Thesis: When an anxious individual is allowed to withdraw to their safe space, they are able to sort out their thoughts, which results in an increased self-awareness.
My brain definitely isn’t a place that I love to be in; my thoughts aren’t always a pleasant experience. I think that a lot of my thoughts stem from the fact that I’m a fairly anxious person. Things like presentations, thinking about the future, and even little things like checking Google Classroom for marks make me anxious. I often overthink things that I say or things that I’ve done. Being alone with my thoughts isn’t always a fun experience. Sometimes it’s scary and I do end up crying, but other times it has been really helpful in figuring out who I am.
Back in March 2020, when school was first cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was allowed to be alone in my room, which is my safe space. I didn’t need to go to school and pretend to be someone who I thought I was or ignore my thoughts because school was my priority. And yes, even before the pandemic, I would spend a fairly large amount of my free time alone in my room. But often I would spend this time focusing on things like school or extracurricular activities. If I’m being honest, there is also no way that the amount of time I was spending in my room then was even close to how much I was in my room during COVID. I’m a busy person; free time was something that I wanted, but in reality, I didn’t have that much of it.
During this period of time when I was able to be in my safe space, I decided to take up journaling. I had a notebook that I wasn’t using for anything specific so I started writing in it. At first, it was a little weird and almost awkward in a way. Writing down my thoughts did feel uncomfortable, maybe because by writing them down I was forced to acknowledge them. Not only that, but writing them down on paper also made them feel more permanent. And I think that permanence did scare me. Especially because not everything that I wrote was happy and pleasant. But I did get used to it, and journaling let me sort out my thoughts in a way that I hadn’t ever before.
One of the major things that I came to realize about myself was that I am not straight. We live in a society where being straight is the norm, so I honestly didn’t really question it for a fairly long time. In fact I didn’t question my sexuality until COVID happened and I was able to spend time in my room with my journal. One day I was journaling fairly late at night and I kind of just ended up writing that I think that I might be pansexual. In the following weeks, maybe even months, I explored this a lot further. I hadn’t liked a girl at that point (at least to my knowledge) but I also didn’t particularly care about gender. So pansexual just made sense. At first I was hesitant to put a label on myself, but as time passed, pansexual started to feel a lot more comfortable and like me. There were definitely times where I thought that I was faking it and I was actually straight and other times where I thought that maybe I didn’t actually like guys and was lesbian. These periods of questioning though did, in the end, help me become more self-aware. I realized that yes, gender doesn’t really matter to me and as long as I end up with a person that I love and who loves me back, I will be happy. Even now, compared to last year, I am a lot more confident in my sexuality. Not only am I more confident, I am also more in tune with myself, or self-aware, and I don’t necessarily feel as though I need to hide this. And while it wasn’t a fast process and it took time for me to feel confident enough to come out to people, in the end I did. There are still times when I question myself, but if anything, I have reached a level of self-awareness where I know that I am LGBTQ+ in some way, even if my label does end up changing.
Another aspect of my identity in which I became a lot more self-aware is my gender identity. Similar to my sexuality, my gender wasn’t really something I had thought about until I ended up having to isolate myself because I was a close contact. Because I was forced to isolate myself, I was again able to spend a lot of time in my room, my safe space, and sort out my thoughts away from society and expectations to present myself in a certain way. The thought of using she/they pronouns had crossed my mind once before, but until this point, I never actually ended up thinking about it. Once I was in isolation, I did some research and found a gender identity called demigirl. I can’t say that it immediately felt right; for a while, I went through a period of time where I thought that I was faking the whole thing. Once again, writing out my thoughts in my journal really helped me because I could figure them out better than when I was just thinking. Eventually, through journaling, I ended up feeling a lot more comfortable with the demigirl label and it started to feel right, along with she/they pronouns. Journaling and sorting out my thoughts helped me become more aware of who I am, and the fact that I was in my safe space allowed me to be more authentic in my writing.
So far I’ve only talked about my room as being my safe space. I definitely think that an individual can have multiple safe spaces and that they don’t necessarily have to be a place; I think that a safe space can be a person. For me, I have this one friend who I feel especially comfortable around. She feels like home. We were hanging out one time and we started talking about the future. We also looked at some university programs at one of the universities that we want to go to. Throughout that conversation, I figured out a lot more about what I want for my future. Not only was she my safe space, she also helped me sort out my thoughts and come to that self-awareness. My future is one of the things that makes me fairly anxious so having that opportunity to do some research and actually come up with some sort of plan was really helpful. And it’s not only the near future that we discussed; I’m also just so much more aware of what kind of life I want to live. I know that a lot of people might want to live in the city and become rich and famous, but I realized that for me, I’d rather live in a small cottage that’s relatively secluded from big cities and instead surrounded by nature. This helped me become more self-aware of the things that I value in life and how I want to live.
I’m not the only person who, when finding a safe space to sort out their thoughts, was able to become more self-aware and in the end, become a more authentic version of themselves. I have friends that over the pandemic also realized that they were queer. They were probably in a similar situation where they were able to retreat to a safe space, away from society’s expectations. I’ve also seen multiple videos, both on TikTok and on Instagram, that had a format similar to this: “It was supposed to be two weeks off of school. Now I’m _________ (mentally ill, a different gender, etc.)” To me, this shows that these people also became more self-aware over the pandemic; possibly because they were able to be somewhere that they considered a safe space.
When society is constantly forcing you to act and appear a certain way, it’s difficult to sort out how you really feel because you learn to suppress those thoughts and feelings. Moving away from society allows you to acknowledge and sort out those thoughts, which, in the end, helps make you more self-aware. I know that if the pandemic hadn’t happened and I didn’t spend so much time sorting out my thoughts in a place where I was safe, it might’ve taken a lot longer for me to figure out and accept who I am.
Image sources:
https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/vector-hand-drawn-doodle-sketch-pastel-lgbt-rainbow-gm1250046421-364467720
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/736127501578054357/
https://www.pinterest.com/katehornsby1/demigirl/
http://clipart-library.com/free/white-divider-line-png.html
featured image
The fallout of this is that many people stop trying new things and stay in the place where they feel free from failure. It is a trap that many fall into and leads to complacency, or smug self satisfaction. While initially this may seem good, it means that they get overconfident, and for many, never find what they truly love doing. I believe that the best way to find fulfillment is through doing what you love and it is very difficult to find what you love if you never explore and leave your comfort zone.
As I explored outside my comfort zone I found activities that I never would have considered without exploring beyond, such as: singing and acting. I do not think that those activities would have even been considered for a second if I had stayed in my safe bubble and only did what I was good at. While I have not found life fulfilment yet, finding my real passions helped to get me one step closer to a fulfilled and successful life.
Egotistical individuals that seek their own prosperity are at the same time confined to a relative perspective on value, suspending them in a cycle of never-ending greed; therefore, the liberation from ego demands the denouncement of relativity, or in other words, an isolation from the external world that instigates the self-satisfying desires that delude the individual. 
