When I start working on my weekly blog post, I take some time to just sit and think through where I’m at. What I’ve experienced recently that affected me. How I’ve been feeling lately. What’s been on my mind. But when I sat down to do that last week, I couldn’t come up with anything. I drew a blank. And it didn’t feel like writer’s block. It felt like something completely different.

I think of myself as a fairly self-aware person. I’m usually pretty in touch with my feelings and motivations. But recently, I’ve been feeling the opposite of that. I haven’t been sad or mopey. I haven’t been feeling bad at all. I just haven’t been feeling much of anything, or at least, I haven’t been aware of feeling much of anything. And that makes writing a blog post about my feelings and experiences pretty difficult. To be honest, lately I’ve been feeling pretty self-unaware.

I don’t think this experience is too uncommon. It’s so easy to go through the motions without ever truly, critically looking at our lives and our experiences. We often just don’t make the time to do that. And when we get stuck in this cycle of simply going through the motions over and over, we make it increasingly hard to get out and actually feel much of anything for a change.

And when we’re disconnected from ourselves and our emotions, we struggle to find meaning in the things that we do. We cannot see the big picture that our small actions and habits are contributing to. We may even start to feel like what we’re doing doesn’t matter because we’re not connected to it, and this is not a good place to be. Thankfully, I realized my disconnectedness before I got to that point.

There’s no one way to resolve this problem. Everybody’s different. But I have found a couple of different methods during the process of writing this blog post that I’ve found helpful, and I thought it would be nice to share them with you.

The first thing that has helped me start the process of getting back to self-awareness is journaling. I know I’ve talked about this before, but I cannot stress how important and helpful journaling has been for me. It helps me think through my experiences and emotions and actually make some sense of them. Even on days when I don’t feel like I have much to say, I am surprised by my ability to process things simply by writing them out. So I’m trying to be more intentional about my journaling and set aside a realistic—but significant—amount of time every night before bed to process things.

Another thing I’ve found really helpful isn’t something I’ve done but something someone did for me. I was in a meeting at work and my boss said something that really touched me, especially in light of the things I was thinking through for this post. He commented about one aspect of my work and how great it was that I was able to do it in the time that I do. For him, it was just a passing comment. But for me, it meant a lot. It reminded me that the things I do, even if they feel mundane, are actually meaningful to others. I find that surrounding myself with supportive, uplifting people like that who remind me of how much my actions do matter has been helpful in this process of reconnecting with myself.

And of course, writing this blog post has been great for me this week. It’s a lot like journaling, but with a much broader audience in mind. So thank you guys for giving me this space and this ability to share my life with you. If you’re feeling disconnected like I am, I hope this has been helpful for you. I know it’s been so good for me. Here’s to reconnecting and striving to become more self-aware! Have a great week, friends, and I’ll see you later.