“The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.”  I saw this quote and it wasn’t attributed to anyone but I fell in love with it.  As I’ve been on this continual journey of evolution, development and improvement, I am constantly seeing ways I can improve and I’ve realized how much I still stick with what I know.  I don’t know if I’m waiting for the right time or the exact right amount of time, money, energy etc., but I do know that I haven’t been quite where I want to be.  Driving home from work the other day I legitimately had a moment where I felt complete presence.  I found myself thinking, “This is exactly how I want to feel.”  It was a feeling of warmth, calmness, certainty, and peace that where I was was exactly where I needed to be.  The realization came after I’d been chewing on some events from the day and I suddenly understood that I don’t need one particular individual in my life.  I’d been hiding behind this person at work and like lightning, it hit me that everything I’ve done in the last few years has been without her.  It used to infuriate me—and it is still frustrating—but in that moment I realized that all of those accomplishments were my own—and I didn’t need her to open any kind of doorway.  I’ve created my own.

As I continued down that train of thought, I went further into the work I’m doing even in my personal relationships and I realized that I truly don’t need any of them either.  All my life I’ve waited until other people around me were ok with my decisions before acting on them.  I thought too many steps ahead and all it did was keep my brain spinning instead of actively making progress.  I will NEVER deny the people who have helped me progress and I am so grateful for every gift I’ve been afforded in my life—I wouldn’t be here without the actions of family and friends, and yes, even some coworkers.  But the reality of it still is that I did the work on my own.  People have provided me tools and resources that I needed but at the end of the day I did the build myself.  So that evening when all of these things swirled through my head, I finally understood that power.  I understood that if I had done all of that on my own, I am fully capable of building what I do want.  Again, these aren’t new lessons, these are just new visceral experiences of them.

There are so many layers to healing that calling it a rabbit hole doesn’t even do it justice.  I’m in this phase where the experience of the things I thought I knew is totally different from what I thought I knew.  I never knew what it was like to experience that certainty and that calmness.  I had a feeling something like this was coming because I had that moment of calmness during my interview last week.  All of the games we play, all of these facades and charades we have, are simply that: fake faces we wear in a poor attempt to protect ourselves.  This life is a cosmic gift and even if we don’t know the full meaning of it, I know we are meant to give it some form of meaning.  The story I told myself for so long was that I needed to be in a certain place at a certain time or I would lose out on the things I currently have.  But what if the things I currently have and the way I’m living are the things that are holding me back?  I’m fighting to keep this façade, this image going when really I should be expanding and building on it.  And I work on this every day, trying to incorporate these lessons, failing and flying all in one.  Make it an adventure.

I watched my son struggle with a trick he wanted to do on the playground the other day.  He was frustrated because he’d been able to do it a few days prior but he struggled to replicate it on our most recent walk there.  I saw myself in him, the need to get it right immediately on that first try back at the playground.  I found myself telling him that it’s about making progress.  We both fixate on the end result and struggle with what it takes to get there.  I struggle because I feel there is a specific reward for specific action and he struggles because he conceptually understands things but doesn’t know how to practically get there—and he expects to have it on the first try.  We both struggle with that, actually.  But I felt a certain wisdom channel through me and I also told him, “When you don’t get it right away there’s an opportunity to learn something new or to get better at doing it.”  Something I need to practice/remember myself, as well.  

But right now we are here in Spring, the trees are budding and it’s a new beginning.  This is an opportunity for all of us to appreciate where we are at in the journey and to appreciate it.  The more present we are and the more we can accept and understand what we need to improve upon (heck, even what we need to do next) the easier it is to adapt, learn and integrate so we can improve.  Will Wonka said “Invention my dear friends is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butter scotch ripple.” (thank you Gene Wilder 😊).  The reason this stands out is because it’s about the effort, the learning, the adaptation of what we are creating that matters.  It isn’t the end product that comes first, it’s the creation of it.  And the truth is that we can’t get to the end without learning what we need to first.  If the goal is to get to the end, we will miss all the living in between—and that means we miss the opportunities to learn and potentially make something even better.  So take time to be where we are, take time to learn.  Life is a big experiment anyway—we all end up in the same place, so we might as well make it an adventure while we are here.  Have fun.     

