Death is not the greatest loss in life—the greatest loss is when we are already dead when we are alive. If you don’t have goals and things to pursue the only difference between you and a dead person is that you are moving. This one hit me hard. I’ve written on a similar topic, discussing how living the same day on repeat for 90 years isn’t a life. But putting the motions in context struck me differently. We only get one shot at this life and I know I don’t want to continue doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for some relieve on the weekends. I truly do want a life of adventure, and excitement, and freedom. I’m not talking extreme stuff, I’m just talking about living my life the way I want to live it, doing the things that bring me joy. If we have to suffer through the entire week and wish for the weekend, chances are we aren’t spending enough time in joy.
I’m seeing that there are many people so comfortable or so conditioned with the traditional view of how we are “supposed” to live that they honestly believe they are happy. Life doesn’t merely exist in the hours after a 9-5 (or whatever hours you work). Life is every moment of our days—how many of those moments are spent doing things we don’t want to? I’m not knocking those who have found joy, challenge, or purpose in that environment—it’s entirely personal. But for others there is a freedom that needs to be expressed outside of a cubicle between 9-5 M-F. If we feel suffocated in doing what we’re doing, then we need to start asking some other questions. Dig deeper and find what really drives us, find what brings joy and spend more time doing that. Joy is often the biggest indicator of where we need to go.
I don’t want to spread fear, I want to spread a different way of thinking. I want to encourage us to tap into the full possibility of life. I want us to take it for what it is and love every moment of it. I’m not talking about shooting for perfection or curating life, I’m talking about tapping into the universal flow of life and understanding the flows. I want us to celebrate our lives instead of mourning them while we are here. While time may be infinite, we have a short blip of it here and, if we are blessed to wake up another day, then it’s time to find joy in that. Live. Really live, and don’t look back with regret. Simply take it and make it what it can be through understanding the infinite amount of choices we can make. Choose life.
“Demanding what you deserve can feel like a radical act,” Shonda Rimes. I never really knew what it meant to know my worth. Every bit of my worth came from someone else’s opinion. For most of my life I didn’t have a clue what I wanted let alone what I felt about myself—least of all what I deserved. It’s easy to conceal fear with bravado or hurt with anger and both of those things imply a power, even if it’s false. Portraying that power makes people assume you need nothing even if at your core you feel you need everything from them. That’s when it gets messy. The validation you seek disappears because people assume you need nothing, and you feel lost because you have lost the direction that outside validation gave you.
My whole purpose here is to help people find their way back to themselves. What I’ve found is this is a journey. There isn’t a moment when we are miraculously “found.” Life changes rapidly, goals change too. It’s a matter of finding our core purpose, understanding who we are at the deepest levels, and seeing how we can use our gifts in this world. It’s understanding true power, knowing there isn’t an end goal in mind as far as “getting somewhere” or “finding who we are.” We aren’t meant to sit around in our “found” state, we are meant to spread that light. Power isn’t about power over people, it’s about mastering ourselves and our gifts and honing it into an actionable purpose. As soon as we see what we are capable of, we start to learn our worth and find that worth expressed from inside.
The work on this journey is messy and it’s about progress. It isn’t about a tidy package of perfection that we live every day. In order to see what direction we need to flow in, we have to know who we are. The act of knowing ourselves means we understand our worth, and THAT is when we understand what we deserve. We’ve been trained to believe understanding and expressing our worth and not settling for anything less is selfish. I don’t profess putting our needs above everything else, but I do encourage understanding and setting limits with others. Regardless, when we know who we are we won’t settle for anything less. When we are told this is selfish, it can be uncomfortable expressing those limits. I agree with Ms. Rimes—it may feel radical—but it isn’t. It’s the norm and we all deserve what we deserve. There is no earning in this life—that was a system put in place by an old regime who sought power through control and acquisition. Today we know our worth and we express it. Value isn’t external, it’s ignited from within. When we appreciate that magic, knowing we can’t take any less doesn’t seem so extreme. So be radical. Learn, heal, and grow, and take action. It will feel natural soon.
