I’ve had a long standing question/struggle about ego.  I couldn’t tell if certain instances bothered me out of pride or out of genuine bother.  Like, was I really the wronged party or did it just feel shitty?  Was I angry or was I embarrassed?  Was this a matter of needing to be right and control or was this truly about disrespect and not being heard?  I’m coming to terms with some habits I have with my relationships that I’m still recovering from my past life. I bend over backwards for people I love—and I love quickly.  Once you’re in my inner circle, you’re in and there is no holding back.  I realize now that there is a pattern of trauma bonding and oversharing in order to make myself validated and needed and accepted.  I asked how I keep attracting these people who have little to no regard for what they do to people or little or no regard to how other people feel about what they’ve done yet they are hyper aware when they feel they’ve been wronged.  One can always argue that we are only responsible for our actions and with free will we can’t make people behave a certain way and they can’t make us feel any way either—we are responsible for how we feel.  The truth of the matter is there IS truth to that but it is far more complicated than simply choosing to not feel a certain way.  We are animals, feelings are wired to reactions.  So knowing that, I think it’s reasonable to say that we all have a role in how people behave.  No, we aren’t responsible for someone’s reaction but we are responsible for our intentions.

The reason I’m still confused is that I can still see both sides.  I’m an emotional person and I can be quite reactive—and quite explosive in my reactions at times.  But I’m also a very clear cut person.  I don’t beat around the bush when it comes to letting people know how I feel because I don’t like to play games.  If I’m at the point where I’m telling you something bothers me, I’m serious. So if the behavior continues when I’ve made my feelings known, then that has been a choice on YOUR part.  You are aware of how I feel, I’ve asked you to stop, you’ve chosen to do it again.  At that point I have a choice, of course—I can discuss it again or I can walk away.  But either response at that point is a result of your choice to engage with me in that manner.  I don’t feel like those are circumstances where one can fairly say, “You’re responsible for how you react.”  There are people who behave in pointed ways designed to poke the bear and when the bear responds, that isn’t an unexpected thing.  You can’t claim to be the victim when you’ve instigated the very reaction you knew would come.  That is spiteful, vindictive, and intentional.  So in that regard, I’ve come to a sort of conclusion: it isn’t necessarily ego, it’s energy and if I FEEL your intent behind it, then the reaction is appropriate and it isn’t about ego. 

We respond to energy and energy never lies.  It is always sending messages and frequencies.  Sure, some energy triggers our ego but other energy is simply telling us what’s going on.  It’s amazing how much we lie to ourselves in this society where people treat us like we don’t know what they’re doing and we’re not allowed to talk about it because somehow calling people on BS is rude but we don’t talk about the manipulation or anything else prior to that, the thing that caused the response.  We can have philosophical conversations all day about how we don’t need to respond to certain behaviors, but I reiterate, we are animals and the bottom line is this: people shouldn’t do shitty things to each other.  We shouldn’t do shitty things and expect people to take it.  The truth is if we are evolved enough to manage our reactions and emotions, then we are evolved enough to know how to treat people and read the room.  And common sense dictates that we wouldn’t do something to cause harm to ourselves in that fashion.  The other point is that I don’t expect people to manage my emotions—like if something bothers me, I will handle the response (this is different than the reaction).  But I am not responsible for behaving in a way that ensures you feel a certain way—that’s manipulation.  To expect someone to behave a certain way so you feel something specific is manipulation.  So at the end of the day, I stand by what I say and can worry less about ego.  Sometimes it’s just the energy you’re giving out.

“When you’re proud of yourself, you don’t really pay much attention to what other people are doing,” Mel Robbins.  Yesterday we touched on self-esteem and understanding it’s ok (and necessary) to walk away from those who don’t see our value—our job isn’t to convince the world of our value.  Robbins brings in an interesting point in that if we see our own value, the opinion of the rest of the world sort of falls away.  The outside world becomes irrelevant because we have found our own rhythm with the nature of OUR world and we are driven by our purpose rather than approval of that purpose.  We have accepted our place and know we are doing the right thing.  If we find peace and are happy/content doing what we are doing, then we don’t really need to worry if someone else is ok with how we find that peace.  Having that purpose and following it to our own satisfaction eliminates the distraction of seeking approval and that is when we can get the real work done. 

