Trigger Warning: Thoughts of suicide as described in a book

I know the trigger warning is a direct opposite of what I spoke about for the last several days, but please stay with me on this one..  I woke with a feeling that I needed to move, that it was time to do more.  Later in the evening we watched a movie and its main premise was about a timeline and if we had the power to change a timeline.  As someone heavily impacted by the thought of time and what it means, these concepts thrill, terrify, excite, and sadden me.  I’ve often asked what I would do if I actually had the chance to do things differently.  We all suffer loss, we all have things we would change, we all have things we would do over, we all have things we would fix, but there is a certain weight that falls on me when I think of doing things differently.  I know the adage about hindsight being 20/20, but I have to express that I don’t just get a wistful wishful feeling of wanting to try again—I often get a gut-wrenching desire to fix it, a burning helplessness in my chest that claws at me with the urge to do it differently. 

I’m currently reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and it, too, is about a timeline and the chance to redo things and how mental health impacts us overall.  The main character attempts suicide and ends up in a library that catalogues all of her possible lifetimes and gives her the chance to try any one of the infinite possibilities of her life.  It also has a book that holds all the regrets from her life and it is so heavy she can barely lift it-a nice image of the power of regret in all of our lives.  Regret is a show-stopper for many of us, even the fear of regret can stop us in our tracks.  It is the heaviest of emotions and learning to put it down takes time.  As we go through life regretting and lamenting certain events that happen, we are often so caught in the moment, the emotion of it that we never consider that that thing, whatever it is that happened, was meant to happen exactly like that.  We so want to avoid the pain that we can’t consider the possibility that this too is exactly on course. 

The example in the book is the loss of her cat—it was found dead in the road and she assumed it was hit by a car and she leapt to the conclusion she was a terrible cat owner.  She asks to live a different timeline and she wakes in this scenario to find the cat dead under her bed.  As a reader it was jarring but it continues that the cat had a heart condition no one knew about and went outside to die, it was never hit by a car—but the cat knew it was dying and anyone who lives with cats knows that is true, they will isolate when they know the end is near.  It had nothing to do with her, in fact she had given the cat the best year of its life.  Haig says through the librarian, “Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all—sometimes regrets are just bullshit.”  Upon asking why she had to endure that experience of finding the cat dead rather than just be told of his condition, the librarian says, “Sometimes the only way to learn is to live.” 

Accepting pain is contrary to everything we feel in our bodies.  We want to avoid pain and, even with such a jarringly perfect example as above, even those events with a reason don’t ease the pain as it is happening.  We want to avoid loss, even inevitable loss.  But the truth is our relationship with time is precarious and will always head toward the negative side of things—the clock always runs out and it will always run out for each and every single one of us no matter what we do.  From that context, it seems silly to waste our time on regret.  If even the pain is necessary in our lives, why do we try to avoid it?  We know in some cases we are not powerful enough to change things even if we wanted to but the emotion of it can drown us.  So the truth is this: we have to make peace, to find peace with what we have and with how life rolls.  Before we consider carrying the weight of an emotion, especially regret, we need to ask ourselves if this is something worthy of holding.  We can beautifully convince ourselves of our power to cause the horrible things in our lives, sure that one decision could have changed it all.  And yes, some decisions are that powerful, but we can never really be certain which ones are so why do we bear the burden of carrying all of them? And the truth is, how far back would we rewind the clock?  The alternative may not be as good as what happened even if what happened hurts—and at what point do we erase who we are to become something else?  How far back do we go?

I can’t say whether there is or isn’t some great life review where we are given the option to see everything that was or that could have been, where we get to choose to recycle our energy or try on a new possibility—and I’m not sure I like the idea.  I know, I opened this piece talking about wanting to change things and go back.  But the truth is this: the things that are meant to happen, happen.  Did we have all the options in the world?  Possibly—but we chose what we did.  That is the reality we have here and now. Sometimes we have to take a few hits to learn the lesson and sometime even doing things flawlessly still ends in pain.  The point comes down to what we do with the pain, how we stand up again, and what we choose to do next.  Wishing we can change things won’t change things—and we may not have the opportunity to rewind the clock to do it differently, but we can do what we can do—and that is continue to live understanding that some timelines aren’t for us, and we can make the best of this one.  Breathe, and try to accept that all is exactly as it should be.  We can stop torturing ourselves with the idea that e needed to do or be something different.   