“Don’t worry about getting it right. There is no getting it right. There’s just learning and change and healing and growing and trying again. Be here for all of it,” Jessica Hesser. A beautiful follow up to yesterday’s piece. As we peel back the layers of healing sometimes we see how deeply entrenched our behaviors are. I’m not talking about those moments when we’re repeating a cycle because we still have a lesson to learn. I’m talking about unearthing the deepest level of our feelings for ourselves. I spent a lot of time hating myself, to the point of actively trying to kill myself. When that didn’t work, I maimed myself through cutting. At the time, with skewed thoughts, those actions made sense to me—they explained the emotion and I thought I deserved it. Now I see how ludicrous that thought pattern is/was. How could I hate myself so much? I would never allow those closest to me to do something like that. Why did allow it to happen to myself?
I thought I had to get it right and I thought any mistake was some sort of permanent mark against me. Any sign of imperfection or people not liking me simply added to my own self-hatred. But what did I hate? I hated the fundamental things about myself I couldn’t change…how I looked, how I felt, how I understood things (and how I didn’t understand them). It took me a really long time to understand that there was no getting it right. It took me even longer to understand that we have a say in what happens in our lives. It isn’t about becoming what we are supposed to, it’s about becoming who we are. So as I continue this journey, I’m still finding little wounds and old habits that turn me against myself. We all need those reminders that progress, no matter how small, is progress. No one person is right or wrong (except when it comes to hurting/controlling or thinking we have power over other people…that’s wrong).
There is freedom in that acceptance because we learn to accept ourselves, and when we set ourselves free, we see the magic of who we can be. For me, that first step was seeing that possibility in others and hyping them up to go for their wildest dreams. I wasn’t ready to accept that those options were available to myself and I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do anyway. Removing the pressure of getting it right is immensely freeing. Knowing that we can take one step and it’s a progression is empowering. Healing what hurt us and seeing how we hurt ourselves is one of the most loving the acts we can do—and we all need to do it. When we are told that parts of us are unlovable, we need to learn to love those parts the most. There is no room for hatred of ourselves in moving forward. Heal, forgive (especially ourselves) and learn our purpose. Then learn to take those steps toward purpose. It all makes sense eventually, no matter how messy, no matter what it looks like to others.
Who hasn’t felt the pain (annoyance) of indecision? Who doesn’t know what it’s like to not know (fear) what to do next? Whether the decision is big or small, sometimes the weight of making a choice can paralyze us. When it comes to people pleasing behavior, anxiety, or mental health in general, when we are used to a specific action (like people pleasing) anything outside the norm will feel uncomfortable, and that too can make us feel paralyzed. Other times we feel the weight of needing to be perfect in order to take a chance or make a choice. We weigh and look for every possible outcome, trying to find the right one. What does that do? That keeps us right where we are. There comes a point when we feel in our soul that staying where we are isn’t working. The idea isn’t to be perfect, it’s to make moves. We eventually have to accept that we can’t continue as we have been.
When it comes to messy action, it’s about making progress toward our goals no matter what. It’s understanding that any step forward is positive, any lesson we learn helps us move forward as well. It’s about failing forward. I will be the first to admit that this isn’t something I’ve perfected, it’s not even something I’ve gotten accustomed to. But it is something I’m aware of. Awareness is key. When we have a goal, that means recognizing our strengths and our weaknesses and whether or not those weaknesses and getting really honest about what actually holds us back. Sometimes we have to recognize that we are what holds ourselves back.
Messy action is about taking steps and knowing that taking that step will almost be guaranteed to be messy. And that is ok. Like finding the staircase by taking the first step, we find our way simply by moving. Perfection doesn’t matter, how other people feel doesn’t matter (as long as we aren’t maliciously hurting them), other people’s opinions don’t matter, and accepting that our opinion doesn’t really matter either. Sometimes we just have to make the move. We have to learn the dance as we go. It can be scary and it can feel overwhelming, but once we find our rhythm, an incredible flow comes that we couldn’t have imagined. That flow is where the magic is, the flow is where the movement is, and movement toward a goal (no matter how small) is progress.
Today I am grateful to have woken up with the moon. I got up about 5AM and as I sat in my office getting ready to work, the sun started coming up. I initially hadn’t seen the moon in the dark–the placement in my office is a bit different–but as the sun came up around 5:45AM, I saw the orange ball of the moon through the trees. Light in the dark and an ever-present quiet power. She still looked pretty full from Friday, hanging low. I love those moments when I am clearly reminded I am a part of nature, and also powerful, but just a piece here. It makes me feel less like I have to control everything around me and that I can simply BE. I am grateful to remember that powerful place and to honor where I am.
