Happy Mother’s Day

Today I am grateful to celebrate this day honoring all the mothers out there—Happy Mother’s Day.  I am grateful to my mother for bringing me into the world, for all she has done, for all she has taught me, for letting me know I’ve been loved.  I’m grateful to my grandmother and all the women before me for being the change, for creating a world where I could exist and create my family.  I am grateful to be a mother.   I can’t say I have an overly innate motherly instinct but I have formed a fiercely protective bond with my son.  There has been no relationship like it in my entire life.  It’s an entire change of who I was, a learning of who I could be, of who I really want to be.  Every choice is about what’s best for him until he learns to decide that for himself.  I haven’t been perfect—in fact I’m pretty sure I’ve already instilled all the patterns I was trying to break in him already.  But I know I love him like no other and I know that imperfect or not, I will always be there for him no matter what.  Because that is what mothering is: a constant presence of love and support to allow things to grow in their own time and in their own way.  Mothers in particular are hard on themselves as we have these expectations of what we are supposed to be able to accomplish and what we are supposed to be like and if we don’t look like some cross between June Cleaver and Superwoman we feel like we’ve failed.  It is no exaggeration to say this job is beyond 24/7—this is something that takes over our entire being, our souls.  This is why women get lost in motherhood: to grow the next generation we have to give pieces of ourselves so they take root.  And we just hope it is for the best.  We can only do our best and who we are is enough.    

Today I am grateful for being seen.  I’ve fought for years, nearly my entire life to be seen as I am. Instead it’s been what felt like a battle to be understood.  I went through so many different groups of people thinking I’d found those who understood me, who accepted me, only to be left out in some capacity.  Or treated like I was an inconvenience.  Or constantly having to explain myself if I wasn’t acting within the same norms/parameters that they saw me in—like if I was having an off day, I wasn’t allowed to be any different than my normal demeanor. It’s only over the last few years that I’m seeing those who truly accept us never make us feel like we have to be/do/say anything other than exactly what we normally would be/do or say.  There’s NO pressure there.  I’m not saying there’s NEVER pressure there, but I’m saying there’s never pressure to ACT in those groups.  There’s no need to put on airs or try to be something else.  No one makes us feel like we have to be someone else or like we need to behave a certain way.  As I move forward with new facets of my career, I see that it’s easier than I’ve been living it.  There’s n need to fight for anything with the right people.  It’s ease.  

Today I am grateful for acceptance.  I know I needed this reminder this week because there have been a lot of things up in the air.  Things I had no control over but still had to work on.  In this regard I’m talking about personal acceptance, specifically of circumstances.  Like, knowing I did the best I could and this is where I’m at—and it’s all ok, type of acceptance.  I spent so much time worrying about what people thought of me and trying to tailor their opinions, to curate their views on my character and demeanor.  I wanted everyone to think the best of me.  Perhaps that’s a bit of human nature, but I never learned to accept how things were, I always tried to make them align with my vision.  But with time, I know that it came down to how I felt about myself.  The more I accept that I am where I am and understand what works, that where I’m at isn’t where I’m ending, the easier it is to make the next choice to head where I’m at.  We can’t get stuck in the mud of what we think we should have done. 

Today I am grateful for support.  We had a tough lesson in friendship this weekend.  My son learned that sometimes the people you think are your friends really aren’t.  He learned that sometimes people only use us for what they can get from us.  He learned that sometimes friendship hurts.  I asked him what he thought that meant and he told me he thought it meant that no one likes him.  I immediately told him no—it means that sometimes people we think are for us turn out  not to be, and we have to learn that it has nothing to do with us.  The right people, the right support doesn’t leave us questioning who we are or if we are good enough.  Especially our worth.  We’ve immersed ourselves in the sport life and I will tell you being around this team has taught us all how to be part of something again.  The support found in this group is a reminder that a common goal can drive an entire group of people to support each other so everyone is set up to succeed.  Success depends on each person doing their part and the team surrounding that person so they are able to do their part—and so on and so on until every succeeds.

