“There’s a difference between Am I enough and Am I DOING enough,” Bruce Brackett.  When I first heard this I thought it was a bit trite or even on the wrong track.  If we place our value on what we produce or someone else’s definition of “enough” then we are on the same path as acting on someone else’s approval.  But when it comes to self-worth, I agree with this sentiment—we need to know that what we do and our talents are always more than enough, but we always have the opportunity to decide what we are doing with them.  The question comes down to the reality of our purpose which is to use our gifts to help others.  If we aren’t doing all we can to help others then we are depriving ourselves of the opportunity to fully express who we are.  This is the ironic part of being fully who we are—when we help others we feel good and when we feel good we shine and when we shine we light the way for others and it becomes this self-perpetuating cycle of feeling good.  Which, for some of us, we were taught that feeling good is selfish.  But that is the surest way to care for who we are and when we fill our cups enough, they flow onto others.

Brackett’s point is along the lines of this: we are always enough.  No matter what we are always enough.  The talents and gifts we have are exactly what they need to be and it’s our job to hone them and refine them and make them into something useful that complements and serves the world—every talent serves a purpose, and that includes our random skills.  That comes down to us remembering that we are also always able to do more—not that we need to learn more things to do, or learn to acquire more things, but we are able to better use our time and use our skills to do something productive.  That means we can do more of what brings us joy, do more of what we love.  We control the pattern of our thoughts and that means we are responsible for managing what we feel to negotiate and manage what we do.  When we feel capable and have a good understanding of who we are, we are more open to sharing what we have. 

Instead of questioning our worth when we feel low, we need to question our motivation.  Are we looking for proof that we are good enough? (ego).  Or do we need to find ways to do more good? (purpose).  When we fill our purpose the soul knows it.  It’s important to distinguish between the two because we can often make ourselves feel incompetent or useless through seeing validity of who we are rather than putting our skills to use and doing good.  Sometimes the absence we are trying to fill comes down to what we need to do rather than finding validation of who we are from other people.  When we know how to utilize our skills for good, when we know how to fulfill our purpose, we rarely ask others to confirm our worth.  The question of doing enough is something that can only be answered from within because we are the only ones who limit ourselves.  If we can do more and share more, the soul knows it and gives us nudges.  Don’t misinterpret that for a question of our worth—rather it’s a question/reminder of what we need to do with our focus and energy.  We are always enough—make our actions match that truth.       

“I wish you saw yourself as I do,” Adam Roa.  So often people see things in us that we don’t see in ourselves.  We may feel like we are falling apart and someone else sees us as a tower of strength.  They see us as source of wisdom when we feel like we can barely remember our name.  While this may be slightly romanticized in trying to convey the message that our perception is different than what other people perceive, the truth remains that we do in fact have different connotations and meaning for different people, we have different views of people, especially ourselves.  We are also trained to never take a compliment because it can be seen as conceited.  That training is false but it’s difficult to reconcile accepting new feelings about who we are with how we are trained to feel.  The human mind is adept at seeking the negative and finding flaws partially serves a survival instinct—if there’s something that would hinder us from surviving, we need to adjust it.  But we can’t let that turn into a negativity bias where all we see is the negative.  We need to learn to accept the good and focus on developing the good.

We are our own worst critic and we often don’t see the good.  We are trained to point out every flaw, every mistake, not as a learning tool but as some sort of scarlet letter, and some of us hold onto those mistakes forever.  I rehashed every embarrassing moment, every failure (or what I perceived as a failure), every bad thing that happened to me, for ages.  What purpose does that serve?  It created a feeling of worthlessness in me that wouldn’t budge because it started to solidify into belief.  I couldn’t trust what other people said they saw in me because I didn’t see it myself.  And that is the truth of it: we will never live up to our potential or be who we want to be if we don’t truly feel that way about ourselves.  It takes strength to admit our weaknesses but it takes just as much power to admit those strengths—and the same amount of energy.  What we focus on grows and we have a choice to partake in the negative and wallow in it, or we can shift and learn to accept the idea that maybe we are worth more than we let ourselves believe. 