Today I am grateful for standing in my own. I’ve found a piece of myself that I’ve truly missed. I have been so tired of feeling guilty for the way I live that I had been rejecting the very things I wanted in my life. I’m hypersensitive to other people’s feelings and emotions and I’ve tailored my life to be just right for everyone out of fear of being rejected. I also have a pretty cool talent of seeing the middle ground between parties, so it came naturally to try and maintain a sort of neutrality. It made my whole life bland and neutral and highly stressful—and also sad for the things I wanted and turned down for the sake of others and thinking I didn’t deserve it. There were some comments made in our group last night and I kept quiet, not because I felt guilty or tried to be neutral, but because I knew I wasn’t in the wrong. There was nothing to feel guilty for and I wasn’t going to let it ruin my evening. Small steps turn into big leaps.
Today I am grateful for fun. It’s amazing how quickly I fall into the trap of taking life seriously. We all do it. I know there are, naturally, things that need to be taken seriously—that is the nature of life. But we aren’t meant to go through life taking every single thing as life or death. The body simply can’t handle that kind of stress. My brain tends to go, “Why not? You never know if THIS could be it?! COULD THIS BE IT?!” I need reminders often to have fun. I’m driven toward “the point” and often miss the point of the journey. We were with our friends last evening having a fire in the fire pit (something we haven’t done in over a year) and I felt so compelled to sing and dance and move my body and that is what I did. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel a trace of self-consciousness and I just opened up to what was happening. There was a brief rain shower and my son is terrified of storms (anything with rain is a storm to him) so, under cover of the deck, I kept dancing with him. It amazes me how freeing it can be to just do what the body wants and to feel the moment. What a gift.
Today I am grateful for revelations. I shared last week about some epiphanies I had at work. I want to talk about the freedom that has given. I’m not going to exaggerate and say the stress is gone (far from it), but I want to express how freeing it is to see the truth of someone after holding an opinion. We NEVER know what someone is really thinking or feeling and we have to either rely on what they tell us or we have to wait for the moment the truth is revealed. I’m not seeking out the “Gotcha!” moments, but when they happen, the puzzle sort of falls into place. When you know information, actual facts, you move differently. I feel grateful to see where I stand, what my options are, and knowing that I can let go of the stress I’ve been carrying around a specific situation. There is no point in holding onto something like that, and talk about keeping grounded and present. It’s nice to live firm instead of in the land of projection and speculation. I’m grateful for any insight I can get.
Today I am grateful for song. When I was a kid, I used to sing with my mom and dad all the time. It didn’t matter what it was, both of my parents had a strong love of music—even my grandmother loved music and used to sing as well now that I think about it. My siblings loved music…ok, I mean who doesn’t love music? Regardless, it was always something we did. I even sang with choir in school. Even if my skills aren’t that strong, I still love to sing—I’m an absolute rock star in the car or in the bathroom. With the stress I’ve felt for a while, I’ve been kind of quiet. I had some time alone yesterday while my son and husband went fishing and I belted my heart out. I sang until I cried, I felt every note that moved through my body (this was even before we went out where I continued singing—friends, you’re welcome 😊). But the truth is, singing absolutely moved energy for me, I felt my body open up. Music is the highest form of expression and I completely expressed myself. It wasn’t about being good, it was about flow. It felt like every stagnant piece of me moved. Never lose your joy to the point you can’t sing. I am so grateful for song.
Today I am grateful for humor. Another remedy for taking life seriously. I understand now that life is hard enough and that we truly just need to be who we are. We need to allow life to happen with grace and humility and love, and we need to be there for each other. There are moments that knock us down, the curveballs, the tragedies, the unexpected. But there is beauty there, every day, there is beauty to be found. Jen Pastiloff calls it beauty hunting. Something remarkably beautiful is humor. We try to force things to be a certain way and make them beautiful, but humor looks at what is and appreciates it while understanding there is something beyond our control. A good laugh can open possibilities, it creates flow, it stimulates life. Sometimes we aren’t falling, we are learning to gain different footing, and understanding that is how we learn to dance is key. That is when we can see the humor. We all move in different ways. Laugh at ourselves and remember it’s all part of the dance.