Today I am grateful for chaos.  Truth be told I HATE chaos.  It confuses me, it unsettles me, it unbalances me and I have fought my entire life to get away from it.  Probably spent more energy thinking about ways to avoid chaos than the actual chaos I faced in some circumstances.  There is something to be said for the power of the mind and its ability to create concern…I digress.  Right now I’m experiencing a lesson in how chaos teaches us.  I’m unbelievably blessed to be able to make some changes in my home right now, make it more my own.  But in order to do that, I need to tear down everything that exists.  Since this project is something we’re doing on our own it will take some time and the house is in a state of utter destruction.  Torn up floor, boxes everywhere, walls coming down, walls going up, furniture moved, getting rid of stuff, putting new things in place.  And the thing is this: in order to see the big picture of what we are trying to achieve, we have to stay calm enough to see the vision, to keep the vision in mind at all times.  We have to be willing to let go of what we know/what we knew.  I’m letting go of what I carried including my initial vision into this house for what I’ve learned as I’ve settled in here, as I’ve learned more about who I am.  So in chaos as I’ve always said—I am firmly reminded there is creation.  It’s beautiful even if it doesn’t look like it.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

Reflecting more on what I wrote yesterday amidst the laying of a new foundation for myself, I want to add/amend to what I think about with control.  Control for me wasn’t always about being right.  No, being right was about proving myself, not about making others wrong.  But control over others for me was a self-defense mechanism and I felt like I had to control others all the time so I wouldn’t get hurt.  Not the first time I’ve written about that.  I have no real desire for power—I don’t want the responsibility of dictating what other people do with their days.  I don’t want to be the one calling the shots all the time—90% of the time people do what they want to do anyway. No.  I don’t want that type of control.  I want peace.  I thought I could gain peace in telling others what to do so I could avoid headaches and mess from having to fix it when it all falls apart.  But the truth is, we gain peace through doing what we have to do, doing what we are called to do.  Playing our role, the role we were designed to have.  Power comes through peace of mind which we get when we have power OVER the mind—not over others.

It’s funny how we can convince ourselves we’re doing the right thing in telling people what to do and believe that we know better than anyone at anything.   I’m living proof that for those who want to make others happy, they will give up their entire identity in a heartbeat if it means getting acceptance.  It’s easy to lose yourself when you’re the one laying that identity on the table.  When that happens one too many times, we build a defense, a wall, we tell ourselves we won’t let people hurt us again.  It’s also funny when we set those boundaries people talk about how we changed and we’re not the same.  And they’re right—we’re not the same because we’ve learned to be less accessible.  That doesn’t mean I’m controlling the narrative of their lives, I’m controlling the narrative of mine.  When we have that type of peace, we know what we are willing to engage in and we learn what we can let go of.  Not everything is a fight.  As a society we are trained to be reactive, defensive, to fight for what we want, to earn, to prove—and we make each other feel that way.  We have nothing to prove to anyone but ourselves. 

The point is we have to learn what it is we really want.  The brain is an amazing machine but it will always and forever take the path of least resistance and work with what it knows.  It will work with how we are feeling in the moment and impulsively decide what to do, it will create walls or doors depending on what’s needed.  That makes it easy to mistake the desire for control with the desire for peace—like I said above, we think control will give us peace.  There is nothing in this entire universe we can control.  Yes, we can control our actions and decisions, we can hope to get the results we are looking for—but we never know 100% what that result will be.  We try to mitigate the factors that impact our choices and we can become proficient at getting a certain result but the only 100% certain thing is that the universe will do what it takes to keep divine order.  Sometimes we don’t know the reasons behind it, we just have to accept it—and we learn to become comfortable with where we do have power.  We don’t need to have power over anything to be content or feel safe.  We just need to have power and awareness of ourselves. 