Continuing on our topic from yesterday, I want to talk about the facets of these relationships which are actually healthy but they are holding us back.  This isn’t to suggest any kind of superiority or hierarchy against people, but we do all have different experiences in our lives which do put us in different positions.  We can’t get to the point where we are letting people limit our experience because of where they are at in the journey.  No one can tell us what is enough for us in our lives—and there is no need to start over if something is legitimately working for us.  Trust me, I’ve decided to throw away progress when it got tough because I was around people who were at that beginning stage so I felt like I needed to start again.  All that does is keep us in the same cycle over and over again.  We also need to recognize what fears we harbor that don’t belong to us.  Those are limitations set by other people. 

Whoever it is, they don’t get to tell us what is enough.  I’m not saying be boastful or put someone down for where they are at or for what they enjoy—that isn’t how we lift each other up or learn. And one thing I’m learning in this balancing act is that just because I’ve been there and done that with some of these experiences, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have things to learn as well.  They have a different perspective so believe me, there is still a lot to learn. While we don’t need to diminish someone else’s excitement, we don’t need to settle for where they are at either.  The way we help each other is to share our perspective and not place demands on how people experience it.  We also advance when we follow our instincts and stick with what is right for us.

It’s a balancing act, a continual growth and shedding, a deconstruction and building.  This is how we are designed, how we are meant to be.  Life is about experience and creation and we are here to help each other and part of that is recognizing our contributions.  If we feel like we are beyond something, then we need to consider that we are there to advance those around us.  Knowing ourselves is key.  Knowing when we need something more is crucial.  We don’t want to stagnate.  We want to create.  Accept where we are and our role in it as well as responsibility for moving forward and making changes.  And always, be grateful for where we are and what we learn.  Don’t discount a lesson we need or a lesson we need to give so appreciate any opportunity we have.

Hearing the saying about how life is about the little things can often feel trite or even diminishing or demeaning when we are in the face of doing something big.  While I could never explain it, I’ve always had this sense that I was supposed to do something more in life, something really big—something that would impact a lot of people.  I NEVER intended for it to be ego because it wasn’t, but I know I had a tendency to put value on higher ticket experiences than other people did and it was because our experiences were different.  It took me a while to realize that even the things I’ve experienced pale in comparison to others (not that I’ve lived in the lap of luxury by any means).  But there are moments when we need to really understand the big picture and see how the little things mean so much more. How the little things really do make us fortunate.  Sometimes in those moments we don’t understand how fortunate we are, especially if we grow up thinking a certain way of life is normal or having a certain perception on how things are.  We all have different experiences so that gauge is different for all of us.    

I’m part of a beautifully inclusive team in the business I own and they recently had a conference out of state and they were staying at a hotel chain that, for many of them, was a new experience and something luxurious.  The more they spoke about it, the more I had a sense of not feeling the excitement they do.  I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt that way and it felt like an age thing because many of them are young—and they are truly young (some of them just turning 20).  It took me a minute to realize the issue: I’ve done all this before.  Part of me felt guilty because I truly don’t want to diminish their joy in this experience but I also don’t want to pretend that this is enough for me anymore.  At the same time I realize how fortunate I have been to have had these experiences before.  I’ve stayed at hotels like that since I was a kid.  The realization isn’t a matter of ego or being unimpressed so much as it’s that I need something more.  The crux of it is this: I’m at a different stage in my life.  Doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot to learn, but I also know there is more in this life—a different experience.  Additionally I have a family, a team I created on my own and many of these people don’t have that—life moves differently when you have that.   

If we are meant to dream big, we need to appreciate what we have and where we came from, that is always true.  But we can’t limit ourselves based on the limitations of others, and there are times it’s so challenging for me to work with a team because we are at different stages in life, different stages in this game.  And I know at some point we will have to meet in the middle because we have lessons to teach each other.  They don’t know what it’s like to have a family, to have a job that brings enough success to afford a house because they aren’t there yet.  I also don’t have the experience of throwing what I know aside and taking the risk to make a life for myself like they have—and that’s because of the golden handcuffs and the house and the family.  One experience isn’t better than the other, but they are different and we make different decisions because of them.  The team is varied with some starting with nothing, some with those golden handcuffs, some who run the whole show and some who are learning. The point is, being a team is taking all of that information and putting it together so we can learn from each other.  I need to learn the basics of the business and the confidence to run it while they need to understand there is something bigger out there.  I know what exists and I know what I want—now I just need to know how to do the work to get it for myself.  How cool to have those resources in each other.    