Today I am grateful for presence and the difference it makes on fear, adaptability, and love. I get stressed on some evenings when my husband and I are trying to have an adult night and we have my son. Our friends are always accommodating and everyone loves playing with him—we are truly fortunate with both our child and the group of people we have surrounding us. But I always felt the need to be hypervigilant with him and make sure he didn’t do anything to upset anyone. That got old after a while and there were some evenings I just wanted my husband to take over so I could associate with my friends without “momming” for an evening. Last night as we hung out, I felt this balance of energy for him with my friends and I played with him, we danced together, and we cuddled and it was all because I was in the moment. We aren’t meant to control others, certainly not our children. Letting go felt amazing and I could see my son relax as I relaxed into the presence of where we were. We knew where we were and we simply WERE together.
We all reach a point where we know we are done. Done with feeling sorry for ourselves. Done with taking on other people’s stuff. Done with the same routine. Done with begging to be seen and heard. Done with fighting for something. Done with letting things slide. The same can be said for people when they realize that where they are, the patterns they carry are no longer serving. Not that this is easy to stop, but we all have that point where we know what we do isn’t going to get us what we want. I spoke of the nuclear bomb theory yesterday and I want to elaborate on that a bit. We live in a culture that is so attention depleted but attention seeking and so deprived of the ability to thoroughly communicate that as soon as we see a human, we unleash or expect them to have the answers. Call it what we want, say we thought this person might actually know the answer, that doesn’t negate us of our responsibility to find out the most reliable source—and it doesn’t stop us from holding each other accountability to that responsibility.
For example, like all of you, I get paid to do a specific job. Most corporations have this thing about efficiency and the greater good of the organization often to the detriment of employees. For example, I’m a salaried employee. I get paid for 40 hours and not a cent more. Anything over 40 hours is my time and donated to the organization. The expectation is that I will work above and beyond what I am paid to do without compensation. Now, if a project runs long, things happen. But I am not going to acquire more work and more projects to be met in the same deadline for the same pay. I will not be responsible for your poor planning. I have no qualms about leaving my job every day after 8 hours. If you insist on putting something over on a certain day, then I will be leaving early the next day. I know that doesn’t always make me a team player, but I was the kid who finished the team’s work for too long and that didn’t get me anywhere, either. And what is it if it’s good for the team but bad for the individual? All that leads to is more stress and resentment and no one can afford to live like that any longer. But this world can be manipulative and make you believe that something is wrong with you for not going “extra”. I think we need to learn to be satisfied with enough and learn that someone else’s happiness at the cost of our own is too expensive and it’s a lie we’ve been fed to benefit a system.
When we people please we take up the mantle of someone else’s expectations at the expense of our own. When we train our children and the people around us to people please, we are teaching them that taking responsibility for other people’s lives is more important than learning to take responsibility for our own lives. When we carry other people’s stuff for too long, we never learn to pick up our own. I’m not interested in being a team player anymore. Yes, I would love to work with a team, but I am not interested in what’s good for the team if that means putting it before my needs or my sanity. I am also not interested in working with the team if we aren’t pulling our equal weight. Again, that isn’t to say that things don’t shift occasionally, but when we do our part, that makes things go around. I want us to consider that part of our responsibility is making sure we know who we are and where we belong. Knowing what our values are and what we do. If those things aren’t aligned then we don’t have a clue how to handle it when others aren’t accountable either. So all of this to say I am done with taking on other people’s responsibility. I am done feeling guilt for the life I live. I am done feeling shame for adhering to my values. I am done thinking doing things for others makes me good instead of trampled on. Honor ourselves and hear the calling of our soul to know what is right for us.
Earlier this week I spoke of compassion and understanding/discovering where other people are coming from, seeing through their façade to their fears or simply the truth of the matter. After attending the event I spoke of and after the revelation of my boss’s fear, something else hit me: I’ve been annoyed at work because of how my team approaches problems. Some people thrive under pressure or chaos (we may even have moments of pressure that bring out our best) but the human mind (and the human body) are not designed to function under pressure, fear, anxiety, or chaos 24/7. I can’t do it. When we operate from fear we forget what steps to take, we forget where we are, and we can’t see the way forward clearly. Life throws us curveballs where we may need to act quickly, but that should not be the case in the day to day.
