How I channel my inner teenager for success

No I’m not talking about smoking cigarettes behind the mall!

Actually, what I’m talking about is a rather tough topic.

The vulnerable side of success.

To me, success isn’t just about how much money I have. It’s my quality of life, how happy I feel in any given moment.

I always say, the more we follow our joy, the more opportunities open up.

Success and joy, it’s all intertwined.

Yet naturally, events constantly occur that threaten our joy. It’s crucial we know how to handle ourselves so we get back to our joyful, opportunity-attracting existence.

You know when you’re starving and just DYING to find that perfect food to satisfy you, yet you can’t find it anywhere and you don’t even know what you’re looking for?

You go through ALL the kitchen cabinets, you rummage through the ENTIRE fridge and freezer, caught in an endless cycle, almost breaching insanity, hoping that maybe, just maybe, you’ll see something you didn’t see before, that magical food, the ONLY thing that can satisfy you and save you.

When I’m caught in this cycle, I feel so desperate. There’s only one thing I need and I can’t have it. I’m doomed!

Every once in awhile, I feel this way about my life.

There’s times I feel so desperate for attention, connection, love, fun, excitement, something, anything, and despite my best efforts, I just can’t make it happen.

There goes my joyful existence!

Recently, my boyfriend’s been playing a lot of video games. He voice-chats with his friends while playing and gets so immersed that he tunes out everything around him.

I’m glad he’s having fun, but I’ve found it to be a MAJOR trigger for me.

It makes me feel like I’m being ignored.
It makes me feel like I’m not important.
It makes me feel unloved.

In that moment the only thing that can help me is the love and attention I so strongly crave, yet as I metaphorically rummage through the kitchen cabinets, it’s nowhere to be found.

Feeling desperate sucks.

What sucks even more is the expectation that whenever we’re feeling down, we should just slap on a positive attitude to mask our inner hopelessness and go about our day, and that will somehow make it all go away.

We know it won’t go away, but we do it anyway.

This is what creates blockage.

This is what holds us back from having, achieving, manifesting, creating whatever we want for ourselves.

Whether it’s love, attention, money, opportunity, joy, connection, health, etc.

So why do we do it?

When we recognize where we are sucks, we want it to not suck, so we work on moving forward and getting out of our rut as fast as we can.

We flip a switch to infuse ourselves with inspiration and optimism to turn our frown upside down. 🙁 → 😃

But in doing so, we aren’t acknowledging the extent of our suffering and its suckiness.
We aren’t giving love and healing to what got us there to begin with. 

And so it doesn’t heal.

It just builds up even more.

Only to come back up again at a later point and frustrate us even more because we thought we were doing so darn good at staying positive and moving forward.

So what do we do?

We’ve got to break the rules.
We’ve got to do the opposite of what’s expected of us.

We have to indulge our feelings and allow that desperation to JUST BE and let it be okay.

As the pain of feeling unloved grew inside me, I decided to get out of the house and go somewhere, anywhere, to try to feel better. I went for a jog in the rain, trying to visualize the rain cleansing these hard feelings out of me.

It didn’t work.

I eventually went home, sat at my desk, and decided to blast angry music. The same angry music my teenage self would listen to whenever life felt unfair (which was pretty often – I was a very emotional teenager).

I went to YouTube, looked up my favorite band from 20 years ago (can you guess who it is??), and sang out my feelings.

I began to understand the reason this triggered me so badly is because in my teenage years, I wasn’t very popular with the boys, and it crushed me. I felt like I had to fight so hard for their attention.

Apparently to this day, feeling ignored brings that back up.
It felt good to make this connection.

After 4 or 5 songs, I suddenly felt better. I’d gotten it all out of my system.

Then my boyfriend came in the room, I calmly explained what happened and how I felt, and we went on to have a relaxing evening together. He even cooked me a steak dinner 🙂

Joyful existence restored! 😄

The point is, when we’re growing up (teenagers or younger), it’s expected that we’ll throw temper tantrums or be “emo” and blast loud angry music.

In doing so, we let ourselves FEEL our feelings.

We’re expressing ourselves and getting it out, so we can move on. This is considered acceptable.

But as adults, we’re expected to cram it down inside, slap a smile on our faces, and keep going.

We do not heal. We create resistance. We create the vicious cycle. 

Whenever you feel your joy is threatened, just remember, all aspects of our life are intertwined.

If you want to be more successful, healthy, wealthy, loved, connected, look at how you handle your emotions.

Are you stuffing them down? Are you pushing through?

The next time a tough feeling comes up, just ask yourself, what would your inner teenager do? (Unless it was smoking cigarettes behind the mall – don’t do that!)