A tough lesson I’m working on lately is accepting if it all falls apart, let it implode. Observing the situations objectively, the question becomes What happens if it all implodes?  If we can’t stop it anyway, then we really only have one option: We find a way to begin again.  No, destruction isn’t fun—it can be down right terrifying and disorienting to what we know of the world.  Sometimes the destruction we face is a result of our own actions, sometimes it isn’t.  We fear it and are afraid of it, try to control it, but when we reach the point of total acceptance that destruction is inevitable, we understand that certain things in our lives are meant to fall, not to destroy us, but so we can build again.  There is purpose in destruction.  We all know it’s unpleasant (especially when it’s unexpected) but it’s no reason to avoid it.  The saying you can’t make an omelet without scrambling a few eggs seems fitting here: sometimes to get something new, you have to break something old.  The past can teach us a lot and there are certain elements of it that need to be revered, but if we don’t learn to let certain pieces lie, to break a few things to make something new, we end up carrying around mountains of baggage that serve no purpose, treading on eggshells our whole lives and then that past becomes a burden.  We don’t need to drag around the broken pieces, the pieces that don’t work to prove a point, that we were right.  Sometimes we have to recognize when we’re trying to make a bad thing work and know when to walk away.

As a recovering/perhaps present control freak, letting go is a real struggle for me—especially in the midst of large change and some of those changes will require my decision—so I will have to know when to detonate those facets of my life.  I want to know the future and it’s one thing to have to pivot to change, it’s another to know your entire world is going to change and have to be the one to do it.  I want to know what choices I will have as a result of the choices I make now.  I want to know what everyone thinks and feels and what they will do.  I always prided myself on my ability to read people pretty well and know what they would do in any given situation and I got pretty good at it—but there are people around me who I thought I knew like the back of my hand who have pulled some stunts so out of left field I’m not sure I ever knew them at all.  I worked really hard to keep them in the definitions I created for them, as the person I knew them as and I made excuses and allowances for all the behaviors toward me and others that I would never tolerate—or I never thought I would—and I know I never said I would.  So much for predicting behavior of others if I couldn’t even predict my own.  It was a crash course in learning not everything works as we predict it.  We can only band-aid so much and there are only so many cracks we can fill before the foundation starts to crumble like sand and the entire thing falls apart.  Trying to hold the foundation together is impossible, it falls through our fingers like sand and holding the weight of what we built without a foundation will only bury us.  And we can’t stop it from falling anyway.

Life does what life does—it IS.  There doesn’t have to be a reason for anything, and no, our human hands aren’t strong enough to make people do what we want them to or force anything to happen any more than we can prevent a mountain from coming down or a hurricane.  We know that’s logical but when we have an emotional attachment to an idea we had, a vision of what we thought life would look like, it’s hard to let it go.  It’s hard to work on something and have a particular image in mind—the time and effort we put into it.  We really want it to work out so we know it was worth it.  We’re all waiting for that “worth it” moment because if we can make it through all the crap and arrive where we wanted to be, that satisfaction means something.  To near the finish line and not be able to cross, to have to run back to the start, is exhausting and disheartening.  It doesn’t have to be but I’d be lying if I said human nature is anything but disappointed in those moments.  I can’t pretend I know that type of disappointment will be worth it.  I know it isn’t easy to get back up after that type of fall, where everything built is just gone.  But I know on some level that there has to be a reason for it—and it makes life a lot easier to go with what IS versus trying to change the course of the river.  I would be remiss if I said that I can’t see some light ahead in the things that are falling apart.  I’m seeing the structure I thought supported me was merely an obstacle even if there was a certain familiarity and comfort in it.  But letting it explode is far easier than holding it in or holding up the mountain that’s crumbling.  And in that destruction is creation—and entire new universe borne of bits and pieces all forming something new.  

I have spent so much time making mountains out of mole hills, never questioning if the issue was as serious as I was making it, as urgent as I was making it.  Was it as serious as other people were making it seem?  Where did this urgency really come from?  Nothing HAS to happen right now, and I’ve convinced myself that it needs to be RIGHT NOW—IMMEDIATELY.  This life can be so simple.  Hold accountability for ourselves and stop worrying about participation trophy culture, the culture where everyone’s opinion is reality because we all have a platform and think that is the way to have our voices heard.  90% of this pressure I feel, whether or not it has an external stimulus, is in how I’m responding to this crap.  Sure, we can justify the reasons for staying in situations that don’t quite fit, that rub us the wrong way, that aren’t fulfilling, that don’t spark any joy but at the end of the day, what we tolerate is what we allow in our lives. If we look at everything as a crisis, like a volcano about to explode, everything feels like it’s going to explode.  We don’t need to put that kind of pressure on ourselves.  We don’t need to allow that type of pressure in our lives either. 