I showed up at work and within 120 seconds (I wasn’t even fully logged in), my coworker approached me with that started as a question. Now, I admit that I can be less rigid with my routine in the morning but I can’t stand walking into a perceived fire first thing. This question was something I didn’t have a full answer to and it was posed as, “You said X,Y,Z and you’re the expert…”. Sidenote, when you start a question like that it does NOT come off as needing clarification, it comes off as testing the other person. Anyway, I explained what I knew and told her I needed to think about the rest. See, my team has a history of asking questions that often have nothing to do with the person they approach, they assume it does. So this question got me thinking about why this person assumes I know this answer which got me thinking about why she’s concerned about something in my area…which got me thinking that if she knew what needed to be done prior to asking me, then why didn’t she approach me sooner.
That’s when my nuclear bomb theory went off. Asking someone something we assume they know can be akin to forcing a basketball player or web developer to disarm a nuclear bomb. They aren’t going to have the slightest clue how to do it and that isn’t the safest time to test them on their ability to reason through something they haven’t learned. Also, approaching EVERYTHING as a crisis, as if everything is going to blow up if we don’t address it RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND makes it seem like the world will be destroyed if we don’t drop everything and address your issue. I can’t, nor would I want to ever live with that kind of constant pressure. It isn’t worth it, in fact, it’s dangerous. There is no reason to put that kind of pressure on ourselves. Strive, face our fears, yes, but don’t create imaginary threats for ourselves or others simply for the sake of having things to solve. Nothing is that urgent my friend, and if we ever face a nuclear bomb that needs disarming, then we need to call in the experts. We are not failures for not knowing how to resolve something and it isn’t our responsibility to know how to fix it all. We have community for that. Face our fears, do our part, and the rest falls into place.
We spoke of Matthew McConaughey’s Art of Living event yesterday and I want to share some other gems from that event. I want to clarify that the purpose of the event was discovering the things that hold us back in order to live our lives more honestly and fully. It’s more than just developing confidence, it’s about identifying what weakens our confidence in the first place, identifying the fears we have. McConaughey asked, “What is the boogeyman? It’s fear of the unknown, fear in our head, not in reality.” The reason this stuck out is the realization that we aren’t trained how to deal with these fears. Too often we are taught to plow through and do until we are able to move forward with some degree of success. McConaughey suggests that this be more like looking the monster in the eye. When we actually confront what we fear we learn how to deal with it. We aren’t trying to beat it into submission, we are asking what it needs which opens a conversation.
McConaughey said that anything worth having cost something. For example, to be successful (of our own definition) we have to be willing to give up other people’s expectations and we have to be willing to sacrifice our comfort. He doesn’t suggest we do this in a masochistic way, working 20 hours a day and striving toward burnout, he says we need to identify where we can learn to face down the voice that seeks out comfort over our dreams. I love the idea of getting comfortable with who we are and accepting who we are because there’s another thing we mistake in life: that if we make mistakes, we can’t have the life we want. McConaughey says the exact opposite: We can have fears and flaws and still get to our ideal life if we learn how to approach those fears.
I loved the perspective McConaughey shared on fear in terms of figuring out what the actual problem is: It’s a right of passage to face our fears and flaws—ask ourselves what monster we need to face. When we go through life we spend a large amount of time proving our worth and judging the worthiness of others. When we see it’s mainly because we aren’t taught how to develop our own worth, we can start looking at how we feel about ourselves and where we want to go. By the time we get to the question about what we really fear, we are in a different mindset. Sometimes the questions we ask bring us the answers we didn’t expect, and THOSE are the answers we need. If we want to live fully, we need to be fully honest about the things we don’t want to face and we need to be equally honest about what we can actually face in spite of our fears. The answer lies on the other side of our fear/comfort zone. When we get there, we are unstoppable. What monster do you need to look in the eye?
Matthew McConaughey recently held an event on the art of living and he shared some eye opening nuggets of wisdom. Sometimes we aren’t able to get honest with ourselves because we feel like we will let ourselves and others down. We hide parts of who we are and don’t share our story because of how we think it makes us look. The truth is our stories connect us. When we share the truth of who we are, we express vulnerability, yes, but we also express an authenticity that can’t be taken away. We show the parts that most people can relate to. McConaughey shared a story of trying to find himself and he wound up walking with a monk, sharing his story for over four hours with the monk saying nothing. At the end of the conversation, the monk turned to McConaughey and said simply, “Me too.” To hold space and witness the parts of ourselves and others that we don’t want to see opens our eyes to another immutable fact: the human condition is not a singular problem, we are all susceptible to greed, anger, joy, pleasure, pain, hope, resentment, etc. as the next person (Matthew McConaughey).