“How to love yourself, Step 1: Stop all criticism of self and others. 2: Stop scaring yourself—we terrorize ourselves with thoughts.  List out our fears and turn into positive affirmations—I am in charge.  One idle thought makes no difference but when we keep dripping one thought after another, [it forms a puddle] and [eventually] we can drown in negativity or float in the sea of life,” Louise Hay.  I want to add an additional step: remember that we are worthy of love without exception or qualification—innately.  We see how to love ourselves when we remember that worth and understand that we have the power to determine what this life looks like through our feelings and thoughts alone.  One of the most challenging lessons I had to learn throughout my entire life is that people are doing their best.  For a long time I never took personal experience into consideration and thought most behaviors with others were common sense.  For a long time I took my experiences and was so painfully critical of every mistake that I forgot I was human—and then I applied that criticism to others.  And soon that criticism turned into fear, thinking a mistake would make everything fail.

Love is about grace and accepting that experience is different for each of us even if we are sharing the same experience. It’s about grace to give space for learning who we are and what we need to do.  It’s about grace and space for our humanity and understanding mistakes are part of the deal.  We have the power to change our perception at any time including taking what we fear most and making it something positive.  Our thoughts will run wild if we let them, the mind’s job is to create scenarios and show us possibilities and that includes the entire spectrum form the greatest success to the most awful failures.  The mind keeps us safe by showing us what can happen and keeping us aware.  We thrive by looking at all the good, the best case scenario.  And we thrive by following our intuition and giving that space we’ve been talking about.  There is nothing to fear.  Even if we fail and fall flat on our face, we can use that as momentum to try again, to approach it differently.  We need to create the pool, the ocean of our lives and we are in control of the contents. We want depths of possibility, not fear or despair.  Our thoughts should be a respite, a haven, a place of opportunity.  Find gratitude for what we have, for our options, for what we’ve learned, and for our ability to teach others.  Take that gratitude as the spring board into hope and possibility.  Gratitude is the boat that carries us through the rough seas and hope is what gives us the courage to dive in trusting we will return safely to the surface.  Love is the space to believe we are worth taking the dive in the first place.  Trust ourselves, be grateful, and love is the result.

I want to express some extra gratitude to the world today.  I’m on the precipice of change, we all are, but I know this change is something that will greatly impact my family.  It is the culmination of years of work, a dream, refining that dream and developing the skill to bring that dream to life.  I am grateful to have time with my family.  We’ve been through a lot of loss this year and I am ever grateful that I still have my family and that we are able to better reconnect with the family that is still here.  I have regrets about the last several years and the way we could have spent our time, but I am grateful to have the ability to spend time and appreciate who is here, to understand love, and to finally put pieces of the past to rest so we can all experience love for each other.  Love isn’t a tit for tat, a tally of who did what for or to whom.  It’s about the time with each other and how we support each other—how we show up. I am grateful to have a chance to make things right with those around me.

I’m grateful to continue to navigate my relationship with faith.  I’m not a religious person but I have appreciation for the fact that there are continual signs of support and reasons to believe.  I’m grateful to have tools and materials to approach my journey from different directions so I finally feel the connection in a way that makes sense.  I’ve been cared for, I have made it through every tough spot.  I’m still here and I still have purpose and the signs from the universe still continue to come.  I’ve learned how to deal with my guilt even if I can’t stop it, and I am grateful to turn that guilt around into lessons learned and support for others.  I am fortunate to have the responsibility I do, the ability to take care of my life, to share my life, to love my life, to build my life, to enjoy my life.  It is a gift to be on this ride. 

I am grateful to enjoy this day, to spend this time out on beautiful land, connecting with nature and feeling the quiet.  That connection allows me to see the size of this Earth and remember how small I am but helps me completely understand how lucky I am that I still get to play a part in this.  So grateful that I get to be with people I love, so grateful that I get to share what I have with them.  I am so grateful that we get to remember the life left in this world and the light that we each can bring with us wherever we go, whenever we want to.  We have so much power over our experience here and we need to remember at all times how we interact with ourselves determines how we interact with others and our connection to spirit, this Earth, ourselves creates an experience felt by all.  We have so much to be grateful for and we need to focus on the light now more than ever.  There is hope in the light, and gratitude fuels hope.  There is always something to be thankful for. 

