Today I am grateful for creating my identity.  I don’t need people around me who don’t want me around.  I’ve learned that lesson and embraced it entirely.  I so desperately wanted to be accepted my entire life—that is a huge premise I’ve shared over and over again in this pieces, on these pages.  But people have shown me who they are more often than not and I will always believe them from this point on.  Forming relationships is tough because the human dynamic is such that most of us still operate on some level of competition, trying to secure what is best for us, feeling like we don’t have enough to go around.  There is also ego.  People want to be the best simply to be the best.  In all of this, all we have, the only person who is with us through absolutely everything is ourselves.  It is critical to know who we are so we don’t lose ourselves in the mess of becoming what someone else thinks we should be.  Even the little things, like buying the art I like, the books I enjoy, the clothes I want to wear, how I want my house to look—all the way to deciding on the thoughtfulness I put into a relationship and recognizing when the relationship isn’t working.  Knowing who I am is critical (as it is for all of us).  I am grateful, as scared as I used to be, to stop thinking about what others think first.  I am grateful to embrace the entirety of who I am.  She’s much more powerful in that capacity versus making herself palatable.  I am me.   

Today I am grateful for understanding the difference between showing and telling.  I understand now that part of why I had so much difficulty explaining and articulating my feelings as a kid is because I was trying to make people feel a certain way—I was trying to make them understand.  Instead of just saying it, just feeling it, I wanted to use words that made them feel how I wanted them to feel.  I thought that was the only way they would understand.  I thought if they understood they wouldn’t want to make others feel that way.  I didn’t understand then that most people don’t operate on such an emotional level all the time.  I didn’t really consider it emotional, I just thought that was how people operated.  I thought everyone felt like I did at some point.  And maybe they do, but the point is they didn’t let those feelings run them.  They didn’t let the feeling make a decision for them and I couldn’t make them feel what I did.  So showing is the way.  No pretext, no preamble—just tell the story.  Just say the words and how the message resonates is out of our hands.  Our job isn’t to make sure people understand how we feel, it’s to attract those who feel how we do through shared experience.    

Today I am grateful for witnessing light.  The light is coming earlier and staying longer in the day.  As I type this the sun is rising.  There is so much life in the light.  It’s an awe inspiring thing to watch the light crawl over the Earth, waking it up. So gentle yet so persistent and powerful—it’s unstoppable.  It runs our lives and guides us where to be and when, how to flow with the seasons, how to flow throughout our day.  We aren’t meant to hide, to shy away from the light.  We are meant to bask in it.  In so many ways I’ve had the light turned on again.  I didn’t realize how much of my time I had spent in the dark.  It felt comfortable there.  There isn’t much reason to move in the dark, so it felt good to settle and curl up wherever I was, perhaps to into another world through a book or the TV.  But that isn’t reality.  I still love those moments, I savor them because there is something special in that too.  I understand on a different level that none of that is actually doing anything.  It’s cool to be inspired and want to have the results or live a life like we see whether on TV or in the books or on social media.  Unless we get out from under the rock, off of the couch, and step out into the light we will never get to do those things.  We have to embrace the gift of the light. 

Today I am grateful for limits.  I’ve been on the struggle bus when it came to getting things done for a while now.  I always relied on a sharp mind to get me from one thing to the next and to remember all I needed to do.  It would automatically get me organized—I mean I used to pride myself on that.  Sometimes the environment around me would get a little chaotic but I would always manage to get myself back where I needed to be.  My brain has felt like absolute mush over the last several months.  I was already stressing with the volume of work I needed to do and I allowed myself to slack in some regards because I wasn’t sure how to tackle some of it.  And then more got piled on so I created the perfect little storm and that turned me to a bunch of ducks going in different directions. I’m grateful, however, because there comes a point where we can’t keep saying yes.  We have to have a limit and we have to abide by it.  Our body and mind know and they give us warning signs—mine did. I wasn’t feeling excited about projects, I was confused, things were conflicting, and I didn’t know where to start—none of that is normal for me on a regular basis.  So I’m grateful for this because we have limits.  We all have that point where we need to say, “It’s enough,” and start tackling one thing at a time.  That’s all we can do anyway.  I used to pride myself on the multi-tasking and managing multiple machines at work while on the phone and indexing records all at the same time—people used to compliment me on it.  Now, I understand I can still do all of that but only in one arena.  I can’t do that in 10.  So.  Back to the drawing board with some limitations and expectations—and it’s ok.  I’m glad to do things well rather than desperately and half-assed.  To do what I need to do.

Today I am grateful for space.  It’s amazing how space and time give us perspective.  In the midst of an event it can be challenging to find the right answer because we are too emotionally invested, too close to the forest so to speak.  With time a lot of things can happen.  We can either calm down and realize it isn’t that big of a deal or we can realize that we don’t align any longer.  Or we realize the middle ground and we understand the compromise or that something wasn’t that important or we understand that changes need to be made.  Space itself lets us know how we really feel.  They say if something still bothers you after 24 hours, speak up within 48.  I think it’s good advice and I honestly it also believe it gives people the most accurate representation of our feelings.  I had an incident this past week where I told someone that I wasn’t happy with their behavior and their response was to tell me that it was essentially my fault—so my understanding that they refuse to take responsibility and have no regard for my side of the event tells me that the space was and is warranted.  I will continue working on my space and my identity and I am ok with that—always know where we stand with people.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.