Looping lessons
The other night I had a dream telling me to go look at March 2024. Random as hell. But my dreams never lie to me, so the next morning I pulled out my old journal and flipped to last year. And right there… I saw myself. The same goals. The same frustrations. The same patterns I said I was done with. It was almost eerie, like past-me was nudging me saying, “Nelly… look again.”
I sat there for a minute letting it hit. Not in a defeated way. More like, “Damn… how long have I been circling this block?”
It’s funny how we swear we’re evolving because we’re reading, journaling, listening to podcasts, “doing the inner work,” rewriting affirmations, but then life gently shows us we’ve been walking around the same lesson with new shoes and better vocabulary.
What I realized looking at that page was you can know the lesson. You can write about the lesson. You can comprehend the lesson deeply. And still not embody it. Like my mentor once said “Just because you know better, doesn’t mean you will do better”. Because your body has its own timeline. And sometimes it takes years for the body to believe what your mind already knows. It takes years to convince yourself you want different or better yet deserve different.
I saw goals I’ve repeated for the last few years… not because I’m lazy or inconsistent, but because I never created a new pattern strong enough to replace my old one. I saw behaviors I thought I’d unlearned and truthfully, I have but in moments of stress or uncertainty, I still slip into them like muscle memory. And that’s the part nobody talks about. Healing isn’t cute. Unlearning isn’t easy. Sometimes you’re deep in your growth era and still falling back into old patterns because they feel safe… not good, but safe.
As I kept reading that entry, I didn’t feel embarrassed. I didn’t judge myself. I actually felt grateful. Because I could see how much softer I hold myself now. How much quicker I course-correct. How much more honest I am about what triggers me and why. Cycles don’t repeat because I am failing. They repeat because there’s a part of me that’s still asking for attention, still asking to be loved differently, still asking to be heard. It’s like life taps you on the shoulder saying,
“You’re not done yet… but you’re getting closer.” And that’s how it felt for me.
Reading those old journal entries made me realize that I’m not stuck. I’m actually evolving. Just not in a straight line. More like in spirals… circling back only to rise higher each time. Only to see things from higher perspective.
So if you’re in a season that feels familiar…If you’re repeating something you swore you outgrew…If you’re staring at last year’s goals and wondering why they’re still here…. You’re just being invited to dive deeper.
And sometimes deeper is exactly where the breakthrough lives. And exactly the push you need to get somethings in order so you can move forward instead of in circles.