I grew up around constant pressure.  The constant feeling that we had to be doing, doing, doing all the time.  That the only way to make something happen was through sheer will and force—and to do it until it was finished.  To do it right the first time.  There was also the pressure to BE right, to be the right person, the person people wanted you to be all the time.  All of these behaviors are performative and I was taught that is the norm.  We jump to what other people want us to do, we do what other people ask of us—and if there’s time left for what we want to do then we can focus on that.  It was what I was born into.  My siblings had a different kind of pressure than my parents, my parents a different kind of pressure than my grandparents, pressure from the family as a whole, pressure from school.  I believed I had to be everything everyone wanted/needed all the time.  That was my job.  That was what life was about—being what other people needed, nothing about forming who I was.  And everything became a huge deal.  The smallest insults were as painful and as the biggest and treated as such.  Then there was the whole desire to be taken seriously by my siblings so my problems had to be as pressing as theirs…at least in my mind.  I wanted to be taken seriously too, after all.  That became the norm, the habit and I really never stopped to ask if that was something I needed to keep doing, if what I was doing served the bigger picture—was I getting the results I really wanted feeling that way all the time?

Many, many years later, now I have the wherewithal to see my role in all this.  I see the choices I made and the choices I can still make to change these feelings.  I see that this pressure ultimately came from me.  I see the circumstances I put myself in, all the things I said yes to that should have been a no, and the things I said no to that should have been a yes (to make things a little easier).  And the common factor in all of it was me.  It was the choices I made, the things I decided to take on in my life.  Why was I choosing to put so much pressure on myself if it wasn’t serving anything or bringing the desired results anyway?  All of this stems from how we view it.  There are people who seem to take on infinite tasks and do it with ease.  There are those who crumble at the smallest amount of pressure.  There are those who pile on and cry victim.  There are those who just want to make everyone happy.  In all of those scenarios, we are STILL the common denominator.  That is all our choice.  We show those around us, the world, the universe what we are willing to accept by what we allow in our lives.  By what we choose to continue.  We don’t need to suffer if something is changeable.  For some people that suffering is where they feel the most normal and it’s uncomfortable to feel good.  But if we are all seeking that type of satisfaction and joy in our lives, then we have to ask what brings joy and what we are doing to allow it.  If the pressure doesn’t serve, it needs to change.  Release some of the power from the volcano we created before it explodes on its own.   

I still don’t know what I’d see in the mirror.  Still sit in silence waiting to hear.  It doesn’t feel right to tell myself these things (that I’m good/bad/whatever, how to move on) because I’ve always expected and anticipated that people would tell me how to feel and what to do. I’ve always complied before so it feels weird to make the choice my own. But the silence is very clear: no one else will.  There comes a point where we have to start telling ourselves what to do and take responsibility for it—for who we are.  I have to look in the mirror—and I’ve been obsessed with the concept of seeing and accepting both good and bad—and how it can drive people mad when they see the truth of who they are and how it differs from their portrayal to the world.  In the end she saw the good and bad and accepted it.  Perhaps I begin there—simply say yes and accept myself with love, trust, and open arms.  Trusting myself in ways I never thought I could, understanding that it’s ok to disappoint some people in order to make ourselves happy and that doesn’t make us bad.  To know that it’s normal to have instincts that tell us what we do and do not like and it doesn’t matter what works for someone else. To know that mistakes don’t make us bad either because we need them at times to teach us how to navigate things and to learn to stand on our own. Accepting that all of these things are simply part of life and do not make me a disappointment. 

That begins with those open arms, holding the little girl wearing the lion mask close and telling her she doesn’t have to carry the world.  She can put it down now, she is safe.  I can protect her like no one did before because they feared her light, her power, because that power was REAL. They kept her small because that girl could roar—they felt it.  They didn’t let her, they told she was wrong, weak.  And she believed them because her tiny legs couldn’t keep up.  But her heart could.  They were afraid she’d pass them by and she slowed herself down so much she stopped growing- so she put on the mask so she would stop hurting, showing them she was big enough, loud but not too much.  And they all left her behind never realizing what she did for them.  Giving them all pieces of herself, lifting them up while they ridiculed her, pointed out every flaw.  She still came back with the hope they would see her, appreciate her.  And they still walked on, even with her hand out asking them to help that last little part of her out of the ground, the part they let her bury herself in a pit so they could walk on—then they blamed her for it.  She continued to don the mask, stuck in her hole, the only thing she knew, waiting for anyone to help her.  I have to go back and thank that little girl and pull her out of the pit.  Remind her of who she is and let her be as loud as she needs to be.

