I Am Feeling Stuck
I have been trying to find the right words, the right sentence, the right method to write another blog post. The truth is, sometimes when I look through what I’ve written, there is a part of me that doubts that I should have posted it. Then there are parts of me that feel good about it and proud of myself for doing it. And there are parts of me that want to edit it all the time! Today, I found myself with a part of me unsure of what to write. I feel a block.
Through my own processing, naming the different parts of me that come up, I know my immediate options: I can step away and not write (sometimes I choose this more often than not), I can think of a topic and try to generate something with great effort and write even though parts of me aren’t “feeling it”, or I can write about my authentic experience in this moment. Today, I choose to do that and so I write about my own doubts and insecurities that I feel in the moment. Often, I feel most secure about what I present when I can name my doubts and insecurities and even share them with others. A part of me knows that if I do this, I am leaning into my authenticity, and perhaps I am naming a reality that others may be experiencing.
As I write about my own insecurities in this moment, I feel a release in the block. Or perhaps the block is still there, but I am navigating around it. The truth is, if I set out to write about a topic and felt the block, and now I am writing about the block, then the block didn’t go away. It’s not that the block went away; I just couldn’t force my way through it as I intended. Instead, I had to move around it, shift my perspective, and take an unexpected path—I had to find another way and be in a different space.
It reminds me of working through “stuckness” or “ambivalence.” When we resist landing in that place of stuckness, we might temporarily move past it, only to find ourselves looping back again. It becomes part of the cycle. But what if, instead of trying to force our way out, we stepped into our authentic experience in that moment? What if we named it—“I am stuck”—and allowed ourselves to say, “Maybe that isn’t a bad thing”? What if we sat with it, explored it, and allowed it to tell us something about ourselves? What if we saw stuckness as an invitation, not an obstacle.
If we became curious about the stuckness, we might start to see that there are reasons why we are here. If we accept it as part of us, part of our process, maybe we can tend to it and, in doing so, discover new pathways. And when we inevitably come across the same dilemma in the future—the same challenge, the same block—it doesn’t mean we’ve failed or that we’re back where we started. It means we have the chance to meet it again, but this time, with what we’ve learned.
Maybe the next time we encounter that same obstacle or “rock in the path,” we won’t need to struggle the way we once did. Maybe we’ve gained something like strength, understanding, and a new perspective that allows us to move through or around it with more ease. We learn by allowing life to show us. And when we return to these moments, we come back stronger, more equipped, and maybe even a little more at peace with the process.
In therapy, we learn to hold the stuckness as a part of us and not as something to get out of or get rid of. We can trust our own intuition, bodies, and minds. When we can accept who we are and what we are feeling in this moment, we will find a way that suits us, a way that is good for us.
Through my life experience, the work that I do, and the people from whom I’ve learned, I find that when we can lean into this with curiosity and acceptance, we can integrate the stuckness as part of us and, therefore, flow with it while we are in self-leadership. Parts work is a relational type of therapy. You find a way. If I can lean into the stuckness, I can spend my energy finding a way instead of fixating on the fantasy of being unstuck. If we can trust that there’s wisdom in our senses, bodies, and intuition, then we can learn from them. In turn, those parts of us that are living in fear begin to trust our own self-leadership.
-Imuri
