Ask Mimi Anything: Advice sent from the edge of an expanding heart

I have been going through a lot of big changes and have been feeling them with much tenderness. I have a tendency to catastrophize when things get tough and have had a hard time adjusting to my new realities. However, as I have sat with myself during these vast transitions, I have learned that my emotional changes and yearnings indicate expansions of the heart. I am so grateful for the following questions because they showed me the vulnerability that is required when admitting our needs and desires to ourselves as we experience immense internal and external change. For this issue of Ask Mimi Anything, we are going to explore what it means to change and feel our hearts open, widen, and expand.

Q: I recently moved interstate, and had two really big friendships end in the same period. How do I help myself when I’m feeling lonely and missing friends? All my interactions are virtual and I crave human connection.

MIMI: Dear friend, I hope the changes of your move have been gentle to you. I know how difficult it is to uproot and reground as part of your decision to move somewhere that feels more aligned to you. Or, if it was out of necessity, I hope you are trusting that this move was what you needed in this moment. Whatever the intention behind your move, I hope that you feel aligned with it now more than before. The adjustment period is rocky, but it impresses me that you knew immediately what you needed and what you were craving. 

Friendship breakups are intensely difficult. They are an upheaval of stability, and can illustrate the painful and grievous knowledge that people grow apart. Whatever the reason for your breakup, I know the space that lost friends can leave is cavernous, and we all deserve to have friendships that are meaningful, fulfilling, and supportive. When moving to a new state, it can be even more jarring to enter a new pool of people. However, I hope you remember that if you did it once, you will do it again and again and again in your lifetime, because your ability to discern what is important to you only gets sharper as you grow. 

Loneliness is an extremely wise teacher. She reveals our needs and dismantles what capitalism and liberalism have long taught us about hyper-independence and individualism. Your needs for human connection are natural, and they extend beyond the human experience, but toward the non-human species that also reach out to each other for sunlight, air, and nutrients. Sit with the loneliness as it transmutes into gratitude for the friends you have made, and perhaps even plan moments where you can meet them with intention and reconnect. 

You are in a period of transition and change and therefore your heart is opening and widening. What you have learned from the separations you’ve experienced will only solidify your intentions for the friendships that you wish to find moving forward. You will also be delighted to know that many people feel this way, and I can assure you that many people in your radius are hoping for the same. Because we live in a capitalist system that intends to isolate us from others, our hunger for connection grows stronger, and our motivation to connect is unstoppable. 

Despite the limitations of the online realm, I suggest that you use it as a tool to reach out to people. Perhaps find local community events and strike up a conversation with somebody that seems interesting to you. As your heart widens and expands, and as you step into this courageous new era, your circle of connections will widen too. 

Q: I find myself struggling with intimacy and relationships of late. After, engaging with therapy and inner child work, I’ve realized that I have experienced a significant amount of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in my childhood. When trying to foster relationships now, I find joy in creating community but pull back when I feel like the relationship becomes deeper. How can I work to improve this discomfort/fear?

MIMI: Dear friend, I commend you first of all for your devotion to understanding yourself through therapy and inner child work. It is strenuous work and requires one to have the courage to revisit wounds that may have been concealed for many decades. While it might feel like a kind of haunting, I like to look at it as an opportunity to heal from childhood wounds so that you are no longer held back by them. As you tend to these wounds, as they sting and sometimes ooze, you come closer to the clarity of what you deserve, in contrast with the painful circumstances that you were dealt as a child. 

Healing does not come without experimentation and failure. Even as you try to put yourself out there, you will re-encounter shadows and habits from your past. It is important to not punish yourself when these moments arise, which I know is not easy for someone who comes from a background of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. You were probably taught that the harm you received was your own fault, and I echo to you a million times that it was not. 

Your hesitation to deepen relationships is natural. There have been ruptures in the close relationships that were supposed to be safe spaces for you. It is no wonder that you see people as threatening, because the possibilities of being abused again are very real. However, it is important to discern the voice of panic in your head and have conversations with yourself about the fear that you are experiencing. You have the ability to sort out your fear from your material reality. You have the capacity to reflect on the red flags in your head versus the red flags that you experience in the world.

I want to point out that the healing that you are working toward is already here. The widening of your heart is evident in your courage to try again, to regenerate new patterns and ideas with new relationships that are worthy of your love and emotional vulnerability. It will take some trial and error, and when these errors come, I hope you do not give up in despair. We keep trying as we keep healing; it is an ongoing process, and you are on the way. While we cannot control or predict how people are going to act, and it is difficult to know the traumas that people have experienced themselves, your heart is opening wider than ever before, despite the many ways that it was closed shut when you were a child. 

I myself have gone through many relationship changes. My circles and communities have vastly shifted and I have grown apart from people whose values seem to be incompatible with mine. This has been a difficult adjustment for me, too, and as I reckon with those changes, my close circle has gotten smaller, but I feel so aligned with and grateful for my friends. As your relationships change and grow, I know that you will attract people to open your heart precisely because you are doing so yourself. Your ability to open up to me now shows that you are inching closer everyday to opening up to new and lasting relationships. You are closer than you think.