Pride can be a confusing word for some people because it comes with a lot of implications. When I first heard Mel say that, I cringed a bit because I personally have a sour relationship with that word mainly because of how people interpreted my own pride.  I wasn’t allowed to be proud of anything because it was considered showing off so pride held a negative connotation for me.  If we are proud, are we egotistical?  If we are proud, are we arrogant?  And the truth is pride in anything can very easily turn into either ego or arrogance or both.  It’s also important to not confuse pride with attention seeking—we are allowed to share our work and if we can do that for the sake of the work rather than the reaction of others, we are on the right track.  The human animal needs a certain level of pride in what they do to succeed—it’s an evolutionary thing to fuel us in what we do well and to direct us toward our purpose.  Those moments when we are too proud and seek control over others to satisfy our own whims is when it gets to a bad place.  But we need a healthy dose of pride to keep us focused and grounded—pride to fight for what we know is right and for what we know we have done well.

I think my comfort level with this quote is more around the concept that if we are satisfied with what we are doing, we are allowed to be content with that, and yes, even proud of it.  The point is that when we have that internal satisfaction, we tend to not focus on what other people think.  We can ignore someone else’s idea of what is enough because we are focused on the work for the sake of the work, not to gain someone’s approval.  Again, when we are proud of what we do and we find contentment in that purpose, we don’t seek validation from external sources.  My own battles with pride are my problem and I know some people might find it strange to be triggered by that word (of all things) meant to inspire us but I find that we need to reconcile that inner driver with what makes us happy so we have our focus aligned correctly.  The focus is the goal, the work itself, the things that make us happy—not if other people accept that we are happy or living up to their expectations.  We are more than capable of finding peace and contentment when we are satisfied with what we are doing and that’s exactly what we need to do.

“I won’t apologize for finally realizing that I am not hard to love, I’m just trying to heal in places that kept breaking me,” Jay Douglas.  I spent a lifetime seeking validation from everyone to the point of expecting them to tell me who I was.  Tell me what you need and I can (and will) do it.  I spent so much time trying to prove that I could be valuable and do what was asked of me that I didn’t spend enough time asking whether or not I should.  I never asked what I wanted and what I should do for myself.  I’d spend my days working my ass off to check off the items other people wanted me to do, trying to find some time to do what I enjoyed but the problem is, when you’re working to prove you can do anything there will always be something else to do.  A pattern developed where I would be available to anyone anywhere anytime and I started to get exhausted—I couldn’t keep up.  The pull of what I wanted to do became stronger and stronger and I started to resent those people who only wanted to be around me because I had no boundaries.  Another pattern developed where as soon as I started to set boundaries, people had an issue.

People with no boundaries often lack self-esteem.  They feel their worth is so low that they only way people will like them or accept them is if they are adaptable and do what they are told.  They believe their opinions aren’t worthy of being shared and they don’t want to be seen as difficult so they often agree with everyone around them.  And everyone likes them because they seem so low maintenance and they know they can go to that person when they need someone.  But once that individual requires something reciprocated or when they have a difference in opinion, suddenly they are seen as difficult or the bad guy.  Self-esteem isn’t just a buzz word—without enough of it we will accept an entire lifetime thinking our presence and beliefs and voices aren’t worthy of being expressed.  The human soul isn’t capable of being repressed that long and, while validation can be necessary at times, we can’t live a lifetime thinking we are the problem for every person.  The problem is we attract people who don’t respect our boundaries because we didn’t teach them those boundaries in the first place.

One of my greatest hopes is that everyone wakes up realizing their worth and that they are able to break the beliefs that made them feel like they were worth less than anyone else around them.  I want people to find their voices and find the rooms where their presences is missed, the rooms where even their whisper is heard no matter how loud it is.  I’ve experienced the alternative where the room was dead silent and I screamed my head off and no one even looked up and that was the moment I realized I was nothing more than a fixer to those people.  My presence was a problem until I was needed. Establishing belief in our own worth can be challenging at the best of times but those scenarios are devastating.  Those places that break us will never heal us.  So more than anything, I want to encourage people to understand their worth and their validity in this world and I want people to walk away from anyone who interferes with the inherent knowing of that worth.  We aren’t hard to love, we are just surrounded by people who don’t know how to love and they don’t see our worth because they likely don’t see their own.  Don’t apologize for removing ourselves as an option to those who consider us a choice in the first place.

