When respect is no longer being served it’s time to walk away.  We just need to have faith and strength to do the walking.  This coincides with what I was talking about in gratitude yesterday, and these are habits that we all need to develop and skills that will serve us in so many ways.  I wish I could say that this happened overnight, that I knew I was being treated poorly and simply walked away.  That’s not how it went.  It was a slow detachment and something I am still learning to do.  Humans are pretty good at recognizing when something is off but we aren’t always discerning on pinpointing what the exact issue is or knowing how to resolve it.  Additionally our relationship with ego is often tenuous at best.  We fixate on being the best and being right and that deters from doing what is right, including what is right for ourselves.  There is some irony in there that we protect our egos but engage in the very behavior that can cause harm to our character.  This isn’t about people placating wants, it’s about respecting each other as humans and allowing people to be who they are without judging what works for them.  We can’t control anyone around us, so what we need to do is look at our patterns and habits, both in what we do and what we attract.  That’s all we have control over, our own actions.  That’s when we can start doing some work on who we are—and it does take work.  Developing awareness always does. 

One, to break the habits we have to be entirely conscious and aware of when we fall back into them.  It’s uncomfortable and can be challenging at times to stop an engrained pattern when you’ve already been triggered to repeat it.  Two, learning the new pattern takes time, dedication, and patience because it is new.  It hasn’t had time to solidify in our minds as the natural response to our stressors and when we are under stress, we will naturally fall to our engrained habits/thoughts.  Three, while breaking habits and patterns or jumping into something new, we will all face a period where we are still somewhat reliant on the old ways whether financially/emotionally and the new quite literally can’t support us yet—for me, it was the financial crutch of needing a 9-5 but knowing that I had to break out into something more even though I couldn’t afford to not work.  I wasn’t rolling in the money by any means, but I definitely needed that income.  What we need to understand is that sometimes it isn’t that the new can’t support us, it’s that we haven’t developed legs that can stand on the new ground yet.  It’s kind of like sea legs.  We’ve been on a boat that someone else is steering for so long and they’ve chartered us through the roughest of seas.  We may have even had to jump off and swim to shore.  When we hit land, it can feel uncertain and scary and we need to learn to navigate our way around, trust ourselves to survive and make our way, and learn that not only can we stand on our own, we can run.

We often mistake respect as an issue with authority or hierarchy.  We perceive people as in a higher position than us or we fear what they can do to us or we are born into a system that prioritizes certain people over others.  The truth is respect is about allowing life to happen.  It’s about removing our personal expectations on other people and allowing them to be who they are.  When we have people who work to constrain us in any way or those that hold us to unrealistic expectations, they are demonstrating they are less interested in the value we can add as ourselves and more interested in the value we can add to their agenda.  People who use other people to fulfill their agenda with no regard for whether or not their interests align do not respect the humanity of others.  This isn’t to say that we don’t all need help at times, it is to say that we don’t hold an expectation of someone else to be a certain way when they are not that, and we don’t berate them when we realize they aren’t that way.  When we are at a table where there is no respect, where we are being constricted into something unrecognizable, yes, we indeed must walk away.  We must shed that version that wants approval and simply begin the work of detachment.  Work on developing our own strength, our own skills, finding our own interests and when we follow that, we find purpose.  When we find purpose we are unstoppable.  Keep focused and stay the course.  Have enough respect for ourselves to do what we need to do for our own wellbeing.  Honor who we are and leave behind what isn’t serving.