So when someone tells us that we are doing something well, believe them.  When someone tells us they admire something, thank them.  When someone says they feel we are capable, keep their trust.  This isn’t about living up to their expectations, this is about understanding that we have a responsibility in different lights to different people, but most importantly our own.  They say those around us are a reflection of who we are, so if the mirror is telling us we are good, talented, compassionate, loving, joyful, intelligent, then it is safe to believe it and integrate it.  Learning to accept the feeling or the premise that we can be seen differently is the first step, allowing ourselves to feel and behave in that way is the next.  Some people stay who they are because they don’t think they can be something else or they don’t think they can change—they didn’t have someone to navigate them through it.  If we stay open we understand these viewpoints, these possibilities, and we learn to accept what feels right to us as well as the possibility that we could be something/someone more.  We don’t always need to be perfect or on the game because no one is on 24/7, but we need to show up.  Show up for the idea that we are something more.  Regardless of how they see us, presence is enough, and the more present we are, the more we feel that possibility.  So look in the mirror and see ourselves, and if we don’t see what someone else does, remind ourselves that they are a reflection of our possibility as well—that we can trust. 

“What if you just refuse to suffer? What if you dare to do the funky chicken dance after Chad dumped you or your boss fired you? What if you chose to laugh when the world expected you to cry?  What if you decided to run when they wanted you to fall? What if you felt the misery of not getting what you wanted but chose not to live in that misery because if there’s anything I learned in my 34 years on this Earth, it’s that our suffering does not have to become our identity, and that sometimes horrible things can (and will) [sometimes] happen to us, but those horrible things don’t have to define us.  There is a time to cry, a time to rage, a time to retreat, but also a time to do the funky chicken dance.  Because sometimes the best therapy we can do is to not only surprise those around us but to surprise ourselves.  Never forget that there is endless magic locked inside of you, and the only thing you need to do to unlock it is to have the courage to use a different key.  So if nothing else today I hope you not only refuse not to suffer, I hope you refuse to stay still because life is a movement.  And on the days when you feel like your life has left you I promise you’ll find it again if you dare to be ridiculous and do the funky chicken dance,” Anna Kai. 

There is power in choosing how we feel.  For years this seemed an impossible feat.  I don’t claim to be good at it now, but I know I have a better understanding of what this actually means and the possibility in it.  We truly do have the power to decide how we feel about nearly every situation.  I believed for years that a certain action required a specific reaction, that we were supposed to just feel a certain way when specific things happened, that relationships were supposed to be a certain way, that love looked a certain way.  I was never taught to feel my way into what I believed things should be, what I valued, what I wanted.  I put myself through endless suffering because I didn’t know better.  That was my understanding and training.  I wallowed in that suffering.  The truth is we all have the ability to decide to not feel or be any particular way about things.  We can make it easier or harder depending on how we choose to interpret things.  More importantly we can manage our expectations.  Ask ourselves what our motivation really is—control of the self or over others.  And if you make your life contingent on the reactions of others and the outcome of their actions, you will always be miserable. 

Instead of making life contingent on any feeling or any image we have in our minds, we need to make it based on how we feel and what brings us closer or further to our goals.  We choose to do things that make us happy and make us feel good and that will continue to guide us toward the big picture, the answer, the key to what we are meant to do.  Life isn’t all doom and gloom by any means, but we have the power to take those down moments and make them less sucky by deciding to move.  Move through the feelings, move through what it actually feels like.  Decide how we want to feel and do what it takes to get there.  There is magic we need to remember in our very being and it guides us.  When things feel low we have the answers inside, all we need to do is listen.  What people think is irrelevant and at the end of the day, these are our lives and we get one shot.  Don’t waste time suffering or creating suffering for ourselves or others.  Don’t make our happiness based on what other people think/feel/do or how they react to us.  Don’t make our happiness contingent on a job/house/relationship etc.  Decide to make the best of life in all situations.  Even the painful ones.  The only one who can decide what our day is like is us.  The only one who can decide what it feels like is us. 

