Rachel’s Room🛋️: Relationship Anxiety

Happy Wednesday, Cadre. I am coming to you from a different kind of room today. I am on an Amtrak train from Seattle to Los Angeles, so I'll give you a little view. We're gonna stop right now. This is Salinas, California. This is our room. I'm traveling with my brother right now, so we're doing a little brother sister trip, which is really nice. So today I want to talk to you a little bit about relationship anxiety. And this is, like, maybe a little bit less of, like, strategies for coping and a little bit more of just some solidarity around the challenges of navigating being in a relationship, especially as someone with mental health issues, especially as someone who hasn't been in a relationship in a long time who has experienced heartbreak.

I, as many of you know, got divorced about four and a half years ago, and this is the first time I'm dating in a way where it's not. It's not casual, and I'm noticing so many anxieties and insecurities coming up that I kind of forgot about, that I forgot existed in the context of a relationship. And so I just kind of wanted to talk about it a little bit because I think it's something that, you know, we sort of see more romanticized, glamorized versions of relationships in tv and movie. We also see portrayals of what it looks like to fight or to have arguments.

And I think it's hard for us to understand, like, what's normal or what's right or what's wrong. And I know for myself, I get a lot of anxiety, and I tell myself a lot of stories about, well, what's right and what's wrong. And a lot of things that I struggle with when it comes to relationships is wondering if I'm doing the right thing and wanting really badly to be a good partner and show up in ways that are healthy and appropriate while also knowing that it's not going to be perfect every single time.

And then asking myself, you know, am I paralyzing myself with worrying so much about doing it the right way that I'm just simply not allowing myself to be myself? And so these are things that are difficult to navigate. And, you know, it's. It's. I was. I think I was talking to my mom about this a couple days ago. I was saying, like, it's so much easier. It feels so much easier to be on my own because I don't have to. I don't have to deal with the insecurities that come up or the fears of rejection or fears of abandonment or the miscommunication or the.

The reality of navigating two people's worlds without knowing everything about another person, nor without that being something that is necessarily needed. Rachel says, I want to start dating but hold myself back because I'm terrified. Yeah, it's really scary. I mean, I had held myself back for a long time because I was scared. And before I started dating this person I'm dating now, I felt a readiness. And now that I'm dating this person, I feel that fear again. So I think it's something that. It's sort of like, if we wait until.

If we wait until. Until we are ready, we'll never be ready, because readiness will never come. We won't be perfect. And it is something that takes a step by step process, and it takes patience and a lot of communication. And also, I'm realizing it takes a lot of. It takes a lot of work on my own that it doesn't happen within the relationship. So I'm also noticing times when I. When I'm feeling insecure or unsure. Those are not always necessarily conversations I need to have with the person I'm seeing.

Sometimes those are conversations I have with my therapist or with my mom or with a friend or in a journal, and, you know, reminding myself that I don't need to have 100% reliance on the other person, which is, which is really, really hard. And those are patterns that I've gotten into in the past, and I'm hopeful not to do them again. But it's. It's really difficult. And, you know, I think that there, again, there's no. There's no right or wrong way. And I think that having anxiety in relationships is really quite common, and it happens for a lot of different reasons.

So I just wanted to offer some solidarity. If anyone else feels that way or experiences that you're not alone, especially if you've struggled with mental health or mental illness, I think that we can also have an added layer of stories, at least I can, around being too much or too hard to handle or too hard to love, and that's not true. So if those stories come up for you, please know that that's not true at all. I'm trying to remind myself of that. It's a lot easier to remind others than ourselves sometimes.

So. Okay, my dears, I will see you next week back in my actual room for the first time in a few weeks. And until then, please take care, drink water, and give yourself a big, fat hug.