Today I am grateful for the ability to care for myself.  Sometimes we get repetitive in what we are grateful for because we need to know it’s the little things that become the big things that matter.  So.  I’ve been on an amazing health journey, truly dedicated, over the last year.  I managed to get most of my blood work back in range, I’ve lost 38 pounds, and I have a consistent routine that feels right—and more importantly, it feels good.  In spite of all that, I had other issues going on in my body that I have been very well aware of for a while, and now being over 40, this isn’t something to ignore any longer.  I have had additional testing done and now there seems to be another issue unrelated to what I thought was going on.  Hazard of 20 years in healthcare, we think we know what’s happening in our bodies, things we think are normal aren’t.  Which is ironic because things we think aren’t normal sometimes turn out to be normal.  Anyway.  I fully recognize that I am privileged to continue on this path and figure out what is going on and to resolve it.  I haven’t come this far to only come this far.  I fully intend to continue being grateful for the ability to care for myself because when we care for ourselves we can fulfill our purpose and care for others.  Because it feels good to live.  Because it feels good to live to our highest potential.  It feels good to know that we have more.  Another day isn’t always promised, so do not take any of them for granted—take care of ourselves in the smallest of ways to the biggest. 

Today I am grateful for connection and reminders to progress.  I had a wonderful conversation with my best friend the other night. We hadn’t spoken in a long time because we are legitimately super busy and we work different hours.  Regardless, I had heard that she was making some changes in her career and possibly where she’s living and I reached out, feeling a little guilty that we hadn’t connected sooner.  She confirmed some of the upcoming changes in her life and I was a little taken aback.  I hadn’t realized some of the changes going on in her career were on the same trajectory as mine.  And I couldn’t help but be so proud of her for deciding to follow what works best for her and her husband.  I had watched as they developed over the course of their relationship, finishing school, moving out of state, going back to school and starting over in an entirely new state, having a house built.  Their consistency and teamwork always impressed me and to see them be able to pick up and navigate through these changes in their life reminded me that the changes going on where I’m at right now aren’t life-ending in a negative way.  They are just the end of this way of doing things and that we have to continue to move with it.  Michael leaving my 9-5 and moving across country, my best friend moving to follow her dream, me navigating new opportunities at work and in my business—it all happens for a reason.  Progress doesn’t happen from doing the same thing.  Progress happens when we move. 

Today I am grateful for the reminder that we are all doing our best.  This was a tough concept for me to swallow.  I remember reading Brene Brown and she was talking about attending a conference where the person she was roomed with ate a cinnamon roll and then wiped her hand on the couch because “it wasn’t theirs” and how that same person put her shoes on the couch.  The way Brown described it, I was completely on her side, appalled that someone would behave like that.  Thoughts of integrity flew into my mind like, you wouldn’t do this in your own home, why would you do this to something that isn’t even yours?  You’d be pissed if someone did that to your stuff because they didn’t know you.  Brown then goes on to describe how she realized after many therapy sessions that people truly are doing their best.  They do what they think is right based on what they know and what they have.  In speaking with my best friend, who by all counts is one of the smartest people I know, I noticed she tended to express some guilt behavior when it came to decisions she had to make for her animal.  I don’t pretend to understand the entire range of emotions or her thought process but I fully trust that she made the decision she did for a reason—she doesn’t need to justify anything to anyone.  Would someone else have done the same thing? Absolutely.  Would someone else have done it differently?  Absolutely.  We all make choices based on what we have and what we know at the time.  We are all just doing our best even if our best(s) look a little different.  It isn’t up to us to judge.

Today I am grateful for not taking offense.  This is a complicated one because it started out slightly offensive, but once I understood the context, I was grateful to keep the focus on what it needed to be—the work I want to do and the future.  My husband made the comment about my friend working her ass off to get where she is in reference to the fact that she is now able to afford a certain lifestyle due to her job–and I was a little taken aback at first because I thought of all the work I’ve done over the years, keeping a roof over our head, food in our bellies, clothes on our backs.  I’ve worked full time, I’ve put myself through school and got my bachelor’s, I put myself through massage school, I stared a business, I got a book deal.  He had never once acknowledged that I had worked hard.  I thought maybe my actions weren’t producing the results we wanted so maybe it wasn’t focused effort, simply the work I’ve done hasn’t gotten us the results we wanted and my friend seems to have exactly what she wants.  And then I realized that he has a component in this too—if it’s a life we want then we need to make it together.  He’s been doing amazing work on our home for the last several weeks and I am beyond impressed with him.  He has a wide knowledge base and he applies it well.  So I realize now that what I want to do is apply my skills as well.  I’m tired of trying to do all the things and make everything take off at once.  It’s too much.  And I realized that I was feeling guilty for wasting time not doing the things I wanted to do to completion.  I also realized that I can still do it, still create what I’ve said I wanted doing the work I want—we can still do what we want to do, too. 

Today I am grateful for absolute creative inspiration.  I’ve had to lay low for most of this week due to the health issues mentioned in today’s first gratitude so I’ve spent an amazing amount of time reading (I read nearly every day but never in the chunks of time I want) and I’ve been focused on watching shows about baking—another passion of mine that I don’t spend a lot of focused time on.  I finished a series that caught my eye previously and once I started reading it, I could NOT put it down.  It was funny and poignant and for fantasy, just so relatable.  Plus from a technical standpoint, it was very well written.  I finished the second book in the series this week and have to wait a while for book 3 so I started looking up info on the author and found her TikTok page.  I was floored to find out that this entire thing was made possible because she was sharing little reels of her bits of the story and it took off.  I was amazed.  So I may be behind the times in a lot of regards because I do NOT spend a lot of time on TikTok—I’m on other socials but not really on that one because I felt like it was way too ADD inducing for me (which, honestly, it is).  So watching the author on this journey, my first thought was I wish I had known about her sooner because that would have been so much fun to follow that journey up to publication—plus she has done an amazing job navigating this story.  Then I realized something: I have yet ANOTHER layer to break through in regards to my authenticity.  I’ve been so proud of all the layers I’ve peeled over the years and even more so in the last few months because I realized I needed to double down on authenticity—and here, I see the full vulnerability of sharing a story in its infancy with no shame, with amazing humor, and it was captivating.  I spent so much time thinking of how I wanted to package the message and how I wanted people to receive it that I’ve lost sight of the damn message.   Learning is a lifelong thing, truly.  There are so many ways now to share what we do and who we are that it can be overwhelming to figure it out.  I’m grateful to remember this is about the message, not making people see it a certain way.  More control to release.  It’s a wild ride to let go of more of what anchored us. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.