I love the crinkling sound of paper, the feel of the page after the pen has its way with it, forever altered, a moment locked in time.  So why am I afraid of the crinkling, the lines on my body?  Why is the passage of time evident on my skin terrifying when I love the history indicated and held on the page?  Why should I fear the history my body tells when I revere it in other forms? The lines on my skin mean that I have lived.  There has been a passage of time that counts down a clock and means this life will end.  The lines on the page will be there forever—there is no time limit to them.  One is finite and the other infinite.  It’s funny how the end and the beginning can be so thoroughly mixed together. Both paper and skin etch the instances of our lives on them, one fleeting, one enduring.     

The things I fear on my body aren’t because of aging perse, that’s not entirely what I mean—like, growing and evolving and developing are essential to living—it’s how we learn.  It’s just aging means different things in the context of the living recording versus what I put on paper.  My books will hold my history forever—those pages are permanently marked with the thoughts I had in these moments, in this life, and I celebrate that.  But I’m afraid of the story my body tells.  I still fear it isn’t the life I’ve wanted to live.  Can I show that I’ve done all I wanted to do?  I think it’s the fear of wasting the time I’ve been given—and I know that’s true because I’ve wasted the time sharing so many of the same stories and thoughts that race through my mind constantly. 

It’s also the thought of how we always miss the full story regardless of where or how it’s recorded.  Like, the words I write can be understood in myriad of ways but so can what’s happened on and in my body.  We have no control over what is said of our story when we are gone whether it’s what we put in ink on page or on skin, or what we cut into ourselves, the lines of our experience written in infinite ways.  We have no say in how people interpret us and, I have whale medicine in me which means I’m a record keeper—it’s my makeup to record everything that’s happened and tell that story so people know what happened.  It’s not that the words I write aren’t the truth of what’s happening, but without the stories I’ve shared in those pages, the stories on my skin can be taken out of context—same with anyone.

I guess in the end history is history regardless of how or where it is recorded, and we will never know the full depth and breadth of people.  When we are gone all that’s left is an imprint, an echo of life.  People from 100, 200, 1000, 10000  years ago aren’t here to share their stories—we piece it together in the little bits we find and we make conjecture.  We tell a story of what we think that person was like.  We leave behind bits and pieces of ourselves, now more than ever with such a large digital imprint.  We can only guess—I guess in the end that’s all we can do regardless.  It’s all a best guess based on our experiences and what we’d think people would do. We will never have control of what people say or think whether in our time or a millennia from now—all we can do is live now and tell the story to the best of our ability.         

I really don’t understand the purpose of the impermanence of life.  Why we can experience near unlimited power and magic only to have it end—or only to realize our power at the end.  To have what we built carry on, but not be here to experience it.  I’ll admit that’s partly me being selfish—I want to enjoy the rewards of my efforts AND help others.  I mean, I believe in leaving the world better for the next person, I do, but it is so bittersweet to live knowing it will end.  Especially knowing we have access to such energy.  I wanted to live forever, to learn, to see, to witness it all.  Perhaps my job, my legacy, my way to live forever is to leave word of what was.  I think that our communication, the words we leave behind, these are the things that make us immortal.  We still read the words of men from the beginning of time, and while that may not speak to the entirety of who they are, they have endured for millennia in some cases.

There is to much to experience in this world and I felt like I needed to live forever to experience all I wanted to.  I was raised to believe we had to earn fun.  That we had to prove our worth when it came to deciding to have fun.  I saved fun for the weekends, for the parties, the holidays, the moments we got together.  The rest of the time needed to be some sort of work or resting to repeat the work.  Mindlessly watching TV until the time came to get to school or work again.  I had drive and desire to do other projects but those were things I was taught to keep on the back burner until all the things that “needed” to be done were done.  But the point of life isn’t to put it on hold until we’ve somehow proven to others that we are worthy of a day off, of a vacation, of just saying we’ve had enough and taking the reins back so we can steer ourselves where we want to be. 

