Make space for something new in your life

To make space in your life for something new, in a healthy way, is connected to letting go. You’ll make sense of it in a second.

In your life, you meet people, communities, or have experiences that you attach yourself to emotionally, in a way that is vital for you.

Let’s say you meet a person and you end up spending time together. Eventually, there will be an emotional connection that you will have with that person, and both the connection and the person will be vital for who you are, as a human being.

If you had such a connection before, then you understand what I’m talking about.

These kinds of connections, whether they’re with a person, community, or experience, can put you in a situation when your emotional reservoir gets drained.

Your energy and emotions are limited, which means you can only offer a limited amount of energy and emotions to those around you. Eventually, you’ll have to learn how to balance the way you allocate your resources (emotions and energy) to your activities, communities, and people.

The more you’ll invest your energy and emotions, the faster your reservoir will drain.

The need to reflect so you can make space for something new

When your reservoir starts to get depleted, it’s time to take a step back and reflect.

If you reach a point where your reservoir is empty because you invested too many resources in these directions (people, activities, communities), it may mean that:

• You truly like what is happening and this is also the reason you keep investing your resources;
• You may have no resources left for new things.

When I reached a moment where my reservoir was empty, the reflection process helped me understand if I’m stuck or not, if I want to grow or not, and gave me more clarity over the point I was in at that moment.

To constantly give others energy and emotions can be a good thing.

If you’re surrounded by the right people, and you’re part of communities where you do the things you want to do, then it feels normal to continue investing your resources. But such a situation feels idealistic more than anything else.

Most people have only 2-3 friends with whom they really want to spend time with. At the same time, most people have lots of acquaintances that they don’t want in their lives, but they’re there anyway.

As long as you understand what you want and don’t want, the things you can give up on will come to the surface so you can make space for something new in your life.

Accept the change

The things you don’t want any more are things you can leave behind, so you won’t give them your energy and emotions. This will give you the freedom to find new things to invest your emotions and energy into.

As soon as you identify the things you can’t leave behind, even though you don’t want them in your life anymore, that’s exactly what you should do.

In the past, I used to struggle with letting go. I used to think that since those things are an important part of my life, they were there for a reason. But maybe they were meant to be in my life for just one week or one month, not 10 years.

Eventually, I understood that what I was doing wasn’t healthy. I used to keep in my life all kinds of things (activities, people, communities) that didn’t need to be in my life. As soon as I let them go, I had more space for something new – for the things that wanted to be part of my life.

Becoming aware of the need to change

When your reservoir is full, imagine you have 10 empty slots (hypothetically speaking) that you can fill with people, activities, or communities.

After you’ve filled the 10th spot, your reservoir gets empty. There’s no mental and emotional space left to connect with new people, activities, or communities. It’s all gone. You don’t have emotions or energy left to invest.

If things are this way, why do you keep offering your energy and emotions to people you don’t want to spend your time with?

I believe we, as human beings, keep doing it. We keep investing energy, emotions, time, and all kinds of resources into things that we don’t really want in our lives.

I’ve done the same for such a long time.

I think I stopped 1-2 years ago. I remember I used to ask myself what I was doing with my life.

I used to have all kinds of people around me – the same people. We used to do the same activities, with the same jokes, same language, and same… everything.

At the same time, I didn’t want to have the same old things in my life because I changed. But when I was again in the same situations, the new version of me disappeared and was replaced, for a brief moment, by the old me.

I made the decision to stop. It was a healthy decision but it was painful. I had to leave behind people, activities, and communities. I didn’t want to be who I was anymore.

Right now, things are better. At this moment, I have the ability to look at what I’m doing and to understand after a short period (usually a few weeks) if what I do is what I want to keep doing.

If something isn’t right for me, then I don’t do it anymore, at least for a while.

With love and optimism,
David