What I'm Still Learning To Carry & Being Kinder To Myself

If you haven't written or journalled before, you may not be aware of how much it helps to release internal thoughts and troubles that are affecting you. I have never been good at staying consistent with journalling, but when I feel inspired, or am struggling with something, I do feel better for getting thoughts out in long form. And although it is a therapeutic exercise, when you hit publish on something so personal and open to public opinion, there is a small amount of fear in doing so. However, the point of sharing experiences is connection, unity, and not feeling alone. So I am going to share an insight into my brain this week, and if you read my previous post, perhaps you will connect the dots into my being for the past seven days.

I want to preface this by stating that since I first tried living in a new country back in 2023, I became very reflective and started identifying thought patterns I would usually internalise and stew on. I should probably seek support in this area, because the patterns regularly return, just on different levels of intensity.

I have always been proud to give 110% to whatever I have done in life, but at some point that pride becomes the problem. Personally, I struggle to switch off, and so I get overwhelmed, and then comes the anxiety, arriving right on cue. I have not yet learned how to manage this well. Usually I let it build, and build, and then I break.

Like so many people, COVID was a turning point for me, and not in a good way. I was managing a hotel when the pandemic hit. As staff were let go and guest numbers diminished, the workload for those of us fortunate enough to keep our jobs, thanks to Government support to business owners, increased considerably. I lived onsite, which meant I had no downtime whatsoever. For ten months, the only time I left the hotel was to go to the supermarket for twenty minutes, and even that felt stressful because I always had to rush back. It took a great deal to eventually leave that job because I saw it as my career. I loved it deeply, and treated that business with the same level of care I would give something of my own. But the sustained pressure of the pandemic led me to a burnout I wasn't prepared for, and I can still recall sitting on the couch in my apartment, ringing my mum and dad, sobbing from stress, on the verge of a panic attack, and feeling as though there was absolutely no way out. I even had to go to the emergency room once because I was in such a state that I could not stand up. The stress had manifested deep in my body, my muscles refused to play along anymore, and my blood sugar jumped to sixteen, high cortisol having quietly infiltrated my system without me even realising. I left that job on Christmas Day 2020. The sense of relief afterwards was as though someone had lifted a weighted blanket I had forgotten I was carrying, and for the first time in months, I could breathe.

Having not sought professional help afterwards, I would liken what I was presenting with at the time to burnout, or perhaps a partial nervous breakdown. Whatever the terminology, the outcome is the same: since then, I have struggled to cope when stress or overwhelm reaches a certain threshold. My nervous system reacts the same way it did in 2020. I retreat, I overthink, I experience crippling anxiety, and I lose the ability to see a way out. It is an unpleasant and exhausting cycle to be caught in, and I am still very much in the process of finding my way through it.

I know I need to see someone about this, because I genuinely do not know how to manage it in the long term. The good thing about living in Italy is that therapy is considerably more affordable than it is back home. I did start seeing someone in Australia when I returned in February 2024, but the experience was not what I needed. She seemed more occupied with her own priorities during our sessions than with actually understanding mine, and after four sessions and a significant amount of my money, I did not rebook. So for now, I am doing my best to manage when I hit that peak through podcasts with experts, and small, achievable shifts in thinking that I can actually work with in the moment.

What I am slowly coming to understand is that many of these habits were formed from my very first job at fourteen. It will take time, and genuine patience with myself, to unlearn twenty-eight years of conditioning. I believe it is never too late to learn how to manage stress, overwhelm, and anxiety, but I also believe it cannot be rushed or forced. Everyone has a different tolerance. Our bodies respond differently, our histories are different, and the invisible weight each of us carries into any given day is something nobody else can fully see or measure. The person beside you on the bus who looks perfectly composed may be running the same internal monologue you are, the same loop of doubt and exhaustion and quiet desperation, just behind a face that has learned to look like it has things under control.

We are so quick to compare our insides to everyone else's outsides, and it is never a fair or useful exchange. We cannot measure our own capacity against someone else's, because we simply do not know what they are carrying, what they have already survived, or what it costs them to show up and keep going each day. And this extends beyond how we treat ourselves. It applies to every relationship we hold, romantic and platonic alike. The partner who seems distant, the friend who has gone quiet, the colleague who snapped when you least expected it, they are all carrying something you cannot see, something that may look remarkably similar to what you are carrying yourself. When we remember that, it becomes a little easier to respond with curiosity rather than defensiveness, with softness rather than withdrawal. Which is why the kindness we so readily extend to others needs to find its way back to ourselves as well, not as a grand gesture, but as a quiet, daily practice of cutting ourselves the same slack we would instinctively offer a friend who came to us struggling. You would not tell them that they are weak for finding things hard. You would not compare them to someone who seemed to be coping better. You would simply sit with them, and remind them that hard is not the same as failing.

Acknowledging that you are struggling is not a sign of weakness, even though it can feel that way when you are in the thick of it. The strength it takes to be aware enough to say "something is not right, and I am working on it" is real, even when it is invisible to everyone around you, and often invisible to yourself. If speaking to someone feels too hard right now, the podcasts I have been listening to this week offered something simpler and surprisingly powerful: write it down, name the struggle. Say it out loud, even just to yourself, because recognition is the first step toward anything resembling relief.

Yesterday I was listening to Mel Robbins on Dr Chatterjee's podcast Feel Better, Live More, and she said something that I have not been able to stop thinking about, that we are all essentially eight year olds in bigger bodies. And the more I thought about that, the more it made sense. Regulating our emotions is a learned skill, not an instinct, and not one that anyone ever thought to put on the school curriculum alongside algebra and the causes of World War 2. But it can be learned; at any age, in any city, on any unremarkable week when you find yourself writing your feelings into a blog at an hour you probably should be sleeping.

She also said something so fundamentally simple that I am almost embarrassed it needed saying out loud, that we can control how we react to things. We can set the tone for what we take on and how much we allow something to affect us. We are not passive recipients of whatever the day decides to throw at us, and neither are the people we love. That particular reminder is one I need printed, framed, and placed somewhere I cannot avoid it on the mornings when I have clearly forgotten it entirely. Which is precisely what I am doing right now, writing this down, saying it out loud, and trusting that this too is enough of a start.

So here is my small, unglamorous commitment for the week ahead. When I feel the familiar pull of overwhelm beginning to build, before I let it settle in and make itself comfortable, I am going to pause and name it. Not spiral into it, not push it down, just acknowledge it for what it is. I am going to try to catch myself in the moment of reaction and ask whether what I am about to feel or do is actually a choice, because apparently it is. And probably most importanty, I am going to be a little kinder to myself when I inevitably forget all of the above and revert to type, because unlearning twenty-eight years of habits in a single week was never going to be the plan. Progress is not linear, and neither is being human, but a better week than the last one is absolutely within reach.