“At a certain point you just become immune, immune to the perceptions, immune to the sabotage, immune to the gossip, immune to anything that is aimed to bring your peace down,” Richard Miller.  Stepping into our identity creates fear because it symbolizes a form of segregation, an isolation from the group—from what we’ve known.  One of the reasons we rely on familiarity is because it feels good and we know the prescribed norm of familiarity.  We know who we are in those scenarios.  But when we start to feel suffocated by what we know, we have to ask what’s next.  Those around us witnessing the transformation will try to bring you back in because there is safety in keeping things status quo.  They will use tactics like sabotage, gossip, and things that put us on edge in order to bring us back toward what we know as familiar.  Sometimes we do it to ourselves.  I’m guilty of falling into bad habits because I didn’t want to feel on the outside and I didn’t want to create disruption in the group.  I became the subject of different perceptions and sabotage and gossip—and my peace was most certainly disrupted.

Without a firm sense of self and a solid foundation in what we value and believe—knowing who we are—it’s easy to be thrown off course by the opinions of others especially as we navigate a new trail.  The hardest thing to do is stand firm in who we are in spite of what others think, say, or do.  Especially those closest to us.  Those tend to hurt the most because we want support and to know that someone believes in us—so when we have to step out with nothing but our own belief, it can be challenging. But that’s exactly what this means.  Do we have enough resolve to follow through on what we say we want?  Are we willing to take the risk and step out of our comfort zone or entirely in a different direction to stand in the process of creating and being something new.  We have to become resistant to the words of others when we know what we are working on.

The more we move like water, the more we let things flow including the opinions and words of others, the easier it is to realize what’s important and what isn’t.  It’s the same with anything.  When we start working out, it’s difficult at first, it feels uncomfortable, we feel overwhelmed.  We will feel the same as we learn to shut out the voices of those we used to revere.  Look, we need people, I don’t pretend it’s been healthy to do it alone.  But we don’t need the input of those who know nothing about us and what we are doing.  There comes a point where we realize we don’t need to wait for anything—if we want it we do it.  And we don’t need to worry about what others will like.  I’ve been working on a project for 6 years that I fought tooth and nail for and those around me didn’t understand.  I kept going because I knew what was right.  Within seconds of having the appropriate audience, it was like a key unlocked—so all that time spent worrying and trying to convince people meant nothing in that arena.  Their voices didn’t matter because I knew what needed to be done and I did it. So we let go and hear what we know instead—if we are to live our own lives we must hear our own voice.  Take the time to listen.

“I came here to live my own life, not someone else’s idea of what my life should be,” Richard Miller. This is a heavy one for me.  We ended last week talking about competition and how that doesn’t serve a healthy relationship.  I now add the point that we also can decide to label something as competition or not—we can also label it a conversation opportunity or gathering ideas.  So when we are fighting we have the opportunity to ask what we are fighting for.  This is also on the heels of a long recovery process and coping with family trauma and death and patterns—and the death of patterns.  In all of this, life is too short.  It moves really damn fast and we blink and suddenly we’re 40 and our kid is 7 and we’ve been in a relationship for 23 years and we’ve spent 20 years at the same organization asking for things to change all while doing the same thing—the things we thought we should be doing, fighting fights we thought we wanted for things we thought were important. 

When we write this story we often forget that we hold the pen—society wants us to forget that, systems want us to forget that.  The soul and the universe never want us to forget it.  We are meant to remember our power and our purpose at all times.  We are meant to feel the creative connection with source and the beauty of connection with souls, we are meant to be a team and work with each other not against each other.  We can write a different story.  We can take the power back and make it what it should be.  We are so mistaken about power and what we do with it, the point of power.  We think power is control when the real control is in managing our emotions and energy and our focus and doing what we are called to do.  There is power in standing our ground and being fully aligned with ourselves and even more power in expressing that. 

Life is too damn short to do all the things we want to do and if we never take action on them then we will have wasted this beautiful opportunity wishing for someone to fulfill our dreams while we are fulfilling someone else’s.  What if we all took the time to find who we are and to learn to fully embrace people and learn to work together?  What if we stood in who we are, not out of defiance or being right and proving power, but to share our lessons and who we are and to share our light and talents with the world to make it a better place?  What if we are meant to be who we are so the rest of the world finds comfort and courage in stepping outside of our numb zone?  We can only do that if we are brave enough to be who we are.  We create a life of resentment when we live it on someone else’s terms and that is a whole other layer of regret and guilt.  Let the patterns die, let the thought we have to please others by being who they think we are die.  Let the truth of who we are live and flourish and grow and create the path, the garden that calls to us.  Because the truth is not only do we hold the pen, we also plant the seeds and if the people around us won’t help us grow, then it’s time to let them water their own grass while we take care of our own. 