“I won’t sacrifice my mental health to keep someone comfortable in their chaos,” Jay Douglas.  We each live in our own reality where we can be the hero, the victim, the villain, the genius, the martyr, the cool one, the one with it all together, the creative—anything we want to be.  That’s part of the beauty of being human: we can be what and who we want to be and we can change it when we need to.  We can be some facet of all these things and chances are at some point in our lives we will be all of these things—sometimes all in one day, you never know.  No one is responsible for keeping up with what goes through our minds in those situations.  We aren’t mind readers and the things that make us comfortable may not work for others.  The truth is we need to seek less comfort and more stability and we get stability with truth.  We get stability the more we practice accepting reality for what it is.  Some people like to be in the thick of the storm so they can be that hero and fix everything and others like to be in the story so they can be the victim. There are others, still, who like to create the storm—they ARE the storm.  The truth is, no matter what end of the spectrum someone falls in (entirely peaceful to entirely chaotic) it isn’t our job to make them comfortable.

We see it every day: realities collide because we have different beliefs, experiences, and views that shape how we see the world and what we do, the choices we make.  That is entirely normal and the human experience varies just so we are able to see the differences and taste all the variety of the world.  But I can’t force someone to live in my reality anymore than they can force me to live in theirs.  We are different people.  When a relationship differs so greatly that I need to shape and tailor my actions and views to suit yours or vice versa, we start to see the issue.  The reality either of us live in isn’t compatible and that would mean we have to become something we are not to support that relationship.  There are every day differences that can spice things up a bit like a preference of coffee over tea but if we have a fundamental difference in opinion over the type of life we live or the beliefs we share on how to treat people, that means we have to bend who we are and the mind isn’t meant to deal with that.  As malleable as the mind is, the soul isn’t so easily twisted and that is where we start to break.

I speak from a place of absolute certainty when I say the mental gymnastics involved with keeping someone comfortable when they have no desire/drive to see things any way but their own is exhausting and painful.  The mind can only bend so much and we can only spend so much time convincing our own mind that at one point someone will understand and do the same for us, they will see it our way.  These people haven’t the slightest inkling to be adaptable.  Even if they see the need to embrace another viewpoint, they feel what they know or feel is more important so they expect the world to bend to their will.  We have our own views for a reason and they have nothing to do with adapting our reality in a way that harms ourselves.  If we take the emotion out of it and strip it down to the facts, we arrive at a middle ground and if someone refuses to meet us there, it isn’t our job to uproot our lives to make them feel better.  Being in a relationship whether it be familial, friendly, professional or other doesn’t require giving up our peace because someone prefers chaos.  We can walk away otherwise we end up with a mind like a pretzel and often alone to figure out how to unwind it.  Don’t give anyone that power—be the center of our own world and let those who need chaos find it outside of our minds.

Today I am grateful for vulnerability.  I share a ton here so it is no mystery that I often jump into my own vulnerability.  I believe we need to get their so we can strip away all the noise and distraction of this world and really see who we are.  I fully appreciate that vulnerability isn’t easy for everyone.  It takes a lot of honesty and acceptance and we have to remove some emotion out of it so we can see the truth of the situation rather than just how we feel about it.  And expressing that feeling is also a vulnerable thing.  We feel risking the truth leaves us exposed and we can be hurt.  That may be true: showing that side of ourselves can hurt.  But finally hearing the truth and seeing how someone really feels breaks through so many barriers and we create understanding.  Humans are weird and complex creatures where we create these stories in our heads about how people feel about us and when they think/feel etc.  If we don’t get information or input to the contrary then we believe those stories.  I am so happy that I finally did get additional information from someone close to me that supported how they said they felt instead of what they’ve shown.  They were too scared to show the truth because they thought it would hurt them.  Now that I know that, I personally feel more trust toward that individual and it’s an amazing feeling. 

Today I am grateful for standing up for myself.  Oh, I could write pages and pages on this one based on events over the last few months.  I took a huge risk this year and completely turned my life upside down because I knew I wasn’t getting what I needed professionally or in my personal relationships.  I wasn’t the person I wanted to be and I was tired of wearing different masks to make others happy/comfortable in the hopes they would accept me.  People wanted my help and input and I was overly available and the pattern is that very few were there in return.  They expected me to expend my energy solving their problems but weren’t willing to do the work and they certainly didn’t want to help me.  In making those changes and finding alignment with things I actually liked, getting in touch with the real me, expressing the real me, I found my authentic voice.  Things I would have accepted before were off the table and rather than try to make my concerns palatable or not that big of a deal, I voiced what was wrong.  There were some who completely jumped ship at that point and I realized I didn’t care that they did because they were clearly not interested in being part of my authentic life—they wanted me to play a role for them and when that didn’t fit any longer, they had no need for me.  I continued to fight for what was right and press the issue when it came to a home project we’ve been struggling with.  Normally I would be afraid to go up against someone like this but I have continued to have the discussion, realizing that it doesn’t matter if they like me or think I’m easy to get along with—they need to do the right thing.  So I am grateful that I found enough worth in myself to use the same energy I would use to defend others to do the same for myself. 

