other sides, our deep dives and our confrontation with shadows and greyness. And far from being a contradiction, this is a real richness and the perfect illustration of what it means to be imperfectly human. Which we all are.

So, starting with my personal journey... My last three months were a bit of a struggle. Lack of energy, low sense of meaning, a feeling of being somehow lost in my mission, of my own value, of my own place. Allowing the visit of the “imposter syndrome”, doubting about my added value and even my self worth. My days continued, my work continued, but my deepest connection with a natural joy and bigger sense were a bit lost, for some reason.

During this period I produced less, I wrote way less, I’ve created only bits and pieces. I continued to meet people and to promote professional encounters, in the hopes of finding a small clue that could enable my spark again but reality is that for this period I had the feeling that nothing could actually fill the bucket.

A couple of weeks ago, in a short trip out of Portugal, having changed my routine, habits, and obligations, something clicked and slowly and unnoticed, a small sparkle arrived. I just had to follow it and flow with it, allowing its impact in my days and working in its direction. This has been growing and empowering me in a good direction and it has allowed me the necessary distance to see it from outside and be able to systematise it.

Here are some things that turn out to be important in this (apparently ) empty part f the path:

• Accepting that not producing as usual was ok. If the right energy wasn’t there, there wasn’t anything I could do to to force my usually high productivity. Flow within emptiness. And I had to learn that not producing as usual was ok and acceptable.
• Not trying to start new projects with the hopes they could “save me”. Inner emptiness is not a good energy to fuel any endeavour, so letting go any attempt to be saved by some external project depending only from me was a learning process. Entrepreneurship needs a good inside-position, I believe. And if it is not there, it is not there. And it's ok.
• Trying but not forcing. For days and days my attempts to get in tune with my most valuable goods were simply not working. Not beauty nor poetry nor contemplation nor writing - my usual deepest engines and enhancers - were working for me. And I had to learn to let them go and live without them for some time.
• Giving what I had, not more. For this period I was perhaps a less patient, creative and funny mother; a less flowish partner; a less inspiring or cheerful company. But I had to learn to surf my days within it. “Functioning”, but not striving. There simply wasn’t a way to give more than I did, that was all I could give and that was ok. I see it didn’t break anything or it compromised any link, on the contrary: I allowed my significant ones to see me from another angle, a fallible, real, honest one.
• Allowing contacts, connections, encounters to happen. Even searching for it. Not all the encounters gave me energy, insights nor ideas, but being with others, hearing their perspectives and suggestions planted small seeds inside, made me feel at least connected with a bigger world and took me out of my empty-bubble. It meant the world.
• Giving love. This is something that, personally, works always very good for me. Sending meaningful voice or written messages or writing letters or postcards allows my best part to emerge even in lower personal waves of myself. As if spreading positive emotions could give a certain sense to my days, justifying their existence. I might feel a bit lost from myself but I wasn’t lost from the love I have inside, so spreading it through small details helped me continuing in the lightest part of the world.
• Keeping in mind the global times we are living and the influence they necessarily have on us. We are all coming from two years of pandemic plus an emergent war whose images are too familiar to us and whose impact seems too close. This is not harmful, it has its strong impact even in resilient, positive, energetic minds and it's mandatory to take its influence into account in our personal paths too.
• Not being in a rush to get out of that apparently empty and fruitless state. Learning out to surf it, accepting its impact and not even trying hard to learn from with while totally inside of it. Just allowing it to be present, even if it bothers, even if it hurts, even if it is a real pain in the a@@:) Immersion (with vigilance, for sure. Allowing the presence of someone who really cares and pays attention to our journey, in case it goes really wrong) was important for the process. Only allowing myself to live it all the way I felt I could get out of it eventually (and learn from it, once I got out).

These were some of the things I can now systematise about this short journey - even if 3 months can give us the feeling of years when they are not lived within a certain joy.

My wholeness was exposed. Maybe it can be scary to think that even positive smiles with grey hair can dive into grey waters, but this is precisely my intention: to give visibility and also hope (and some humour!) about it.

And, as Robert and Todd wrote in their book: "If there is anything close to a true blood text or X-ray for quality of life, it's the rich stories of our daily experiences." Cheers to all our experiences, states and moods. In praise of the wholeness they can positively bring us.