Today I am grateful for being on the same page.  There is one thing to be said for understanding where someone is coming from but it is entirely another to know the thoughts, feelings, and understanding are synced.  I also love seeing that “click” moment when everything shifts into alignment and you’re no longer trying to prove a point, you both feel the EXACT same thing.  I’ve had moments of shared understanding with my husband before, but we recently had a moment where there was no doubt we knew we understood the shift happening in our group, the feelings we had with each other, and the dynamic change that could no longer be ignored.  It has been years, feeling like near decades, for us to agree on that level where we could talk about it calmly and not try to defend anything that happened, but just accept that things were not what we expected and that we both had certain feelings about how we had been treated.  They say that when people show you who they are, believe them, and we have been shown with 100% clarity where we stand with people.  Now, we’ve tried to look different ways before when something has happened with the group and we now know that it can’t happen that way anymore.  Certain things don’t fit and it’s no longer feasible to make them fit.  Round holes and square pegs don’t mix.  It is a relief to share that feeling without having to defend it.      

Today I am grateful for surrender.  I have always been grateful for my friendships, for being understood, for having people listen, for that actual connection when someone gets it.  I often tried to force that with people so I wouldn’t feel so lonely—one of those over-sharers where we think trauma bonding means we are actually bonded.  So what I’ve surrendered is the understanding that people are 100% on their own, we can’t make them feel/think/do anything (obvious, but stay with me).  The reason I wanted friendship to be so intimate and connected and so clearly between a set group of people is I wanted to be connected period.  I thought the deeper information someone had about me the deeper our connection would be.  I never considered that people behave differently with that level of information.  SO.  Let people be who they are because we shouldn’t have to examine the deepest wounds of ourselves with everyone just to be close to them.  And when you do share more personal or intimate details, people who care should be willing to listen and not judge and they should be gentle with the information, not ignorant to it.  If people show you they can’t be gentle, they can’t listen, they’d rather have a different priority, then let them.  We can’t force a relationship and we can’t alter someone else’s desire to have a relationship with someone else or to feel a certain way about us.  Let them be and the right people, people who care and actually connect will find their way into our lives.  We can’t force people to have or not have certain relationships—so let their true colors show and make choices from that.

Today I am grateful for family.  I came from a decent sized family but a very large extended family.  I was fortunate to know my Great-Grandmother, my Great Uncles, my Great Aunts, my Great-Great Aunt, and multiple layers of cousins.  The family was so big we used to have to rent out a hall just to get together for the holidays or birthday celebrations.  There’s a big age difference between the whole group, so by the time I came along the frequency of those events was diminished but I still cherished any time we got together.  The family is significantly smaller now as we are all aging.  There have been some rifts in the group, some health issues that have prevented us from gathering often, and naturally with time we have started losing members of our family.  Seeing the diminishing numbers of our group is sobering and sad but it has made me solidify what I have with the remaining members.  My father has lost two of his siblings and my mom still has all of hers but my mother’s family has been separated by distance for a long time.  My uncle came in for the weekend and I haven’t seen him in nearly 3 decades and it was a fantastic reunion.  It’s something I crave and wish I could do more often.  And it’s a reminder to appreciate those we still have while they are here.  We can’t change the fact that we will eventually lose each other so we need to make sure that we are spending our time with those we love accordingly.  Appreciate the time we have and the company we keep.    

Today I am grateful for fun.  I share this one every now and then and I love to share it because I think we take life too seriously as a general rule these days so we need to remember to have fun.  We also need to remember that there are multiple ways to have fun and sometimes we need to think outside the box to find ways to enjoy time together.  We attended a birthday party yesterday at a roller rink.  Neither my husband nor myself have been to a roller rink the entire time we have been together so it’s been well over 20 years since we’ve even attempted to skate.  We had the time of our lives laughing as we tried to find our footing and our groove again, enjoying the feeling of being back on wheels, of teaching our son how to skate.  Full transparency some jealousy as some people are so freakin’ smooth on those wheels, but it was something that showed us a new way to have fun and that we can totally do something physical together as a family and enjoy it—and that we need to get out of our heads every now and then to just enjoy the moment.  Feel alive doing something we normally don’t do and change things up.  There’s a lot we can do together and many ways we can find shared interests—we just have to take the time to do it and be willing to have fun.      