The truth is confidence in this life, in this day and age is a fickle thing. We can’t rely on confidence as a gauge of success unless it’s the confidence that comes from knowing ourselves. Anything that comes from the outside or “makes” us feel a certain way can be altered or taken away at any time and it’s important to have the wherewithal to let go when necessary. So when we share and understand with 100% certainty that we are not alone, we can build relationships and connect with others. Connection is key. I’ve always been one of those do-it-on-my-own women because I felt the need to prove myself every step of the way. Plus I didn’t want to be bound by other people’s timelines so if I wanted something done, it was faster to do it myself. But that left me empty and scared and anxious, always looking for the next thing that could go wrong because I had to be on high alert for any issue to deal with. I became addicted to fear and stress and trained my brain to constantly feel victimized. While there were moments those feelings were true, my life was not constantly in danger—no ones is.
So when it comes to the human condition, we can fix the issue with connection on two levels: connection with ourselves and connection with others. When we connect with ourselves, we develop an understanding of our flaws AND our strengths, of our fears AND our possibilities, of our obligations to others AND our responsibility to ourselves. We see the truth of who we are and we embrace and accept it and when we learn to operate from that foundation, a path forward begins to form. When we connect with others, we are reminded to be humble because we aren’t alone. We are reminded the world isn’t out to get us and that we have options. We can learn from other people’s lessons and we can teach other people from ours. We aren’t meant to be singular creatures, we need community and love and support. Judging ourselves as unworthy places judgement on others. Remember our worth and our values and if we live there, we are always divinely guided.
Last week I spoke of some things going on at work and I feel the need to follow up after the past few days. When we were kids, we were often told that people are mean because they are jealous or that they like us, or that they have their own problems. I understood it on surface level for a long time but I still took everything personally. I couldn’t deflect a thing. There was inherently something wrong with me if someone was mean to me. So as I’ve been dissecting every facet of who I am and everything I could have possibly done wrong at work, my old habits resurfaced and everything was my fault. There are certain lessons in life that take time to make sense, for us to understand the full nuggets of truth behind them. Today was one of those days.
The universe can take a while to show us the truth of a situation, but the truth will always come out. While working with one of the people involved in the story I shared last week, I started to notice that the story I had originally been told from this individual wasn’t entirely accurate. True, it may have been their perspective, but it wasn’t accurate in regards to the other party’s intentions. This individual had deliberately taken the time to skew my perception of the requirement using fear that the third party wouldn’t be satisfied with my work. As the story unfolded today, it hit me: “This is unreal—she’s jealous and she’s scared.” Not necessarily of me, but of her position. She’s afraid of what’s coming just as much as the rest of us.
I share this because, yes it was incredibly frustrating and quite frankly it was debilitating for a bit there. But seeing that her actions, while calculated and cold, they weren’t nefarious or entirely malicious: they were fear based. That opened up an entirely new train of thought for me. While I won’t be rushing to confide or trust in this individual any time soon, I know that her insecurities played a large, role in her behavior. I felt compassion. While I’ve never tried to undercut someone (I tend to go toward needing validation rather than hurting someone), I’ve felt that insecurity as well. I know what it feels like to be vulnerable to other people’s decisions and their views or opinions of who we are. I know what it feels like to be told your best isn’t good enough, and she was having that experience, as humans, we all have.
The truth always shows us what we need. Sometimes that first impression isn’t accurate. Sometimes it isn’t the whole truth. Sometimes people are afraid to admit what’s really going on. But if we can be patient or if we learn to ask the right questions, perhaps there is an opportunity to see something else or to learn about someone in a new way. Yes, what happened felt horrible and I haven’t seen behavior like that since I was a kid. But that doesn’t mean this individual isn’t hurting as well—hurt people hurt people. Taking the time to see that perspective and understand where they are coming from doesn’t fix it, but it helps me keep perspective. I’m safe, I am healed (and healing), this had nothing to do with me. I know where to keep better boundaries, but I can forgive. And that is the key—I no longer need to hold onto that anger. Of course I wished it went a different way, but I am grateful to know the truth and to move on from there.
The Intentional Dreamer 