“Imagine when we are born we are given a human and told we need to take care of that human for the rest of our lives….We are our human—we are in our own custody.  We need to take care of ourselves. Loving ourselves isn’t a feeling, it’s an approach, it’s a job.  You don’t even have to like yourself today to love yourself; loving yourself today is your job and we have to take that job seriously because we are our human,” Matthew Hussey.  I wanted to share this little reminder.  So often we give care to others that we don’t give to ourselves and we burn out.  Either that or we don’t know how to care for others, we don’t know how to reciprocate or receive care.  In remembering our worth we are able to see our value and do not question that we need care.  We are not alone on this planet but our journey is our own.  Sometimes we forget the care we need.  We forget the difference between like and love and we don’t realize we need to apply those emotions to ourselves. 

Loving others is complex enough—the concept of love in itself is complex—but we take that task on with little consideration for the implications behind it.  We take on the responsibility of other people before we understand how to take that on for ourselves.  Love is never a burden, but it is work.  The funny thing is it’s also effortless.  Love is innate and we put a burden behind it thinking love needs to be or look a certain way but love is the most natural thing out there.  We know it when we feel it but we can’t describe it.  So when it comes to loving ourselves, it’s simply knowing we are worthy of having boundaries that keep us on our path that allow us to achieve our goals while interacting and experiencing or creating a particular outcome with others.  Love guides us and keeps us through our knowing and our intuition of what feels right—we know the care we need, we know what we need, and we know what we need to do to fulfill those needs.  In a world of distraction and false information it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important including ourselves.

We are the only person who is with us from day one and no one else is responsible for us—just as we aren’t responsible for anyone else (except our children).  Children are a good example here because we have that innate love for our kids, these beings we know we have an influence over.  It isn’t our job to determine who they become, it is our job to shape them and guide them and help them become who they are meant to be.  We understand the love required in those circumstances, we need to remember to apply that to ourselves.  No one will give us what we want, it is up to us to form a relationship with ourselves, spirit, the universe, and those around us to create the life we are meant to have.  We have to be able to look at our efforts at the end of the day and be happy with the result.  We need to be proud of what we’ve done, how we’ve behaved, how we’ve treated people, and how we’ve treated ourselves.  Hate begets hate so if we do not feel love for ourselves, we can’t truly feel it for others.  Understand our care determines how we show up in this world—and choose to care for ourselves well so we can do the same for others.   

Whitney Hanson shared a poem with one line that stuck out prominently to me: “Losing all I thought I was so I can finally be found.”  Over the course of the last several weeks I’ve felt lost in a way I couldn’t explain.  Between dealing with continuous nonsense at work, insecurities in my relationship, insecurities in myself, I’ve felt lost in the little bit of knowledge/feeling of who I am.  At first I found myself spiraling into the usual woe-is-me mentality because I’m tired of losing footing.  I’m tired of adapting all the time and still losing my ground.  That in itself made me feel sorry for myself because I’m tired of wasting all the energy and effort into something that feels so secure in the beginning and then tends to fall apart either from lack of follow through or from things literally fizzling out.  I always considered the idea that we shed who we are as we evolve and I still believe in that concept, but I never realized how quickly we could shed through those layers.  I spent a lot of my life looking for security because of the degree of loss and almost-loss that I experienced as a child–and it’s something I still do—not that we aren’t all looking for security, it’s just that I became compulsive about it because I feared losing everything all the time.  I witnessed the rise and fall of a successful family business, of starting out with my husband and having to go back home, of feeling secure and having the ability to go where I wanted to and then feeling trapped in work that was less than unsatisfying.

Now as I’m clearly in mid-life I need to consider the idea that there is a different reason to be lost, or to lose what we thought we knew.  Sometimes time speeds up like that to bring us to where we are meant to be faster—or at least to get us away from where we aren’t supposed to be.  I have a tendency to take things way too seriously, always finding the serious implications of what is “meant” to happen or what could happen from any little scenario—catastrophizing to a professional degree.  Sometimes the worst-case scenario happens to show us that we can survive the worst-case—or that the worst case isn’t really the worst case, we just built it up in our heads.  Doesn’t mean that the universe is trying to show us how bad things can get, it’s just trying to show us that we are stronger than we thought we were and that we have a tendency to create scenarios in our head.  Sometimes we are taken a different path so we can discover where we are meant to go.  We lock into this idea of how things are supposed to go and who we are because we buy into distraction and what others tell us.  When we lose that version we’ve created under the premise of what others told us to be, we learn to find who we actually are.  It always amazes me how something so simple as knowing who we are and what we want to do, what we are meant to do seems to evade most of us.  We have to allow new experiences so we can integrate them into who we are—and find who we really are.