Today I am grateful for the understanding I have developed/gained this past week.  It seems the lessons of the universe are true and they all kind of come in at once.  This past week has been eye-opening on so many levels.  1. We can’t change people or make them feel a certain way about anything or any one of us. 2. When people show you who they are believe them—as painful as it is, accept it and let them be who they are because we can’t make our happiness contingent on how people treat us. 3. When we stop asking permission life gets a lot easier.  It can be scary at first, but it gets a lot easier with practice and we see the results faster.  I wasted too much time asking permission and it pisses me off, but now I know that it’s something I don’t have to do again.  4. Never stop having fun. 5. People who appreciate you genuinely show it, they don’t make the relationship conditional. 6. There is no reason to not be honest about everything.  It makes life so much easier in the end.  I’m not saying be a complete jerk and blunt about everything, but I am saying we need to make sure we aren’t sugar coating the truth either.  7. Being honest includes saying what we want with clarity and confidence and not being ashamed.  Sometimes people are legitimately waiting to hear, the universe needs to hear, what we need.  We get one go-round in this life and it is pointless to waste time doing things that make us miserable hoping it gets us some kind of reward.  Do what we love and become the person who spreads that love by overflowing our cups. 8. Appreciate the time we have with people we love and doing things we love—there is no nobility in wasting time doing what we feel obligated to do and then resenting people or the universe for missed opportunity.  Do what we love, be honest about it, appreciate it. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

How can we build a life together if we are in competition?  This was a thought I’ve had a lot lately.  This year has brought a significant amount of loss, potential loss, and anxiety and all of that has brought the condition of some of my closest relationships to light.  If we are supposed to help each other, to love each other, if we are supposed to create together, why are we fighting each other?  That’s both in general for some of my friend group as well as very specific to my closest relationships.  There has been this air of surging energy and power struggles throughout these groups, and since it’s kind of permeating everything, I felt like this is a theme we need to address.  The world is on edge and we are uncertain and being bombarded with fear—and there are legitimate things to fear as well—so we can only sustain that for so long until we start feeling some trauma symptoms.  Often we become more reactive and I feel that’s what’s going on, at least in my experience.

There are a couple things in this phenomenon that stand out to me, that make me seriously question the sanity of humans at times.  Some of these competitive moments are happening when we are fighting for the exact same thing.  We are saying the same thing and there is still an edge to it, like we are proving who said it first, that our idea is just a bit more unique.  Even if we think we need to go about it differently, we are both seeking the same end result and that point seems to be missed.  The other point is that we are fighting the very people we want to be involved with.  The very people who can help us are the ones we start pushing away.  Is this all a matter of ego?  Or is this some deeper symptom of misunderstanding and miscommunication?  Perhaps it’s both.  We are all seeking ways to be recognized and have our voices heard that we don’t hear what other people are saying even if it’s the same thing.  And we are so distracted that, no only do we not hear others, we often trample over what they are saying.  The speed of society (and the world at large) is too much to allow for people to speak and share with any real depth—we have to get our point across quickly and be the first to do it.

So that brings me to my opening question: How can we build a life together if we are in competition?  The answer is we can’t.  We need to ground ourselves enough to understand what we really want and to know what we are trying to say.  We have to make the choice to hear the other person out and try to understand what they are saying.  We can have different viewpoints and different ideas on how to get where we want to be, but if we are trying to get to the same spot then there is validity on both sides and we need to hear that out.  We are trained to compete with each other because we have some primal instinct toward survival, thinking that ego and being wrong is somehow equated to danger or death.  We need to fight the instinct to fight when it isn’t necessary.  That happens when we are grounded in who we are and clear on the goal.  It takes practice and discipline to over ride that response.  Managing those reactions and coming to a common ground changes the entire game.  It isn’t about hearing ourselves, it’s about coming to the right conclusion and finding the right answer.  We are blessed to have evolved to the point where we really don’t need to compete.  We have most of what we need provided for us or at least readily available—and a sidenote that we have enough to provide for others as well.  So put aside the ego’s voice and hear each other.  It’s often the same song, and we just need to learn to harmonize.  

