Today I am grateful for signs.  It’s been a while since I’ve spoken about signs.  I truly believe in the power of the universe.  In some ways it acts like the algorithms on social media—what we like we see more of and we notice more of the things we focus on.  As I work on my mental health journey, I notice that I am particularly susceptible to the desire for encouragement.  I don’t think I had a lot of encouragement when I was a kid, I think I simply received praise for a job well done.  My family wasn’t equipped to guide people through the learning stages so it was easier to be there when the task was done.  The beautiful part of this is that over time I’ve learned to find my own encouragement.  I ask for signs all the time and I truly do see them more often than not.  The universe shows us what we are willing to see and it communicates with us in thought, in feeling, in obstacles, in clear paths, in signs both big and small.  It’s up to us to what we do with it—I choose to bolster the belief when I see them.

Today I am grateful for friends.  This has been an emotionally challenging week and a huge reminder that I need to continue practicing emotional control/restraint.  It’s funny because I always wanted a supportive group around me, people I could lean on but I had a tendency to push them away.  There was a lot I had to figure out on my own as a kid so I learned to self-soothe and I learned what I thought was best for me.  As I’ve gotten older, emotions got harder and harder to manage so I’ve learned that I need a better system.  Help isn’t necessarily about people fixing things for us—I honestly used to believe that too.  A lot of my early “friendships” and “relationships” were solely based off of where I could help people.  As an adult it made me incredibly shy to help others because I didn’t want to be taken advantage of.  But as the emotional baggage got too heavy and I learned to discern the real from the fake, I understood the importance of having an authentic support system.  I am grateful that they helped me through some incredibly challenging moments.

Today I am grateful for the destruction of ego.  I realize how much I have tried to call the shots in my life and how much I’ve defined success by how things have gone my way or people doing what I’ve told them.  it’s a power play because I’ve felt so insecure about many things.  I haven’t fully defined what I’ve wanted in life so I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around.  I’ve lost a lot of time and this has made me feel totally out of control—so I sought control in my relationships and with people around me.  I thought that having a title at work would make me feel better, I thought that calling the shots about how we spend money as a unit would make me feel better, I thought that things playing out how I saw them would feel better.  I see now that it has made me weak and a volatile mess.  I don’t want to be controlled by how I feel.  I don’t want people to be controlled by how I feel.  I don’t always know best, and finding other opportunities and other ways comes from letting go of that belief.  Ego is a fine line because we need enough to know we are worth going for it but not so much that we make ourselves the center of the universe. Let go of the inflation and allow ourselves to soar even higher.    

Today I am grateful for life.  This has been one of the busiest years I’ve had in a long time.  I legitimately cannot believe it’s November.  I feel so unbelievably blessed at the events of this year, the connections I’ve made, the events that have unfolded, and the new experiences we’ve shared.  This is truly what life is all about.  We often spend our time envisioning what we think it should be and then we notice that it either isn’t happening or we are going through it alone.  The more we align with what is, we start to feel the veil lifting and we suddenly find ourselves right where we need to be.  We allow the magic to flood in and adventures and stories are created.  Life is entirely of our own design and we are able to make it what we want.  It truly is of our own design, and that is a gift.  The more life we allow in, the more life we get to experience—and it can begin at any time. 

Today I am grateful for the perspective I needed to get and continued confirmation of my instincts.  I am also grateful to separate someone’s opinion from what I know about myself.  Someone told me they were disappointed in me this week.  That same person tried to equivocate a particular circumstance to something I had been complaining about previously.  She tried saying that something directed to me under my scope should have been shared with her because she felt excluded and she knows I don’t like being excluded either.  The difference is the things I was excluded from were responses to projects I had started or things impacting my team directly that she allowed to go to other managers.  I’m not going to lie, I was infuriated.  Not by the fact that she said she was disappointed, but by the fact that after all this time she still had no clue what I was upset about in the first place, she still couldn’t see her role in what bothered me.  She can keep her disappointment because that is a story she is telling herself to feel better and she needs to grasp at straws to make me the bad person.  That too belongs to her.  I don’t need her approval and I am not there for her praise—I have a job to do.  There is more than one way to get things done, it doesn’t make anything wrong if the goal is accomplished.  I am fine with that.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.