Case in point of looking at a scenario that was the worst and can be viewed from another perspective is my relationship with my husband: when I found out my friend had been hanging out with him over 20 years ago, my initial reaction was literally, “What the fuck are you doing with that kid?”  I had more than one preconceived notion about who he was and I knew the person who I was at that point didn’t associate with people like that.  I never considered that he may have things to teach me or that I needed to have certain experiences with him.  I had to lose part of myself, give up part of my ideas of who I was in order to find those pieces that were really part of me.  I had to learn that sometimes we go through things in order to come out the other side.  This is how we find who we are: going through the experiences we think we can’t handle.  We hold onto homes, jobs, relationships, and what we think we know because we feel it gives us security without realizing that what gives us security is knowing who we are.  We can’t let jobs or circumstances define us no matter how hard it is to break out of those habits.  We never know what we will get until we go through it.  We can’t assume, we can’t pretend we know everything, and we can’t plan/prepare for everything.  WE just need to know who we are and not let circumstances tell us who we are.  We decide what we do next and how we view it. We can let ourselves be lost forever or we can learn to draw a new map.  Following our creativity, intuition, and knowing, we find our way out of where we are and into who we are meant to be. 

I sat on the floor outside the door of the bathroom, cleaning supplies sitting on the counter, unable to move, struggling to breathe, tears streaming down my cheeks.  My watch read 10,282 steps.  Where the hell did it get me?  What came of those 10,282 steps?  I was sitting in the exact same spot I started earlier that day.  The same spot I started yesterday.  The mountain of things, tasks, then more lists with more tasks, all started but unfinished both at work and home, just all over the place, not enough pieces of me to do it all.  I sat on the floor, alone, the towering wave of emotion trying to drown me—and me feeling like I wanted to let it. I was paralyzed, unable to move or even decide how to move.  There was no way to do all at once and I was getting tired of waiting for the help I was literally and explicitly asking for from my family.  No, not everything needed to be done right that second, but the things we had to do were all interdependent and time is a-ticking.  All I need help with is the first thing: clean the damn house.  I needed to get things organized again, and then cleaned, and I’d only need bits of help from there.       

I’d started the day super positive, knowing we had a lot to tackle: multiple stores to go to, a haircut for my son, laundry, dishes, writing, deep cleaning, trimming cat nails, cleaning their ears, bathing the dog, organizing, donating, planning meals for the parties we’re hosting, putting gifts together, finishing cards….and I was well aware not all of this would be done in one day—that’s why I had wanted to start these things three weeks ago.  And now, we’d done so much moving that I didn’t even know I could stop, and I had so much to do that I knew I shouldn’t stop.  Every second wasted was time I could have spent making progress on the mountain of everything that needed to be climbed, and I realized I was trying to climb 3 mountains at the same time.  And a big ol’ 4^th one was in the distance—the mountain I needed to face with all these feelings, this guilt, the thing that was keeping me from focusing and attacking the work I wanted to do:

The fear. 

While cleaning, I saw my Aunt’s name on the bag of shampoo and bathroom stuff I’d gotten from her house when we were cleaning everything there.  My heart dipped.  As I was cleaning the bedroom, picking up hair from the floor, I found a whisker from Loki.  I picked up his whisker from the floor and my eyes started to tear. My husband and son walked out the door, unwilling/unable to help me.  So, I sat alone on the floor. And suddenly the emptiness was too much—and I understood all of this, all of this doing, those 10,282 steps, was to fill something I’m missing desperately—more than I wanted to admit.  The weight of the hole created by the absence, the space left open by all the people I love(d) now gone, just unbearable. I was trying to fill that space with busyness and gifts and trying to perfect the season and overscheduling. All of that fully collapsed, taking my breath and crushing me with it. Thoughts racing, the full realization of how many people in my life are gone, who I can never see again, the finality of all the Christmases never to have again and knowing that there is some sick universal countdown that can never be stopped until the rest of the family goes too, until finally we all go.  Thinking of all the time we wasted, so caught up in our own worlds, pained and alone when all we had to do was reach out, pick up the damn phone, hiding our problems because we felt we deserved them.  And now we will never have the chance to say any of those things to each other.  Ever.  And the cherry on top was the animal that used to be present for all of those things, helping me navigate the emotions, is now gone too.

