I've always thought answers were a matter of seconds. That you either knew or you didn't,
and if you didn't, you just didn't want to know.
I've often felt pressured to have to answers immediately and when I didn't I invented them for myself and others because I thought that's what I had to do.
I am not talking about the answers to that math test or factual things.
I'm talking about personal answers, you know, whether you like this color or this one, the things you are feeling, the things you want. Somehow, I've always thought that I was supposed to know these things. From the beginning. Always and forever. So I've appealed to my intuition, this gut feeling you're supposed to have about things in the moment.
I've made things obvious in retrospect, telling myself I knew before but just was lying to myself, like when I left my toxic ex and told myself I always knew and wasted time trying not to know. - There were things I knew for sure, and a lot more I needed to learn -
I've tried to avoid this "mistake" for everything since, putting so much pressure on myself to know from the get go.
Adopting the idea that answers are supposed to always be evident, and simple, and fast. But that's a lie.
And no amount of going harder and faster or doing things differently will spare me the process of being alive, of finding that things are not the way I thought, or that I was right about that one.
More than not, only time and lived experience will tell, but sometimes that lived experience seems too hard and too painful for answers we want to tell ourselves we could have had sooner if we'd just listened a little better.
I've had the hardest years of my life in many ways and all I've done was looking for answers on how to make things less awful, less difficult, less painful.
I just learned that sometimes there are no answers, especially not in looking for them, and that difficult and painful things are a part of life that you don't always have to solve or find answers to, just be there for. And they shall pass too.
I was trying to get answers as a way of not feeling the pain, but answers are in the feelings, whatever they are.
Sometimes, feelings come before answers, and you have to make space.
This is crazy how much pressure I can put on myself when I live to get the "right answer", because I believe the "right answer" will save me from suffering, and everyone else too. - Because I don't look for answers that work just for me, they have to work for everyone else too. Codepence much ? 😅 -
I haven't learned to be in the questions, because I didn't have the space to, because it was maybe too uncomfortable or painful. And this is hard to learn. There are so many things underneath the questions that are scary and sometimes painful.
I hope it's also beautiful.
So yes, answers take time. (I don't like that either !)
Because finding the right questions take time, and spending time in the questions.
Because discovering the answers take time, and untangling them from expectations, from shoulds and oughtta and coulds.
Because owning them takes time, and detaching them from other poeple's answers and needs and desires for us and for them.
Because living with the answers takes time, and seing them change, evolve and move us.
Because finding some and then loosing them and finding them again and stumbling on new ones takes a life.
So yes answers take time. And that's okay.