Finding Safety in Myself

Understanding my emotional needs

Feeling safe is one of the basic human emotional needs. For some people, it might be so basic that they have never felt the lack of it. When I reflect back, it feels like I have never felt completely safe in most of the set ups in my life. It’s not like that I have been around people who can harm me physically. But sometimes feeling unsafe has little to do with physical safety. For some people who has felt unsafe physically, feelings of being unsafe can linger for a longer time. For example, I am on a walk and a lion comes in front of me, I will feel physically unsafe and try to run away from it. When I have reached in a safe room where the lion cannot come in, I will still have feelings of unsafety for some time.

When I wonder about the first incident where I had felt unsafe, I can’t think of a something particular, but I can think of few experiences which might have added to my feeling of being unsafe. To start with, I come from a country where not a single day goes by without reading or watching news of a woman being harassed. When I was a child, I have always seen girls being advised not to stay out when it’s dark. I don’t remember my parents telling me this but as a child you follow things what others around you are following without questioning it. When I was living in one of the metro cities of my country, I have always seen men colleagues dropping women at their place when we finish late at work. It is unsafe was an unsaid thing. I remember few of my taxi rides to train stations early morning by myself and how unsafe I have felt.

Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

I migrated from my hometown to a metro city and then from a metro city to a different country. There was a sense of excitement in these moves but also a sense of unsafety as you are leaving familiar things behind. Familiar faces, familiar roads, familiar cafes and familiar bookshops. It takes internal work to create a life beyond what you have seen and known all your life. I didn’t even know this feeling of unsafety at that time, I just know that it was quite hard in the beginning. And then covid happened. I couldn’t meet my family and visit my country for three years. When I visited my family after covid, it didn’t feel the same. Everything was mostly the same, but what changed was myself and my familiar people. When I came back, my reason of being in this foreign land came to an end. Again, feeling of unsafety, panic and other hard feelings was at peak.

Now when I look back at my life, my struggles and my story, it feels like I have always tried to derive the feeling of safety from something outside of me, my hometown, my country, people I have loved and what I have always known. There is nothing wrong in doing so but then when these things change, people leave or you feel an urge to make a change in life, it will be very hard for you. I am trying to work on this safety bit in myself. The base of my safety should be in myself. I can feel safer with certain people or at certain places. I believe, if it is something I already have in myself, then I can discern outside things or people better which might make me feel unsafe and are not for me. In saying so I am not denying my struggles of being a woman, country migration, covid lockdowns and other hard stuff, I am learning to trust and feel safe in myself in the midst of a storm. I hope you are all doing well. Thank you for being here.

Lots of love and healing,

Harneek!

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This week’s recommendations:

• Both are true by

  Nadia Meli
  on validating spectrum of emotions you feel at a single event

• Wanting to quit being the person who organises everyone and everything by

  Poorna Bell
  on how exhausting it is to be the person who takes up the role of an organizer and how sometimes we over give ourselves to others being in that role

• End Suffering Right Where You Are And Live The Gift Of Freedom by

  Paolo Peralta
  . Some simple and powerful words on being present and mindful