We can’t make things be what they were once they fall apart.  We never know when anyone’s time will run out.  But I know all too well the pain of missed opportunity to say what we needed to say.  The loss of the feeling, the way it used to be.  I have enough presence to know that the way I envisioned those events unfolding was likely not the way it would have happened, a fantasy.  I’m mourning the idea of what could have been.  I’m mourning the loss of what will never be.  And what I saw was so beautiful, I wanted it so badly.  I have so much love in me, so much I want to share.  And I sit here alone.  It won’t always be this way, I know that.  I know one day I will be able to fill those missing pieces with life, the life I want and have been desperate to build.  Many of the people I wanted to see me get there are no longer here, so this is a mixed bag.  I’m proud of what I’ve done but it feels like a hollow victory in some ways because I don’t get to share it with everyone so I feel like I’m up against a clock to do the rest of this.  The tears will quiet, and the pain will lessen, and the rest will fill in, I know this.  But I can’t continue to walk these steps merely circling around what needs to be done—calling movement progress only to be stuck in a circle.  For anyone dealing with that kind of weight this season, I hope you find solace that we are not alone.  It’s different, but it isn’t lost.  The hearts of those we love still beat in us no matter where they are.  And, no, a clean toilet isn’t going to bring them back, but the love we have in those around us will continue to propel us forward.  So take solace in presence, let the tears come and then let them dry.  We do the best we can, we pick ourselves up off the floor, and our steps carry on

Today I am grateful for seeing the truth.  Even if it hurts, it’s better to know exactly where we stand and how people really feel.  Yes, it can be a harsh reality but it s better for all involved to know rather than guess or develop ideas on false pretenses.  Find the people who show they support us rather than those who say they support us—it’s a different behavior entirely.  Someone can say they’re helping only to undercut at the last minute and the truth is that isn’t support.  Trust the gut and, above all, watch people’s actions.  What they do will tell us all we need to know. 

Today I am grateful for the ability to give.  I’ve been so excited to give back this season and to have the opportunity to share and provide and make things magical for others.  I’ve been more in my head than usual lately, feeling the pressure of everything that needs to be done, and it has been nice to get out of my head and do nice things for people.  I’ve read before that sometimes giving is selfish because of the high we get—and I used to think that was a bit exaggerated.  But I totally understand it.  Seriously.  When we’re feeling down or overwhelmed, it can really help to look at what other people need and see where we can be of use.  I haven’t always been able to give back as much as I would like to and this year I have found myself in a position where I can really enjoy the spirit of giving.  This season constantly reminds me of how lucky we actually are and how much more we can do than just give things.  The presence is more than the presents and we need to remember as we prepare to enter this time of gratitude, giving, and love, that it comes from the heart and we are lucky to give.    

Today I am grateful for breath.  We so often take our autonomic functions for granted.  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen the impact of imbalance and overwhelm on all areas of our lives—mental, physical, social, financial, spiritual.  It’s easy to get carried away and to feel like things are out of control—they are out of control.  All we can deal with is what is right in front of us and I constantly forget that, feeling like I need to handle everything all the time and I know my body is so tense most of the time that I don’t breath correctly—which then impacts everything else in the body from cellular and system function to cognitive function.  The breath is the single most centering thing in the body aside from the beat of our hearts, the electric impulse that keeps us moving and runs the show.  We are amazing creatures, and all we have to do is let our bodies do what they do.  The rest is covered.  The rest isn’t that serious.  Yeah, we have a bunch of made up rules that tell us what’s important in life, but without the breath, without the basic function of our being, those rules mean diddly.  And this year has shown me how quickly life can change or how unbelievably stubborn it can be.  Both scenarios dictate all we can do is breathe.  I appreciate what my body does for me, how it keeps me moving.  How the air moves me. 

