Darren Waller

Yeah.

Yeah, much better than I ever have.

It's still – for me, it's like the curiosity and the kindness towards myself and the difficulties that I still experience and any like pain points, discomforts that come up or any –

behaviors that I feel like I could be doing better in.

Um, it's just having that lens toward myself and, um, you know, staying in communication with people at all times that I love and that I care about and people that hold me accountable and that, um, push me to be better.

It's like, that always has to be a constant for me to thrive in any realm.

And it's like, that's, what's going to prepare me to, you know, whenever one day the opportunity presents itself to be able to, you know, care for other people or care for a family, um,

care for my seed at some point, like whenever the opportunity presents itself, like these are the opportunities that are training for me to have a fulfilled life because there is no fulfilled life without being able to relate lovingly, vulnerably, openly with other people.

And that first has to start with me.

So it's like continuing to build on that foundation of that loving, kind nature toward myself.

Everything benefits from that opportunity.

um i would say uh a lot of my early approaches to like therapy and like doing the work that has kind of changed my life it's like there's a lot of fixing that i need to do i need to fix myself like which has like an undertone of like there's pieces of me that are like broken uh and in some ways you can look at it and say that's the truth but it's like um

We all have like a shadow.

I don't know if you've ever heard that concept before, but there's this psychologist named Carl Jung, and he has this quote that always sticks with me.

He says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

And so there's all these parts of me that I was never...

conscious of like those shadow parts like the the version of me when I was a kid when I was hiding all the coke cans and still in uh taking money out the purse and like doing all these all these things there's always this shadow part of me that I always had a um a resentment towards like a hatred towards of like ah like that needs to go away that I got to get that out of there but in therapy I feel like I've realized that there has to be an element of like befriending that shadow

And looking at those parts is like this shadow is really just showing me areas in which I could be freer, areas in which I could have like a much more whole part to myself because it's like learning, basically learning to love like not only this healthier, you know, more put together version of myself, but also those broken parts.

Those hurting versions, those lost versions of myself and finding like a like a congruence there, like a love for those things.

So in shifting away from I need to fix things by myself, but it's more so like I'm just becoming more whole with all of me and all that.