So while life is short, it feels a whole lot shorter if we spend all this time doing what we are told, hoping we will be afforded a few minutes of peace and joy along the way. The key to life is to realize we never needed permission to live how we wanted to.  I may not have a reason for the impermanence of life, I may not have a way to physically be here forever, a way to fit in all the things on that list of what I want to do: none of that is a reason to not go for it, to try and find a way to do all that I want to do.  To understand that this life isn’t over at a certain age, that it doesn’t have to look a certain way because of a number.  That we live as long and as fully as we want to in regards to how much life we fit in a day—not living the same day over and over again hoping to do something else.  We experience life now and that is a legacy we leave: learning how to live life in the moment, experiencing all the joys life has to offer.  We use our power now, we create our life now—because that creation can endure forever even if we aren’t here.  That is how we live forever.    

Today I am grateful for a new path forward.  I’m taking a leap on a new adventure, a new role.  It means giving up a lot of what I worked for, a lot of what I wanted.  It’s touchy because I have issues of self worth in that regard, perhaps more related to faith than anything.  I have a pattern of getting what I want and turning it down.  Like, there’s some sort of self-sabotaging behavior where I’m telling myself I’m not worthy of what I really want and I reject the exact thing I want when it’s handed to me on a silver platter.  That’s a habit I’m breaking as I’m dealing with faith and worth.  But I am giving up what I thought I wanted because I found that what I wanted was vastly different than what I thought it was—at least getting it was a different way than I thought I would get it.  Different than what I got.  Everyone has different priorities and I’m a stubborn enough person that when I make a decision I want to stick it out to prove I made the right choice.  I mean, that’s not true in every case because I am also quick to admit when I’m wrong and pivot.  And I’ve taken chances before on things that were close to what I wanted hoping they would turn out—sometimes it has—but there were times if it didn’t look exactly as I expected I’d turn it down.  But there comes a time when we have to take the leap again, even if it isn’t 100% what we want, if we can move forward with 90%, then it can become 100%.  So that’s what I’m doing.  It’s time and I’m grateful for the chance.

Today I am grateful for learning who I am.  There is nothing more exciting than seeing something we’re working on come together and it’s even more exciting when seeing the results of that project feels like the perfect recognition of oneself in an outward expression.  Like, seeing the vision come to life and feeling like it was completely right all along, like the vision was in alignment the whole time, a representation of who we are to our core.  It feels amazing when we no longer have to settle for what people give us, when we can envision something ourselves and bring it to life, showing the world exactly who we are.  It’s the most natural feeling in the world and there are so many ways to see who we are, so many ways to find who we are.  It’s like accepting ourselves when we see those pieces come to life.  I never realized how much work it would take to find and express who I am—I always thought that would come entirely naturally.  For so many it does because they aren’t deterred from their natural state/ability/who they are.  They’re allowed to express self from the beginning. Not everyone is so lucky, so to peel away the mask, the layers, each piece an admission of who I am, a welcoming of what works, is a gift that I do not take for granted.

Today I am grateful for everything I have been given, both divinely and physically on this Earth. I am so grateful for the peace that comes with accepting those gifts, for the skills and abilities that open up.  For the opportunity to use them and for the decision to stop hiding them.  None of what happens next is how I thought it would look, the type of leadership I thought I would be in.  I mean, I thought I wanted to lead people so I could call the shots and not deal with crap and in the position I’ve served, I’m seeing that their definition of leadership is different than I thought.  I was always able to self-lead and in this case, people would rather spend their time fighting what they are told and what they know is right than they would take direction from someone they deem unfit.  I have been given different gifts than others and I see things differently—just like anyone else sees it differently.  Our perception dictates our reality—but I am tired of what I know as reality being distorted by how other people FEEL about reality.  I was given the gift of seeing things as they are and seeing things from multiple sides—in short, the gift of understanding.  Others simply see how they are told no and they work on fighting to get their way—I genuinely have always sought what was right for all.  Now I see that doesn’t matter to people in certain arenas.  I thought I had to hide my gifts to meet the vision other people had in this world instead of just living my own.  Now I see that is entirely false—I am meant to use the gifts I have been given to help others and I am grateful to have them.   

