Lifeline Session 1: Out of the darkness

I started attending a Personal Growth Course through Lifeline Community Wellness Centre. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I am honestly very glad that I found the course.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to move forward with my life, and get over some of my painful past experiences. I feel stuck and I just don’t know how to deal with these overwhelming emotions.

Basically, this course is a journey towards greater self-awareness and self-discovery. The main goals are to gain greater self-insight, to learn to accept yourself and your feelings, to communicate more effectively, to expand your ways of relating and responding to others and to know yourself more fully.

Exactly what I need! My reasons for doing the course are:

- To figure out my true identity apart from once being a medical student

- To meet new people that are also facing similar challenges

- To find my purpose

- To make new friends

- To find joy within myself

- To let go of my past and move on with life.

- To help me become a mature and confident young woman

- To help me face my fears head on

- To help me start taking risks.

- To start healing all these scars from my past

We were allocated to smaller groups to discuss the different exercises for each session. One of today's tasks was to draw a picture of ourselves, and where we are in our lives. This is a very revealing exercise because even though one doesn’t have the skills of an artist, the image still comes across quite vividly.

It was quite something to listen to each person describing their pictures and to be able to open up, emotionally, to a group of strangers that I had only just met. I felt comfortable telling them all that had been weighing heavily on my heart the past couple days. Once I had started speaking, the tears just came - but I wasn’t embarrassed in any way. It was freeing to let it all out. They offered encouragement, and shared some of their own personal experience in similar situations. 

It’s time to move out of this darkness that I have been hiding in, and to accept that this is my life; I can’t silently wish it were different if I am not going to get up and do something to change it. I want to make the most of what I have been given, and be grateful for every blessing.

This is not about simply smoothing over the surface, hiding away my issues or making everything appear better. It's not even about trying to put a smile on my face and being be more positive. It's much more than those fancy quotes that I love, that tell you that everything will be OK one day; it is about building my self-confidence and truly believing in myself, with no doubts or second guessing.

It is time to change the things that make me unhappy - even if I just take one small step at a time.