I was recently in a confrontation with a co-worker in my 9-5.  Things have been hectic as I have a department with no staff and I’ve been taking on additional responsibilities as well as working the front line.  A few emails came through from one of my other teams and we didn’t receive the help we needed, we got push back.  After the conference I went to last weekend and having a successful interview with a higher up, I felt no need to deal with that type of nonsense especially when we had an agreement about who would be responsible for a certain function.  So when the team responsible for it said no, I called them on it.  Soon my boss got involved and started asking questions about my team and their status and how many positions I had open so I immediately became defensive.  I knew exactly where it was going: this was somehow going to come back to my team even though I’m short staffed in two departments—and that is a challenge because we run lean anyway.  When the other leader involved showed up at work it was evident that she was upset over something.  I assumed it was me and didn’t say anything.  She had her meeting with our boss and she started to leave saying that our meeting was going to be pushed to next week.  I stopped her and asked if she was ok and she burst into tears. 

Needless to say all the crap went out the window and I immediately started working with her to figure out what happened.  It was unrelated to our issue but I knew that she needed support.  I had been prepared to go in strong but I can’t help but stop the crap and try to get to the root of the issue.  There is something to be said for a human who can put aside their ego and still offer compassion and caring—it tends to break down any wall that we have, and I’m not trying to say I’m special or anything but I know that I would want the same courtesy.  Every time I think I’m going in to control the situation or handle something I often find myself in this position.  Just as I’m trying to maintain a boundary, I get to the root of the issue and I am grateful for it. There is a moment when working with difficult people or working in a difficult situation when the façade breaks.  Suddenly you see the person who seemed against you for what they are: a human being. They’re fragile.  They’re scared.  They’ve probably been acting confident the entire time you thought they were making you miserable intentionally.  Seeing the reality break through the shell is a sobering moment. 

We all create these defenses because we don’t feel we can trust that being seen as ourselves is safe.  How sad.  We’ve forgotten how to relate to each other.  We’ve forgotten how to be with each other.  We’ve forgotten how to hold space for each other because we’ve been set against each other as the enemy or that we are competition.  We’re so afraid that if people see us as vulnerable they will take advantage of us somehow.  That has absolutely happened to me and I’ve often felt miserable and regretted it when it has happened.  But I know in my experience, as soon as we see that vulnerability, there is no need to go at arms with anyone.  We are fully capable of talking it out and working with each other.  We don’t need to dominate each other, we need to learn to work with each other.  We are all on the same rock floating through space and everything we do impacts each other so there comes a point where we have to understand how much we need each other, how interdependent we are.  In the grand scheme of things I don’t care about having power over people—I want to make situations better so we stop treating each other like crap.  That all starts with treating each other with compassion, how we want to be treated.  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if people showed us the same courtesy or respect—they are operating from a hurt place too.  It’s how we help each other get through it. 

I don’t know how the habit started but I often refer to myself as a plural.  I say things like, “We’ll see you later,” instead of simply saying, “I’ll see you later.”  It’s a habit that started several years ago and I think it coincided with the timing of having to do multiple things and be multiple places at once.  My subconscious was telling me that I was doing too much and that my brain was being split.  This society often encourages this type of behavior and calls it multi-tasking.  I complained to my boss about having to divide my attention and getting frustrated and she made the comment that the person who had the role before me didn’t have any issue doing it.  She also made the comment that my other coworkers also had multiple areas to oversee.  So I felt guilty, like I wasn’t doing enough and like something was wrong with me for not being able to handle all of that responsibility.  The reality is this: the manager before me didn’t have the same departments I do and my coworkers have multiple departments that perform the same function.  My departments all perform unique functions.  I’ve said it before and I share that story again because it is my testament to the fact that multitasking is not a way to be successful.  It does not make things easier or more efficient.  It creates confusion and lack of focus and more non-productive time having to shift between modes.  And frankly, it tears the mind apart.

The fact that I have been required to do that for the last 7 years along with having a child, I can say my brain understandably started having difficulty transitioning and transmuting information and communicating it.  The mind isn’t designed to have that kind of split attention for this long.  It diminished my confidence because nothing was getting done to full capability and it made me feel so stupid and worthless because people thought I wasn’t doing my job.  What I’ve realized is that it also made me afraid and mistrustful of my ability.  I didn’t think I could handle what came before me because I couldn’t see it through.  I didn’t think I could do the work or that I could understand anything else.  With this energy shifting in the universe and constantly being told it’s time to walk away from what doesn’t serve, I think it’s time to say good bye to some of those multiple pieces of myself.  I do not have to prove anything and I certainly don’t need to stay in a position that isn’t healthy for me. I am enough as one person and that person is trying her best to be seen for all she is. 