Today I am grateful for stubbornness of the universe.  I have fought and screamed for years that I wanted things to be a certain way because I knew what was right—that we were all accountable and needed to do the right thing. I insisted on moving quickly because I knew what I needed and wanted and I was always pissed at anyone who got in my way or slowed me down.  The entire time, the universe has been finding ways to slow me down and I never understood the reason.  If I’m entirely honest, the universe is still sending me the message because I’m equally as stubborn and still see no point in waiting for what’s right…I digress.  But I am grateful the universe has continued to send me this message regardless of my frustration and anger about it because I think I finally understood something: the concept of time that I’m working with is my own—the timeline I’ve created in my own head is just that: in my own head.  I am the one who chose to pull myself in all these directions, I accepted all these projects and ideas, I am the one who put them all forward at the same time because I got so afraid of running out of time to do what I wanted that I thought I had to do it all at once.  But the universe persisted and kept telling me to slow down, to take things one at a time and trust that all will unfold in its own course.  That I could trust and allow and learn to be present.  In all that rushing and being stopped, the universe was trying to tell me I have all the time in the world and it’s ok to just breathe sometimes.  We can’t control the chaos but we can control how we respond to it.  Even if we are being delayed unnecessarily, we can trust all is as it should be and we have to understand that we don’t have to do as much as we think we do.  We have a lot of time as long as we are aligned.    

Today I am grateful for releasing.  My home is still in sheer chaos as we are finishing some renovations and it has been driving me insane.  Things have been torn up since February and I am getting desperate to finish things up because I want to move forward and there are things I literally can’t do with the house in this condition.  But I am grateful for releasing control and the unnecessary crap around the house.  We accumulate and accumulate and I can’t tell you how much stuff I have found that I can donate and remove from my house.  I don’t need to create space for things that I don’t even use, for things that no longer serve a purpose in my life but may be of use to others.  So I’m looking at this chaos and thinking that perhaps it’s for a reason.  Perhaps it’s to show me what’s really important and to learn how to let go of the rest.  Life is about letting go and I don’t think I ever understood how much we need to let go of.

Today I am grateful for the small moments.  Life is so fleeting that we really do need to learn presence and joy in the little things. I appreciate every small gesture, every small moment, every smile, every laugh, every cuddle, every discussion we have.  I spend so much time trying to avoid the silence because my  mind is CONSTANTLY moving and I feel like I need to prove myself and that I always need to be DOING to earn my existence so to speak.  It also frustrates the hell out of me thinking that all this time is misspent and I will expend energy with no result.  So the more I am present with the small things and take the time to appreciate what life is—the life in the every day moments—the more life we have.  It’s ironic that the faster we go and the more we try to cram in the less time we have.  Suddenly when we slow down, we have all the time in the world.  I don’t need to jam a million things into my days to make them worthy.  It’s ok to get done what gets done.  It’s ok to spend a day at the zoo or an evening bowling—and we don’t have to fit it all in on one day.  We don’t have to relegate fun to specific moments where we shove it all in our two weeks off a year.  The every day is where it’s at, where it matters. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

“When presence is expected but not protected {we think} maybe they’ll see me if I love them hard enough but here’s the truth about that: no amount of over functioning will make the emotionally unavailable show up. No amount of loyalty will make the unstable feel safe to love.  No connection is worth keeping if it constantly costs you your clarity, confidence, or your sanity,” Jay Douglas.  This is the truth for every relationship we have but it speaks highly to the relationship we have with ourselves.  The way society functions (perhaps human nature) is that we have to adhere to these unwritten, often unspoken rules of how we interact, what we expect, what we are supposed to look like, how we are supposed to behave in certain environments.  That includes everything down to the way we look up to the things we are willing to say.  We train ourselves to run ragged on the whims of others with the hopes they will reciprocate something and we end up over functioning to compensate for what they are unwilling to give and what we were unwilling to give to ourselves. 

