Journal Series Ep 1/4: That's Rare

Nicole reads a raw journal entry written under pressure and unpacks what it actually means to be self-aware when it comes at a cost. Real strength isn't performance. And looking at your walls? That's rare.  Self-awareness isn't the destination. It's the price of admission 

Transcript

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I looked at my walls and that's rare. That's it. That's the whole episode. Bye. Okay, not really. Let's sit with that for a second. Welcome back to Nicole's Notes. I'm Nicole Zeller, and today we're doing something a little different. I'm reading you my journal. Ah. Not a polished essay, not a crafted argument, the actual page written in blue pen in a floral notebook that absolutely does not match my personality at a moment when I needed to remember who I was. So let's go. I am disciplined. I don't drift long. Even in heartbreak, I'm working out, finishing assignments, building systems, showing up socially. I self-correct. I am intellectually sharp. I think structurally. I analyze patterns. I understand trauma dynamics. I don't operate from fantasy for long. I course correct toward reality. I am emotionally brave. I felt something massive. I didn't run. I didn't numb it. I didn't play games. I went straight into it. I don't discard people easily. I don't weaponize resentment. I hold complexity without turning cruel. I am self-aware. I examine my impatience. I examine my high performance bias. I looked at my walls. That's rare. Here's what I want you to notice about that entry. It's not a gratitude list. It's not affirmations in the toxic positivity. Manifest your abundance sense. This is something harder. This is a woman in the middle of something, something that hurt, making herself look directly at her own character so she doesn't lose the thread of herself. There's a psychological term for what's happening in that entry. So Carl Jung, uh, a psychoanalyst, who was very profound in figuring out how we make our conscious and our subconscious integrate. He referred to this as holding the tension of opposites, the ability to stay in pain without collapsing into it or escaping it, to feel something massive and not immediately convert that feeling into a story, a defense, a distraction, or a weapon. I don't know. Most people can't do that. Not to say that I haven't done it, I've done it for sure. But most people, when something hurts, do one of three things. They run, they numb, or they retaliate. They ghost, they drink, they talk themselves into being fine when they're not fine. They manufacture reasons why the other person was terrible so that they don't have to sit with the unbearable complexity of a situation that was real and meaningful, but still ended. I wrote. Suddenly, it's you. That's where the real work lives. The high performance bias, the walls. Because here's the thing about being someone who self-corrects, who course corrects toward reality, who analyzes patterns. Sometimes the pattern you're most afraid to analyze is yourself. That's rare. It is rare. And it costs something to write that down. What I know now that I didn't fully know when I wrote that, self-awareness isn't the destination. It's the price of admission. Knowing you have walls doesn't automatically bring them down. Knowing your high performance bias doesn't stop you from performing. The examination is necessary but not sufficient. What comes after the examination is the harder part, which is deciding what you're going to do with what you found. Whether you're going to use your self-knowledge as armor. I'm so self-aware, therefore I'm exempt from accountability, or whether you're going to use it as a door. I wrote this entry to remind myself I wasn't nothing, that even in the middle of something that cracked me open, I was still me, still intact, still functioning, still capable of going straight in instead of sideways out. That was true. It helped. And I'm still working on the walls. If you've got a journal, and I think you should go back and find the entry where you were telling yourself the truth under pressure, where you were making a case for your own character, not to perform it for someone else, but just to not forget it. That entry exists and find it. Because that's the one that tells you who you actually are when the noise stops. Thank you for listening and stay fierce. The world will adjust.