It’s easy for people on the outside to criticize and tell us how we should be all while never doing the work themselves.  Those people find joy in making other people jump through hoops because it makes them feel powerful.  They tear confident people down in insidious ways through gaslighting and fear mongering because it makes them feel better in themselves.  For people who are trained to please others, it’s a recipe for disaster because we tend to believe that.  We need to remember that self-loathing will get us nowhere, especially when it’s coming from someone else’s opinion—someone who doesn’t even do the work.  There are some people in power who have more fear than sense and they try to tear down those who think outside the box.  They think power comes from making other people feel bad—they gain energy by taking energy through putting other people down. So in feeling like I’m not enough, I had to create these multiple versions of myself hoping that one of them was good enough.  In facing the struggle with standing up for myself and being confident, I clearly see how this habit of plurality started.  I needed to remember that my worth isn’t contingent on what anyone things—no one but myself.  It is ok to set and maintain the boundaries that are right for me and to do the work that feels right instead of working for praise.  I am enough.  We are all enough.  Bring all the pieces back together.  

Today I am grateful for clearing the past.  This is something I have worked on for decades now.  I see now that it wasn’t all just me holding on to crap—there was trauma there, legitimate damage and hurt and mistrust that couldn’t be undone.  I learned early on at the foundational level that I had to prove, that I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t trust those I was supposed to trust (except my parents).  And now I know I need to heal that.  There are people around me who I constantly vacillate between trusting and not trusting, both personally and professionally.  There are some I know my instinct is right on but there are others that I know I need to relax.  Just because my senses of mistrust and fear are heightened doesn’t mean I’m picking up on it for the right reasons.  As we heal, the same situations come up and we eventually learn to process them differently.  Each time I make a different decision, I feel better.  Each time I face the same thing over and over again, I do feel frustrated because I feel like my boundaries haven’t been respected.  It took me a long time to figure out which boundaries were ego and which needed to be held.  The more I heal, the clearer that is. 

Today I am grateful for love.  I have had a confusing relationship with love for a long time.  Going back to foundational issues, I really never understood love.  I favored a particular style of romance filled with drama or glamor or both and it was a long time until I understood how to accept a relationship for what it is.  I grew up watching a lot of movies…what can I say.  All that aside, I never understood that relationships don’t need to be dramatic or extreme—there is real value in stability and predictability, in building things together, in knowing the other person is there. There is nothing more disheartening in thinking you have a partner and discovering that they don’t want the same things.  Who we choose to be around, who we listen to, and who we build things with impacts us in so many ways.  When we learn to love ourselves we learn who can love us and who we can love.  We see what our real match is.  I am grateful to be supported by people (some surprising) who remind me that I need to take care of myself, that I need to love myself.  And then I can love them. 

Today I am grateful for releasing.  Following up on clearing the past and building healthy love, I see the limiting patterns that I need to release.  Maybe more than seeing, I feel them.  When I repeat a pattern I can physically feel my body behaving differently.  It doesn’t feel right, kind of like, “Hey, this isn’t fitting.”  Whereas before I would agree with the negative feeling.  In releasing these things and finding foundational change and learning appropriate relationships, I’m learning to trust myself and know that I am capable of doing the things I want to do.  Yes, it takes work, but it is something I am capable of.  When people doubt me, I have transmuted from feeling I need to prove that I can do it to simply doing it.  Similarly, I understand that if I shouldn’t be doing it (like if it’s legitimately someone else’s responsibility) that I won’t do it regardless of who tells me to do it.  That one is still tough, especially in work environments where I do have a reporting structure—but I’m sticking with it.  Part of releasing is letting go of the need to be approved of by anyone.  I’m not a child looking for a parent’s approval, or a teacher’s approval.  I’m an adult and my wishes and boundaries need to be respected as well—and just because I’ve been nice doesn’t mean I need to be compliant to your every whim to the detriment of my own needs.  I’m also grateful to go for things that I wouldn’t have normally because I didn’t feel like I qualified.  For opening my mouth and expressing the truth—because people who understand don’t just listen, they hear.  Those are the ones that matter.

