Being human is so messy.  There’s no book on how to get through this life.  There is no guidance for the day to day and we are all doing our best within our own frames of reference.  So we make it up as we go and we get it “wrong” until we get it “right.”  The room for error and the room to experiment and have fun in my life is something I struggle with every day.  I feel the creative urge a lot but I let myself get distracted by the mundane or the things that I’m told I need to do.  My fear keeps me firmly on the path set out before me.

Being human is about creating space and that is hard to do when you have a preconceived notion about what that space should hold.  It’s even harder to create space when you are only allowed to create the life you’re looking for if you can afford it.  So really when it comes to creating space, it’s about creating space for yourself as well as others to be equally flawed.  It’s up to us to decide how that impacts us and where we put that energy.

I have a story that I’ve been hesitant to share before now because I was afraid of how it would make people perceive my work.  I was afraid it would be too off-putting.  I felt shame about this story because even as I was living it I knew it was “wrong” and as time passed, there were fewer and fewer people I could share it with.  The way I handled the trauma of my life was not the conventional way—and there are some who would debate whether or not what I experienced even was trauma.  I felt guilt because I didn’t believe that I had a reason to feel guilty based on my life.  It left me conflicted about who I was—because I knew I had this experience but there were people who didn’t think it was enough to feel the way I did.  I always carried the belief that all of these things were the direct result of my decisions, so anything that came of it was a result of my own actions.  How could I be upset over things I brought into my life simply because it was more than I could handle?  Do we have a right to be upset over the world not going our way?

I think the point is, regardless of what others may think, our stories are all an indicator of our messy humanity.  We all have things we’d prefer not to have lived through.  We all have things that embarrass us or make us feel a level of shame.  And that too is part of being human. 

Over the next few days and weeks (however long it takes me to compose it) I will share this story.  I can’t move forward with this work without sharing this piece.  And I can’t profess honesty and transparency without being honest and transparent.  Sharing the pieces of life that we have choked down is a mark of our need to connect and also a need to remind ourselves that we are human.  No matter how messy it gets, we are lucky to live in the beautiful chaos of it all.  We can either invite ourselves in and learn to weather the storm or we can fight it and get carried away.  I choose to open the door.       

Today I am grateful for such a beautiful weekend.  We have needed some time off, only to decompress.  This weekend was absolutely gorgeous and we accomplished a lot.  It was great to accomplish those things on our to-do list together. 

Today I am grateful for progress forward.  We took our house off the market a week ago and we have started making improvements to our current home already.  We’ve been painting and making the space fresh.  The ultimate goal is to find our forever home, but I am so grateful that we were able to take a stressful situation and work together for the bigger picture.

Today I am grateful to remind myself that I am capable.  We all go through funks every now and then and I’ve felt off lately.  It started as we were waiting to see if we were going to be selling our house or staying and now that we have decided to stay, I feel more settled.  But there are things we need to do around here regardless.  So as we are beginning our next adventures, I am seeing that I am able to follow through.  I am able to do things I haven’t done in over 20 years.  And I am happy.

Today I am grateful to release some energy.  It has been challenging to get out of my head and challenging to find the right actions to take.  So I’ve taken to making little decisions throughout the day rather than treating each decision as a life altering event.  If I need to rest, I rest.  I meal prep, I have been painting.  When I can’t paint, I prep by taping walls.  Anything to keep me moving forward.  And it feels good.  I know this is something I’ve mentioned frequently, but I genuinely need to remind myself of this all the time because I will fixate and paralyze myself if I’m not doing something.  And then I will sit there doing nothing—so the reminders help. Today I am grateful to develop beyond my comfort zone.  I’ve been spending time looking beyond what I have around me.  I’ve been reading books on different topics, a lot of memoirs.  So many of their stories have inspired me in the work that I want to share and offer on my own site.  A lot of the pieces I have read have inspired me to have the courage to share more of my own story.  It is only when we are brave in reaching beyond what we know that we learn.

Photo by Rafael Serafim on Pexels.com

The world needs us.  The world needs us present and attentive and giving a damn about what is happening.  The natural order of things shows us that with care, nature flourishes.  We are the same.  At work yesterday there was another issue between my employee and one of my coworkers about clothes.  The context of the event made it clear that the last event involving my employee’s cloths (that I spoke about a few months ago) came from this coworker and not from the group that we initially thought brought it forward.  My initial reaction was to be completely angry.  Like all consuming righteous anger.  But I had to pause because we were in the exact same position as several months ago and I am done repeating that story.  So I took a beat.

The woman who has this issue is older and she has found herself in a pattern in her life.  I can’t make assumptions but she has a different view on how things should be because she is from a different generation.  When there is nothing to complain about a person’s work ethic, the age old tactic is to attack on a personal level.  She approached my staff member and said some really inappropriate things and touted her position as a right to discuss these things with her.  She had also mentioned that she had some frustration with work over the weekend so she was primed and looking for anything to target.

After I thought through all of this I realized the story is always the same: Fear.  It’s fear and a lack of introspection.  An inability to stop and pause and ask whether or not you are really the appropriate person to address an issue.  An inability to recognize an unrelated issue can cause us to snap. And it took a LOT of work for me to understand that this woman needs some care.  We need to care enough for each other to manage our own loose ends rather than lashing out at someone for a completely unrelated issue.  It takes a lot of personal work, deeply intimate and thoughtful work to keep ourselves in check.

I feel like we are at a stage where we have to re-learn this whole human thing.  Being human is as powerful as it is fragile and it will behave according to how you treat it.  We have a choice to nurture ourselves and each other or we have a choice to remain defensive and isolated and victimized.  I’m not sure what the tipping point will be or what side of the fence we will ultimately land on, but I know we have to make a decision and I know that whatever decision we make will have a factor in which way we go.

Whether it is a big moment or a small moment, we can start by breaking habits.  I fought with everything in me to tailor my anger at hearing my employee was harassed again—and for the record I made sure to defend my employee.  But taking a moment to really think things through helped me see where she was coming from and that it wasn’t my leadership she was attacking and it really wasn’t my employee.  She was going after something she felt she could control.  Knowing that helped me keep the situation in check both for myself and for my employee.

So let’s start small with taking care of ourselves, with understanding ourselves.  We can demonstrate that we have tolerance for our human state by having tolerance for who we are.  We can’t fulfill our purposes if we are treating ourselves like garbage so make yourself a priority.  Own your worth and find joy in your experiences.  Having love and compassion for ourselves is a step toward having that empathy for everyone else.  Starting small can be the biggest step you take.