“Not every day will be this good, but they certainly aren’t all that bad either,” Marie.  I was scrolling through IG the other day and this popped out and I thought we could all use a little reminder about perspective.  The world keeps moving no matter what, and it operates on the natural law of what fills must empty and what is empty will fill again.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to have super crappy low days that drag us down to the point we aren’t able to function and it doesn’t mean that every day will be a spectacular high.  What it means is that it’s natural to vacillate between the two.  It’s our job to keep it in perspective that we need both—the good and the bad—to appreciate where we are in life and to understand the lessons meant for us.  It may not always be fun, but it is a universal truth that we all experience.  Sometimes we are pushed when we are near a breakthrough, tested in a way.  We need to keep moving because those hard moments will lead to the lighter ones—and often lead to the light itself.  When we are in dark times it’s easy to equate those moments to a bad life—we see all the negative.  It’s just as intoxicating to see all of the potential and good and act impulsively when we are feeling good.  We need those moments, the good and the bad, to keep us balanced.  Enjoy when things are good and learn when things aren’t so good.  Be grateful for both.

Today I’m feeling a bit heavy with loss, thinking of my family in particular as we continue the process of cleaning and clearing my Aunt’s home.  It was unexpected and terrifying and surreal—I don’t think any of us knew how bad she really was.  She felt so much guilt over what she had done that she didn’t feel she could ask for help—and she was so lonely without her family she didn’t want to.  I feel like I had no idea who she was at the end—I really hadn’t known who she was for the last several years.  Going through her things in that house, the house that used to be so beautiful and cool and full of life, now dead, and void, and while full of things, is so devoid of life.  it hasn’t had life in there for a long time if we’re really honest.  It’s a sad thing to watch the energy, the heart disappear from something that meant so much.  It’s hard to accept that, while the person was still here, we were still losing them.  We’d already lost them a long time ago.  It’s the toss between wanting to go back and relive it and wanting to stop everything that happened.  The one moment.  We can pinpoint that one moment when it all went downhill.  And seeing all of what was, all of the hope and potential just squandered on desire, ego, and addiction.  It’s a cautionary tale instead of a life lived.  Trying to make ends meet all the way until the end when there was every opportunity to create genuine abundance and flow.

And now I have a few of the things that remind me of the times we had together, the person/people they all were then.  And looking back I know that I had no real idea of what was happening, I was just as involved in the intoxication of the lifestyle, the cockiness of the endless flux of things and abundance.  I literally didn’t know any better—and it was a drug.  It felt so good to have that kind of false power, the feeling everything was in endless supply.  We were all on a high.  I was reliant on the work of what others had already done, and I see now, I never learned how to make and sustain anything for myself.  We never even learned how to keep up with what others had done for us.  We got lazy and complacent, and some got greedy.  And we all let it go in the end because we couldn’t maintain or sustain anything of what we had.  We could have stepped in and replenished it and made choices to build it back up, but none of us knew how.  I had hoped they (the family) would come to their senses and restore it, put aside the pride and work toward fixing what had been broken.  Toward doing what was right and making it better.  But they dug their heels in, dug deeper, thinking they could prove their way out of it, that they could get out of it on their own and didn’t need anyone.  And then there was nothing left.  Literally nothing left. 

For something that had such a golden age so to speak, it is heartbreaking when it fails.  I’m not trying to be dramatic and I’m not ignorant to that pattern throughout history—everything ebbs and flows and power fails all the time.  What fills must empty.  But there is a strange emptiness to be the one to clear the sources.  It is a strange thing to resurrect the little bit of life left in all the death, and I’m literally in the middle of that–I have the last living thing from that house—her cat is now with me.  I can’t remember if I talked about this.  It’s a weird dichotomy having this living thing that I never knew until now be in my home, afraid and alone.  I lost my cat, he lost his owner, and now we are trying to find ourselves again.  He’s a sweet boy and I love cats so that isn’t the issue, but I feel there is still a painful lesson that needs healing here.  It’s like living on foreign territory.  Neither one of us knows how to act with the other but we know we need to rely on each other at this time.  We are both hurting and we aren’t trying to replace what we lost, but we find ourselves in this situation together and we have no choice but to figure out which way to go next.  This is the next step in filling up again.  It’s finding the life and tending it until it can flourish once more.  Sometimes it feels a little bleak, but we go back to find the hope.  Take the small wins, remember the good, honor the whole, and keep moving.  Life keeps moving.    