Today I am grateful for understanding my body. There is a Buddhist saying about love pertaining to how we feel.  It’s along the lines of if you feel nervous or jittery or pounding heart when you meet someone, they aren’t the one, true love is calm.  I recently experienced this in relation to success.  I mentioned last week that I had met Loren Ridinger.  Normally when I meet well-known people or people in power (I’m only talking about events like when I’ve attended comedy shows and stayed after to meet people, or when I’ve worked/met with the president of my company etc.—I’m not inflating my ego here lol) I get really nervous and I find myself trying way too hard.  When I met Loren, my heart beat was steady, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest.  I recently went for an interview and it was simply a conversation—no nerves, no trying to prove.  I listened and responded instead of trying to plan my answers.  I’m not saying that anything in particular is going to come of this (I can’t see the future) but I 100% understand that saying.  When something feels right, that knowing takes over us and there is an ease to it rather than an impulse.  The body often tells us what we need to know through what we feel instead of what we think.  It feels even better when we lean into it—it’s a different type of flow.  Allowing is an amazing experience.

Today I am grateful for releasing.  Yes, I’m talking about releasing again but this is different.  I’m talking about releasing control.  When it came to my day to day or even planning the future, I was always on the defense.  It always felt like I was behind the ball, running to catch up, like I wasn’t good enough so I had to prove.  The little moves I’ve made to bolster my confidence have shown me that I don’t need to have people think a certain way about me to be successful or to move forward.  Freedom comes when we forget about controlling anything and we just do what is right for us.  We will never have a way to control the opinions of the world—all we can do is be authentic and know that the right people will find us.  No matter what the wrong people say, that doesn’t invalidate our message, who we are, or what we are capable of.  There are some cases where that is easier said than done, but I will tell you, since switching to that focus, doing the things I need to do, the need to control anything outside is diminishing and it feels good.  Instead of looking at the steps someone else needs to take to fulfill our needs, we simply take the steps to fulfill those needs ourselves—and no one can take away that work we do on ourselves. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.             

This has taken me a while to articulate because sometimes it isn’t a specific thing that happens, it’s a specific energy—and the last week has been filled with a lot of energy.  The day before the eclipse, I saw Loren Ridinger in person to hear her speak.  The things that have happened since have changed the way I look at things.  I’ve felt this feeling of being on the precipice of a new life for a long time.  I truly do feel it, I just haven’t been able to move forward in it.  It’s fear conditioning as well as fear of the unknown.  It’s also a feeling of not being safe enough to take a risk on something I know I need to do.  I don’t always feel the support from those I have around me in the physical plane so I have to learn that sometimes we only need support from what we know we feel—from source.  I know there are things I have to walk away from—things I’ve tolerated for too long—but I’ve been afraid to because they are familiar.  But if I am to step up into my purpose, then I can’t expect everything to feel comfortable.  I can’t change if I won’t change.  The world will not bend to my will and give me what I want simply because I say I want it—change and development require work. And as easy as it sounds to make everyone understand and accept simply by doing, that isn’t how this works. 

Hearing Loren speak was unique and probably the most vulnerable I’ve heard her in the last few years I’ve worked with her—she is super powerful and incredibly encouraging, but she is a prime example that no matter how powerful we are (or feel) life keeps moving and happens as it wants to.  We have choices in those jarring moments and we can either collapse or we can pick ourselves up.  That type of energy coupled with the eclipse (an eclipse that inspires change), there is momentum beyond motivation at this point.  There is reason to care for myself, reason to stop hating myself, and maybe in healing me I’m discovering the message I’m meant to share with the world.  Hating ourselves gets us nowhere.  Love and healing clears the clutter and the baggage we’ve been carrying for too long—often baggage that was never ours as Loren says.  The world is hard enough and we battle enough with a society that sets us up to fail—we don’t need to have an internal battle with who we are as well, trying to figure out our worth.  We need to remember we are worthy.  We need to have faith that walking away from what doesn’t work for us doesn’t mean that we will lose it all.  Sometimes in the process of losing ourselves, we lose what we know, but we find the way to build ourselves back up again and become the person we are meant to be.