Today I am grateful for big, astute hearts.  During a panic attack this weekend, I lamented that I didn’t know what to do.  I was on my knees with my head on the floor and my son, my little 7 year old, said, “You’re just overwhelmed.”  I fully admit I don’t give my son enough credit for what he perceives, what he feels, and how he interprets things—his feeling nature in general.  His awareness of the major portion of my problem, the overwhelm, was definitely a perfectly timed reminder that all is not lost, and sometimes the mind goes a little wild.  Sometimes all we need to do is remember to breathe (like I talked about above) and get a little perspective.  Kids are so aware.  They feel the truth and trust that knowing to BE the truth.  My son brought me right back to where I was, and I was able to get through it.    

Today I am grateful for another shot.  Because of my sensitivity and proclivity toward anxiety I have a tendency to think once something is over I won’t get another chance again—or something else won’t come around without difficulty.  This year with so much time spent in limbo or loss, I felt myself stagnate a bit.  I mean, I definitely took big strides but I’m not feeling they were as big as they could have been.  On New Year’s Day I saw an Eagle and was ready for this year to take off just as big as that symbol.  The year wasn’t awful, it just had some huge swings.  Just because we don’t get where we thought we’d be, it doesn’t mean we didn’t progress.  We may be a bit battered in some cases, but we are here, and as long as we are here, we have another chance.  One rough inning doesn’t mean the game is over—we get to bat again. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

“Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly,” JFK.  This is the next level to what we were talking about yesterday. This is more than discomfort, this is a willingness to outright fall on our faces and what that failure can do for us.  I know the times I failed, I took it as permanent.  I believed that the failure was a resounding no from the universe and that I wasn’t meant to go that path.  I often wonder, knowing what I do now, that if I had continued to pursue any of those paths what would have happened.  I would be an entirely different person.  If I had gone past the discomfort of that initial failure, I may have become an expert in any one of a million things that fascinated me but I lost the courage to go after because I was once told no, or once made a mistake.  I feel that is also part of the reason why I stuck with the wrong things for so long.  I wanted to prove that those choices weren’t a mistake, that they could turn into gold.  I digress a bit.  Failure isn’t a life sentence and it doesn’t mean it’s over for good.  Sometimes we have to learn to redirect and we have to understand that when we take risks and push ourselves to the limits of our comfort, we find new ways to get what we want.

Failure is a milestone toward learning how to create what we want.  It shows us what doesn’t work on that path and guides us toward what does.  It also shows us that we need to be clear and direct on what we are doing.  For example, I spoke about clarity the other week (not a new topic) in regards to focus and how we achieve what we are looking to.  We have to decide to commit to one thing and see it through and that means accepting any failure that comes with it.  We don’t always get it right on the first try, we aren’t experts the first time we walk on the field.  And when we focus, we need to learn all the points that fail in order to develop the strongest result in the end.  We need failure to learn the weak points so we can make them better.  And the bigger we go, the bigger the potential for failure—and the bigger the failure may be.  But as we develop our skin and learn about ourselves and about the task we are trying to accomplish, those failures become easier to handle, the things we thought were life ending become a stepping stone.  Failure puts things in perspective.

Without failure we lose the ability to adapt and we close our minds to what we may need to know in order to achieve the highest level of success.  Failure doesn’t feel good for many reasons—sometimes a lot is hinging on the success of an idea and when we don’t get the results we are looking for it can feel overwhelming, like we will drown if we don’t do it right the first time out.  But as we develop and grow our capacity and tolerance for failure increases and our learning curve goes down, meaning it takes less and less failure to get the results we need.  If we want big, we have to do big.  We have to trust that it’s all part of the plan, that we will find our way.  Failure isn’t some scarlet letter we have to carry around and it isn’t a stopping point—unless we let it be.  Take failure as an opportunity to redirect and refine ourselves and the goal and to hone our skills.  Don’t let failure become regret.  Don’t let temporary discomfort become a permanent block to permanent joy.  We are meant to be adaptable and change and sometimes we have to fail in order to get to the right spot.  It’s no reflection on who we are, it’s a guidepost to who and what we want to become.  Stay focused on closing the gap and we can’t go wrong.  

