Hi Lizzie,

You might get some mental clarity if you tried to see all these things as separate from each other and not one big mess. Often when one thing starts to become overwhelming, then the capabilities to handle all the other stuff becomes impaired.

Also, when you look at things, there is the reality and then there is your perception of reality along with your attitude towards it.

As an example, you say that you have a job that you hate. If you wake up every morning thinking “I so do not want to go there”, it’s only going to make things that much more harder for you (that’s the attitude part). Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and fighting against it will only add to the difficulty. In reality, there might not even be any difficulty if you looked at things from a different angle. But as long as you wish that the reality was something that it’s not, you’re going to feel miserable and anxious.

So, if you could try to entangle these things one by one, without thinking about the other parts, you might have a clearer picture of what it is that you truly want. Moving abroad to get away from a situation that seems overwhelming isn’t going to solve the situation. You would start a new life without solving the past issues, and that would leak over to the next phase as well. Your view of reality and your attitude towards it is going to follow you everywhere.

Part of the attitude can be letting go. It doesn’t have to mean ending things with a boyfriend or thinking that you’ll never travel abroad again. Letting go does not equal accepting some perpetual state, rather it allows the things to move towards where they ought to be moving. Now you’re kind of stuck, not wanting things and wishing for something else, but you’re still holding onto everything. When you mentally let go and allow things to be as they are and progress as they naturally would, you might find yourself exactly where you need to be. It’s scary to do that, because the future is unknown. Right now you might feel that you would never want to live without your boyfriend, but there is no saying that next year you wouldn’t be living with someone else and you’d think “wow, I never saw that coming”. Or, you decide to stay and you have a child together and you look back and think “wow, if I would’ve left I wouldn’t have all this right now”. Hindsight 20/20, but the point is that by letting go, you might get to where you truly want to be, even if you don’t know it yet. Right now you are seeing all the threats, but not the opportunities. It makes sense that you’d feel like that, but that’s not the whole truth.

I know that doesn’t exactly answer your question, but try to look at each thing as a separate entity and refine your attitude towards it by allowing it to be what it is. Not fighting against it.