The truth is life is all about facing the moment.  I can’t even say it’s about facing fear because many of us avoid things like happiness and joy simply because we are used to being miserable or scared.  We often make ourselves the elephant cuffed to the chair—we have the power to leave at any time but we keep ourselves in place because we think we can’t move.  While familiarity is comfortable, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy.  Life can hit us with a curve ball at any time no matter how well thought out or well intentioned our plans are.  Life doesn’t give a shit about our plans if they aren’t part of THE plan.  Keeping us locked in a box with the same routine to feed a system that drains us like a battery is not the plan of the universe even if that’s what we know.  In that regard life is about finding our resilience and being secure in our ability as well as developing who we are to become who we are meant to be.  Sometimes in order to fulfill that part of the plan we have to deal with things we would rather not deal with.  It isn’t to be cruel, it’s to push us to the point where we understand we can break that cuff or even crush the damn chair at any time.  There is power not in grinning and bearing it, but in realizing we have wings and then learning to fly.  Loren said our mind is the biggest prison in the world.  But what we need to remember is that we can break free of it at ANY time.  Do the thing, whatever it is, do it. Soon that thing that we’ve been unable to face becomes a kitten in a box instead of a lion—or we realize we ARE the lion and we bust that box down.  Fear only exists because we let it.  Learn to roar—there is no box.        

This is a long one. I happened across a podcast the other day with Dr. Gabor Mate and he says “If I were to choose to live life over again, I wouldn’t live it in this way.  [The ending of Winnie the Pooh] brought tears to my eyes for years.  Christopher Robin has to go to school and he’s telling his friends, the toy animals that he won’t be able to pay with them as much anymore.  What I wasn’t aware of when I went to medical school and when I was a physician is how driven I was to justify my existence in the world.  I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.  When you’re driven to work too hard you actually ignore what matters and what matters is…taking time and enjoy time with kids and family.  I didn’t do that, and I always thought I had to keep working.  And the book ends with statement, ‘And whatever they do wherever they go, in the enchanted forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together’.  People sacrifice their playfulness, their joyfulness, being driven by unconscious needs to validate their existence.  And where does that come from?  From childhood trauma.  Play is so important.  Joy is so important.  In that sense we can always keep playing in the enchanted forest and that’s just essential, I think.”

Being human is a funny thing.  We are one of the only creatures that is literally trained to ignore its own instincts while simultaneously being impulsive and giving into what we want in the moment.  We have this natural draw toward play and laughter and love and joy, and we systematically dismantle it and then spend our adult lives trying to make up for it (buying or doing things we think we deserve—displays of extravagance, or thinking we only deserve two weeks off of work a year so we have to go big).  We’ve gone from the need to survive, interact, create tribes, create work, finding common ground to proving how individually great we are through material means or how we look, or some form of notoriety, or all of it.  We learn to erase any draw toward individual goals outside of what is societally acceptable, and we learn to blend in.  Don’t get me wrong, I know there are more than a few who follow the beat of their own drum, but they too are part of a system.  Now anything we want to be a part of we need to prove our worth.  We’ve forgotten the joy of being a child and simply knowing our worth—that we don’t have to be any certain way to be loved.  We’ve forgotten the joy of seeing someone do something new and being excited for them and how to celebrate ourselves.  We’ve forgotten the importance of the every day moment.  Knowing that we are meant to play and feel joy because in joy we are able to find our way.

I have to share that when Dr. Mate shared that quote, it gutted me to the point I struggled to breathe.  It went straight to my soul, immediately bringing thoughts of the child in me I’ve neglected since I was a child, my fears of time and loss, regretting any missed moment with my family (everyone), anger and guilt at any frustration I’ve had with my child and my response to make him “grow up because life isn’t like that” (talk about hearing my parents).  And I saw the entire history of my family laid out before me: my father as a child, my mother as a child, remembering snippets of my siblings as children, my grandparents as children, and yes, myself as a child.  In that moment I felt this profound loss, this disbelief and sadness at ignoring that person, seeing how all of those children were ignored and told to grow up.  And the tears came—they’re coming now as I write this.  We are taught to believe play is a selfish thing, that there isn’t time for nonsense.  The reality is how we live is incredibly selfish.  The fact that we deem each other worthy by anything other than who we are, the fact that we feel we have to justify our existence in this world is truly heart breaking.  If we all got to the point where we remembered who we were as children, we might just come to a different conclusion.  Life has serious moments, it has its tragedies, but my God is it beautiful.  It isn’t nearly as serious as we make it.  We became more focused on blaming others and looking at the injustices we face instead of learning to heal and help each other.  We lost sight of anything that matters.  We forgot that there is inherent joy in our existence.