Today I am grateful for the process of letting go of physical clutter.  I am a record keeper on so many levels.  I hold onto things, many far longer than I should.  I always had this idea in the back of my mind that I never knew when I would need to prove something to someone, to show them what really happened—that was part of where I learned my objectivity.  I held onto things long since passed.  And now as I’m shifting that focus toward building the new, toward the next steps in life rather than going back to prove the steps I’ve taken, I see there is a time to let go of the things I held onto for both nostalgia and protection.  I’ve burdened myself with the task of holding everyone accountable, policing other people’s words and actions.  I’ve also burdened myself with the weight of proving myself with physical accomplishments, physical representation of success.  The funny part of that is knowing how hollow it feels to succeed mentally, to be ok with what I’ve done only to have it crushed by someone else yet still needing to hold onto those pieces that demonstrate my side of the story.  I’ve literally carried lifetimes with me, mentally and physically, the documentation and history of all I’ve done, thinking I needed to prove myself, trying to control the narrative/defense of why I’m like this and what happened.  I was born like this, with the need to understand how things got like they did.  I didn’t want people to misunderstand me and in working to clear/control that perception, people still created their own version of events.  I don’t want to waste my time/energy/strength holding onto these things anymore.  The space they take up, the physical and mental real estate is too big—and better served for other things.  The things don’t matter.  I can’t control how people see me today nor will I be able to control that perception 100 years from now.  So it doesn’t matter.  I can only carry what I know matters to me—I don’t need to hold onto what was to justify what is, my existence, who I am. I can let it all go.      

Today I am grateful for rebirth.  Once I made the decision to accept and honor and truly change my course (the course I truly wanted), everything shifted.  Once I saw that the things I really wanted were different than what I thought I needed (IE, I wanted peace and thought I needed control to get it when really I just needed to allow a new way for peace to enter), I felt a different pull.  I saw the right way to align with what I wanted and it wasn’t a matter of “Getting what I wanted,” it was a way of allowing what I wanted (the truth of who I am) to shine and be seen in this world.  It was away to align what felt right with doing that in the physical realm.  I always knew there was an element of pain in shedding the mask because I wanted that mask to be true—that was the only version of myself fi really knew even as all the other pieces poked through.  The pain came from the ego in realizing something I’d prided myself on and thought I wanted didn’t work (turning down what I asked for) and it came from not being recognized, and then it came from being stifled (and stifling myself).  Once we make it through the other side, we see the pain was from how we held ourselves in a space that didn’t fit—and we didn’t fit in it.  The pain was from keeping ourselves small when we needed to grow.  I am grateful to be on the other side.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

Don’t let the past be a burden to the present.  Always be honest, because honest is how we create change.  I heard this and I don’t remember from who, but it resonated.  The way we frame the past is what makes it a gift or a burden.  We can see it as a series of lessons that directed us where to go or we can see it as an anchor. We can pretend we had no say in where we have ended up, that it was a series of mishaps and unfortunate events that brought us to wherever we are, or we can admit that we made choices that didn’t always work out.  And it’s ok to admit that something didn’t work.  It’s ok to admit something that DID work isn’t working any longer.  It’s ok to admit that something we purposefully worked for isn’t what we want any longer.  I spent a whole lot of time trying to make things how they sued to be, to bring people back to how we used to do it because I wanted to recapture a feeling, an essence of a time gone by.  It never occurred to me that there were different feelings in some of those experiences—just because it brought me joy didn’t mean that it was joyful to them.  I had to learn to be honest about what certain events meant and what it meant for me moving forward.  I had to get honest about the need for change.