Discussing relationships and a follow up to keeping people in our lives: I’ve always been a bit protective over my people—or who I consider my people.  I value my relationships and I value the support that I can give and receive.  I’ve got some PTSD when it comes to relationships in that I will either be your best friend or I want nothing to do with you.  I wanted to be accepted so badly that I let too many of the wrong people in.  I also struggle to let people in—but once I do it’s all access.  Some lines are a bit blurry for me as many of my relationships were based on proving my worth.  Throw in the PTSD of losing some of the most important people in my life early on and nearly losing each of my siblings and my father as well as the near-loss of my mother’s mental health.  With all of that being said, forming a bond with people is important and I take it seriously—some may say too seriously.  I never got the memo that some people simply aren’t meant to stick around forever.  I spent so much time trying to keep things as they were, not allowing for change in them or in myself.  At the same time I hold people to a certain standard that really is a hard line for me.  Needless to say, I am a bit contradictory when it comes to forming and maintaining relationships—I’m human.

This isn’t about holding my own, but about being respected.  You can’t have a relationship without mutual trust and respect.  I will help anyone to the best of my ability but within my limits.  If there is a push to do something that I’m not comfortable or capable of doing I will turn that task back over to who owns it.  It isn’t my job to do the work for other people—I did enough of that growing up.  I also feel that building trust in relationships means appreciating the people involved and not excluding them.  Look, I’m a realist and I understand that not all people will see eye to eye or enjoy all of the same things 100% of the time.  But in a group there should be enough respect to be inclusive of everyone and afford the opportunity to get involved with whatever is going on.  There should be a healthy respect for each other’s boundaries as well—when you are at someone else’s house, their rules apply.  That may seem old fashioned but someone’s private property is not for you to do what you want with it.  I also have a sense of propriety about expanding the friend group.  Like, great, the more the merrier, but don’t go excluding the person responsible for it.  It isn’t even about giving that person power, it’s about appreciation and boundaries—appreciation for the connection and boundaries.  

I know some may say that there is free will and we can’t control people—and I fully agree.  But I also agree that if people can’t hold a basic modicum of respect for each other then the relationship isn’t very successful or authentic.  It shows more about the person who would turn around and use other people to their advantage than it does about the desire to have that person around.  And look, some relationships form naturally and there is a bond that supersedes the connector but that is still not a reason to exclude anyone.  I introduced some friends at a party I hosted in my home and I noticed that conversation started happening and I got jealous immediately.  My spidey senses told me that I was going to be ousted so to speak.  And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.  The three of us have mutual interests and I found out the two of them got together without me to discuss something that we ALL would have done.  Perhaps this is just a trigger from being used in childhood, and some may ask why respect is needed in this situation and there is validity to that question.  I also understand that on the occasion where not everyone is involved doesn’t mean that they are excluding you.  But it doesn’t take away the reality that there is room for all. 

I’m learning to be grateful for my role.  No, I don’t like being used as a bridge, but it is a gift to connect people.  I don’t always have to be the driver or the one creating the events for the group.  But there is a sting to the heart knowing my home has been open to all of these people for so many reasons and events and they’ve all willingly come—and then they turn around and choose to not invite me.  Perhaps this has to do with what we’ve been discussing about relationships over the last few days.  They feel the pressures of something I’m giving off, or more than likely, there are just certain things we aren’t meant to accomplish together any longer.  We have different priorities and different needs. It doesn’t mean that we dislike each other or that people are being intentionally hurtful.  It just means that we have different goals, intentions, and purposes.  We can cheer each other on but we aren’t always in the game together.  Some people aren’t on the same team at all.  People come into our lives for a reason just as we fulfill a purpose in theirs, but no matter the timing/purpose of anyone in our lives, we must understand that even the best relationships will evolve and change, and that we have no say in how long people are in our lives.  Allow them to be who they are, and to flow as they must.