The other reason this piece has stuck with me is because I’ve recently had a big birthday—officially 40—and we weren’t able to celebrate it.  Yes, I received the calls and the texts with good wishes, but we didn’t actually celebrate.  And I thought about it—I can count the number of times I’ve celebrated my 40 years on one hand.  That little child in me has had her heart broken so many times, struggled to find worth for so many years, and really has a hard time believing she is worth anything, especially when she can’t find the people to celebrate her.  That little child has been driven for years to find someone who would tell her she is worthy—and she has tried to make the people who should think she is special treat her that way.  She is alone in the woods because she gave up the bear hoping someone else would walk with her and make her feel special—and she wasn’t allowed to feel special about herself.  For all of her accomplishments, she was never allowed to celebrate them; She wanted to be good at it all so she was seen as worthy and people thought she knew how good she was, but she was never allowed to revel in it or appreciate her success, she had to hide her pride in it.  The very things she was good at, the things that she should have shared remained hidden or diminished.  And now people tell her to find confidence when the last time she tried that, the razor met her skin because in her mind she was always falling short.  She has constantly accepted less than what she deserved, settling for what she could get because she never allowed herself to develop the skills that would carry her.  She has never felt safe in her own ability to thrive because her success was diminished and cut down. That little girl needs to be taken back to the enchanted forest and know she is loved and appreciated as she is. That little girl’s heart is still there and can still be heard–and it is my job to honor that.

People aren’t crazy, they’re wounded.  People aren’t stupid, they’re scared.  People aren’t jerks, they’re exhausted by not living the life they want to live.  People aren’t assholes, they’re protecting themselves.  I always found myself thinking the same negative, hurtful thoughts every day while driving home.  A little context: I have a long commute and I get annoyed with bad driving.  Ok, fine, I get incredible rage at bad driving.  That is literally my biggest pet peeve in the world.  You’re operating a 4,000 pound vehicle, fucking act like you know that. Anyway.  It was to the point where I literally felt like I needed a camera for protection because people were so aggressive with my smaller car.  While driving home, I realized that I needed to change the narrative.  I don’t want people thinking bad about me, we all make mistakes, but the truth is there is so much more to what we are feeling.  We all want to get where we need to be, we are all so tired, and we are all in this rat race.  I felt myself spinning and thought I was crazy, and I realized, I have these wounds in my brain because of old programming.  I call myself crazy all the time—and I know it’s not really crazy: it’s because I’m scarred, and if I act this way because I’m scared, then chances are other people are too. 

I realized today that I need to slow down because I too quickly jump to the bad feelings or judgements about others even if I don’t mean to.  So much more than I thought I did.  I’m making mistakes I normally would never make, I’m feeling anxiety, I have old fears popping up.  My brain is in overtime to a degree I’ve never experienced before.  Repetitive thoughts, fears, anxiety, exhaustion, analysis paralysis.  My brain is circling and cycling through the same thoughts because I haven’t moved to change them.  I need to slow down. The constant stimulation and speed of life has made it hard for anyone to get through the day in a normal pace.  We are constantly divided and our brains are not meant to deal with so may forms of stimulation at once.  We do best with one train of focus but somehow we have idolatrized this idea of the multi-tasker.  I don’t want to say that we will never have to do multiple things or that we can’t accomplish multiple things, but we certainly do our best at those things when we focus on one thing at a time.  With billions of us essentially forced to live in ADD every day, it’s no wonder we behave erratically.  Don’t even get me started on the concept of keeping us sick and distracted to have another element of control over us. 

Regardless, the point is we all need to give each other a little more space and grace. We all need to do the same for ourselves and understand that we are all on this journey together.  We all want the same thing, we all want to thrive in this world and no one truly enjoys being told what to do for a living.  We are looking for freedom we inherently have but aren’t allowed to express (or we think we aren’t allowed to express it) because in order to live and thrive int his world, we have set rules that promote some behaviors over others.  If we give each other time to understand that everyone is experiencing the same feeling, the feeling of wanting to come awake and live their lives how they want to, then I think we’d be more tolerant of each other.  We need to remember that if we feel stressed and overwhelmed, other people do to and, unfortunately, not everyone responds to stress and overwhelm the same way.  Some people react angrily, others get sad, others shut down, others lash out.  So instead of jumping to the conclusion that someone is crazy or stupid or doing something intentionally, give them the benefit of the doubt.  The same benefit we’d want for ourselves and we start seeing the world in a different way.