The Roommate Inside Your Head

When I began the journey of my transformation, I had to start with the lies I had come to believe about myself. Not just the ones that others taught me, though those were just as important to get rid of, but the ones I invented on my own that were off-shoots of weeds already rooted in. Sometimes negative beliefs are not just developed by what someone says to you, but by how someone makes you feel.This can cause your imagination to run wild with all sorts of terrible thoughts about yourself. And the more that you hear those types of messages, the easier it becomes to believe that they are true. 

Our brain doesn’t know fact from fiction. It learns what it is taught. And if it hears something long enough, it will lock in those thoughts as if they are fact. So, it’s up to us to learn how to rewire our brain with truth and immerse our mind in positivity until it begins to believe in it. Our brain can be so conditioned to hold onto a belief that in the initial stage of rewiring, it will try to deny any new beliefs, even if they are good. Call it muscle memory, autopilot, or the path of least resistance, your brain will do what it has been taught to do simply because it’s easy and it knows how. This is why it’s important when transforming to a positive mindset,  to not give up and to also employ the saying, “fake it, ‘til you make it!”. There is so much truth in that statement because your brain will require you to take action and feed it positivity, and a whole lot of it, before it can believe in what you feed it. And it will try to derail you until the new teachings take root. So, it’s important to use positivity before you believe in it. Read that again! But, the positivity is different than just showing up to your friends party with a smile on your face and pretending everything is fine, when the truth is your world is falling apart. We shouldn’t deny ourselves of our emotions when facing life’s painful moments. It’s the lies that we want to target that stick around and paralyze us from living a better life. 

In the initial state of learning how to use positivity to change my mindset, I found I was faced with another challenge. I not only believed in lies, I saw them as my identity of who I was as a woman. So, I needed a way to cope when the lies would resurface and discourage me from continuing. Sometimes, I felt like the effort was futile and I would never become someone worthy of being respected and treated as if she were valuable. Yes, this is how low of a point I was in my life. I had to somehow separate who I was from who I thought I was. This is when I started calling my brain the roommate inside my head. I imagined my mind was a separate person from me. A beautiful friend that needed rescuing and I set out to see her as someone I could help. And it allowed me to give myself the grace I needed to try, fail and fall and the courage to get back up again.  At the time, unknowingly, this gave me a starting point to learn to love myself. So, I imagined myself as a little girl that needed kindness and nurturing and I set out to rescue her and give her hope for a new and better future. The term roommate inside my head stuck and further used throughout my course in hopes that other women will see their mind as a beautiful friend that they have a deep connection with and a wonderful purpose to encourage toward something better.

Seeing my mind separate from myself also allowed me to see the difference between who I was and how I was. My identity versus my actions. My identity was a fixed idea and my actions were the variables, which included thoughts, perspectives, beliefs, behaviors and habits. During seasons like this, we tend to feel “lost”, like we no longer know who we are, if we ever even did, which causes us to not know who we are. The good news is that the “who we are” is a child of the Almighty God. A fixed identity that cannot be taken from us. So, we can rest assure that we KNOW who we are. The lost part belongs in the “how” or “where” we are category. How we making choices that keep us feeling lost, or are we behaving in ways that keep us from seeing the truth? And where are we in life that isn’t going so well. These are some hard truths that I had to ask myself so I could determine what I needed to do to get myself heading in a healthier direction. This gave me something concrete to grasp to that I could work with.  There was nothing wrong with me, I just had to change how I showed up because my actions weren’t lining up with my identity in Christ.

So, I clung to the truth that I was a daughter of a King so I would always remember who I was and I paid closer attention to what I was doing that was sabotaging my road to a healthier mindset. It wasn’t easy looking within myself to learn what I needed to do differently, but I also found so much freedom and a sense of hope, which kept me going knowing I was now in greater control of my life and my future.

It is my greatest hope that if you have lost a sense of who you are, take heart, because you too, are a beautiful daughter of a King and He wants you to know how treasured you are to Him. And if you feel lost, I hope you know that there are things you can do for yourself to find your way again. Sometimes, we have to do positive things over and over before we reap the fruits of our labor and trust in the lag time that good things will follow. But, if we do nothing, nothing will change and we will always be left wondering if it’s just our lot in life to suffer. I assure you, it is not! 

I am so grateful I took a leap of faith and started loving the roommate inside my head so that she had a fighting chance to believe she was more. Now she lives with only faint memories of the lies she once believed in and knows that she is valuable to God, which gives her the courage to show up in this world loving others better than she did before. Because when you love yourself enough to be kind to your mind, your heart and your soul and consider how you want to show up in this world, you are much better equipped to love others in a way that showcases the love of Jesus.

You, my beautiful friend, are not broken. Remember your identity in Jesus and teach the roommate inside your head that she is loved and wanted and how she might create changes so she believes it.

Stay faithful. You are more valuable than ever.