I’ve seen so many ways the past becomes burdensome: when we use it as a way to justify not doing what we want to do (because something happened a certain way we can’t do what we want to do).  When we try to repeat it over and over again never allowing life to unfold and adapt as it’s meant to.  When we constantly try to shift other people’s perspectives of an experience/when we try to change their experience of it.  When we specifically try to change other people’s beliefs about us and what happened.  When we try to prove that what we did was the right thing either in cases where we want it to seem like we made the right choice, or when we keep trying to make something that doesn’t work, work.  One of the heaviest burdens of the past can be when something DOES work and we have to admit that we don’t feel the same way about it anymore.  We’ve invested so much time with something/someone and we may have even fought like hell to get it and when we see it worked but it brings no joy, guilt can take over.  It can feel selfish to shift direction on something that works, something that anyone else would want and decide we don’t want it any longer.  That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.  

We have to see when we use the past as a shield, as something to hide behind and we have to know when we need to step out from behind it and let the world see us as we are.  All of the ways we make the past burdensome I listed above are shields in a way.  No matter the reason, continuing on a path that doesn’t work creates unnecessary strain in our lives.  It drains our ability to be present and adapt as needed.  We miss the creative opportunities to develop something new, to try something new, to find new ways of doing things or even to find what really calls to us if we continue to say no to what we feel.  The only way we can focus on the change we want/need or even to find the ways we need to change is to be honest about where we are at, what works, and how we feel about it—and then decide where we want to go with it.  The past isn’t meant to be carried around like some bag filled with every event that ever was.  That’s a lot to sort through even on a good day.  No, the past is meant to be filled with moments that stand out, both good and bad, that guides us to the purpose/future we are meant to have. We have to stop every now and then and take a few things out, realizing that they served their purpose and now they’re just adding weight to us.  Let it go.  It’s ok to put the bag down and pick up again when we’ve removed what is no longer necessary.  Trust ourselves and keep moving forward.     

“Don’t let someone’s timeline become our deadline. Wake up and keep going even if we aren’t seeing the full results.  Do it all over again, every day knowing exactly what you want, showing up every day until you have it and continuing to fight like hell to keep it,” Bishoi Khella. In that same clip, Khella talks about how that process is a sort of delusional patience—even when we don’t see what we are looking for, we keep going for it because we know there’s a possibility that it exists.   In general he is saying that success requires this delusional patience to keep going even if we don’t yet see the result.  I realized that he wasn’t just talking about a delusional patience, he was talking about faith.  Having faith in ourselves to keep going, that we will find the results we’re looking for if we just keep going.  That even if we don’t know the answer, we will find it if we keep going.  That we will find what works for us if we just keep going.  It may take time, but if our core tells us there is something more around the bend, we keep going knowing it will be there for us.

Life happens as it’s supposed to, on its own timeline.  We make the choices we make and we yield the results from those choices—it is the largest game of cosmic cause and effect.  Just because it doesn’t happen when we think it will doesn’t mean it won’t happen and we need to keep that in mind in regards to this delusional patience.  No one can tell us the exact moment our work will pay off.  Even if it worked like that for them, it doesn’t mean our circumstances will play out the same way—even if we do the exact same thing.  We must learn to do for the sake of doing, for the fact that it feels right and that we find some joy in it . When we get to the point where there is no joy, when we have pushed beyond our limits even for the sake of that “keep going” mentality, if there is nothing that brings us joy (if there is no longer a reason to keep going) then we must stop.  The purpose isn’t to have a delusional patience about learning to like something.  It’s to have that patience to incubate our creation while it grows.

We put enough pressure on ourselves to succeed or appear a certain way that we don’t need the added pressure of having things by a certain time.  Even I, someone who struggles immensely with time and making sure things are done according to when I’m told they should be, even I know that a deadline imposed by others doesn’t help bring the result we’re looking for any sooner.  I’m not saying that we don’t occasionally need a fire lit under us at some points, but we have to keep finding that joy in whatever it is we are waiting for.  We have to want to fight for it—we have to want to keep it, period, in order to do what we have to to keep going for it.  We have to find the value in it over and over again, knowing that it will be worth it.  The worth comes from us—not from when we get it.  I remember wanting things quickly so I could have as much time as possible with it but I’ve learned that the reality is there is no less joy in when we get something if that thing matters to us.  Faith is a test at times—that belief in a reality no one, not even ourselves can see.  Regardless of when, if we love it enough, we keep going until we find it.