“Pushing through discomfort gives us the belief and the confidence in our word,” Bishoi Khella.  Knowing new people and seeing their success, hearing their stories gives me the confidence to push through my own crap.  Collectively I am surrounded by people who have literally pulled themselves up from the depths of things and who have created lives for themselves.  One of the biggest regrets I have is that I never allowed myself to fall.  I never wanted people to see me at my lowest, I didn’t want them to see me fall because they already thought I was weak and any sign of failure was more than enough for them to pounce on me and make me feel worse about myself.  But the truth is if I had just said fuck it and gone with my instincts, even if it meant falling, I would have learned more about who I was rather than trying to fit all these pieces into my life to create a version of myself that was always a couple sizes too big or small.  We know when things aren’t a good fit, we know when things don’t feel right but we try to convince ourselves that it will work or we buy into our shit and we stop trying.  That lack of follow through creates a story that we can’t do it, that we will never succeed and it gets easier and easier to say no to what we want to do.

But when we push through the discomfort of failure and fear, we learn that we are capable of infinite things.  Our power is limitless as long as we stick with it.  Our decision will take us exactly where we need to be, we just have to stop pretending what we do and don’t want.  We have to get honest with ourselves about what we want and what we have to do to close the gap to get there.  Every time we stop ourselves because of some limiting belief or fear, we tell ourselves it is ok to give up on what we want.  We give ourselves an out to creating the life we’ve been dreaming of.  What message does that send to the universe?  That’s the energy of, “thanks but no thanks, I don’t really want it.”  And then we get upset when we reject what we wanted and it doesn’t come back to us.  We need to learn to trust ourselves, to trust that we can handle our dreams and that what we want is meant for us, that it wants us too.  Discomfort is temporary but regret is permanent.  The fact is we only have so much time on this earth and no one knows how much time that is, and if we can face our fear of failure head on even at the risk of temporary pain/embarrassment etc. then we potentially create the greatest joy in our lives.  And if we do it once, we can do it again and we have the confidence to do it again.  Greatness is on the other side of fear—believe we can get there.

A theme has popped up over the last few weeks.  If we want things to change then we need to change, that is a given.  Sometimes that new skin, that new feeling is uncomfortable.  If we had been tainted or given ideas about a particular person, it can be difficult to trust and learn about the real them.  But taking the time to get to know people and see where we are actually similar is interesting.  Sometimes the very people we think we couldn’t stand are the very people we need in our lives.  It’s also interesting to hear another perspective on people who have known each other a long time.  There are multiple sides to every story and I recently was reminded that I need to hear all sides before making a judgement or decision about other people and about who I am.  I always talk about the importance of knowing who we are to make decisions but the truth is that we can’t always know until we are in a specific circumstance.  We don’t know what we are made of until we go through it or expose ourselves to an alternative, face what we fear, etc. 

We can only learn the truth about people by taking the chance and letting them in.  Deciding who someone is without our own interaction with them is wrong.  Talking with new people and creating new feelings and learning to control the emotion opens doors and build bridges.  Life is about more than just about getting done what we need to or about surviving—we need relationships and sometimes those relationships form when we least expect them.  Relationships built on creation rather than competition and sometimes we have to find our own version of someone rather than believe what we are told.  I had an amazing conversation with someone I hadn’t been given the most favorable view of.  And I saw within this person similarities to myself.  The drive, the passion.  And this person was able to take that energy and actually do something with it.  For them to be able to do that and for them to come into my life at this stage while I am in the midst of stepping out on a very steep ledge shows me that it is possible to have a big dream that can seem uncertain, risky even, and that we can make something of it.  That we are meant to take the leap.  Sometimes people come into our lives as a reminder of what we can do.

We can’t know the depths of people if we don’t even scratch the surface.  I’ve had to go against my better judgement with people before and allow myself to be proved wrong, and that has been harder and harder to do as I’ve gotten older.  The cool thing is that every time I’ve been proven wrong I’ve learned something about myself.  I’ve learned that sometimes when we shut people out before we know them, we are missing out on the opportunity to learn something about ourselves as well.  It’s funny that the very things I thought I didn’t like about certain people were the very things I also had within myself.  Not that I was totally denying that I had those traits, but that, like so many things, I repressed those traits thinking they were somehow bad.  There are times we need to keep tight to our boundaries but when our instinct tells us differently than what we have been told, or when we constantly cross paths with certain people, we need to listen.  We have to hear all parts of ourselves and we have to trust our gut—we can’t always rely on someone else’s opinion of the matter because other people’s opinions are always skewed by their experience and beliefs.  Or on anything really, we should always taste it to see the flavor and develop our own perspective.  If I had continued to ignore this person, I’d have missed out on the potential of a real relationship as well as the potential to know myself. Change the story, take the chance, and get to know who we are while we get to know them.