When we have people in our lives who treat us this way, we need to understand it has nothing to do with us.  Their inability to see our worth is a matter of their blinders, not our ability to live up to their expectations.  We only need to live up to our own.  It isn’t fair for anyone to have to be what someone else wants over their own desires and we create the freedom we want in our lives by doing what is in our hearts.  We have to understand that our presence and connection to source and ourselves is more important than the connections we hope to have with people.  Real connection is forged from an understanding of the spirit/soul within individuals, not our ability to contort ourselves into what someone thinks makes them happy for that moment.  Those types of relationships are fleeting and they are easy to fall into because some of us are so engrained with people pleasing and seeking validation that we are able to be what anyone wants.  But that isn’t real love. That isn’t reciprocity.  That isn’t a relationship—that is making ourselves a source of entertainment for someone else.

Learn to be ok with disappointing people.  Let them be disappointed.  We aren’t their children and if someone isn’t happy with our actions that’s no indication of our value as people.  We are here to sort out that relationship with our purpose, not to be responsible for someone else’s.  It can get confusing because I do believe with my heart that we are also here to help each other as our skills, wants, and abilities are complementary.  We were born with the inherent ability to help each other move forward in life.  We’ve gotten so consumed with competition and being number one that we feel like we have to put our needs first.  No ones desires outweigh someone’s needs, nor is it our responsibility to fulfill what someone refuses to do for themselves.  It isn’t our responsibility to tolerate what someone deems we are worthy for.  We are here to build a life, an existence that is meaningful to us, to fulfill our purpose.  It is only in doing that where we find fulfillment.  Don’t waste our time with people who don’t appreciate or respect that and certainly don’t waste time that don’t appreciate or respect us.  Walk away because the sacrifice if all that keeps us who we are isn’t worth it.            

“They cause the fire but then they get offended when you walk out of the smoke, when you finally choose you, not for applause or out of spite, but because your nervous system is tired of calling survival love.  Choosing peace when you’ve been through emotional warfare isn’t selfish it’s CPR,” Jay Douglas.  I have a group of people I’ve considered friends for a little over 3 years now and the relationships have dramatically shifted.  I always thought friendship meant making other people happy to keep them around even if that meant bending to the point of breaking or sacrificing what really couldn’t be sacrificed.  Giving time, energy, effort, and attention to people who I would be there for at the drop of a hat but couldn’t be found when the water was raging in.  Recently the group took another turn and I’ve found myself on the outs with them, this time I believe for good.  And here’s the thing: everyone feels like a victim at some point, I know that.  We can all play victim all we want.  But when I was working through the list of things I wanted to address to get some understanding between us, the realization hit me that friends wouldn’t require an explanation that this is bad behavior and they would have stopped the first time a friend raised an issue.  That isn’t what happened.  And then I heard today’s quote.

I realized that this has been a pattern for me: always finding a way to make it work, even things that really shouldn’t work.  I’ve always bent to accommodate what other people wanted because I thought my role was to make other people happy.  I was raised and treated with the belief that if I got upset when someone crossed a boundary I was a bitch and I was a bitch if I raised my voice to express what I wanted.  But then the pattern shifted to me being a bitch because I SET the boundary.  I confused that with ego, thinking that I was too egotistical because I set the boundary and then I’d let people walk over it and get hurt and they’d get mad if I said I was hurt.  So I struggled to find balance and in this group I thought I had found some semblance of acceptance and understanding until the pattern started to repeat itself.  This time I didn’t quiet down.  I’d bent myself silly and finally said something and when they got mad, I didn’t bend again.  I realized that not only had they started the fire, there were times I’d gone so far as to set the fire FOR them and they still looked at me like I was the problem.  I could have done EVERYTHING for these people and, at the end of the day, they still would have found some issue with me setting that boundary/being who I am.

I went through an exercise writing a letter to work through this, unsure if I would give it to them.  The first draft was really angry and it bit—it also hit on all the points where I was still tender from their shots.  I then went soft, trying to find where I was responsible for this miscommunication as well and trying to find a way to make it work.  The third attempt was somewhere in between, voicing my concerns clearly while acknowledging my part.  But what was funny in that third attempt is that as I was listing out all of the things I wanted to discuss/get understanding of, it hit me like a lead balloon that I wouldn’t have to explain this to friends and friends wouldn’t have done all of this stuff in the first place.  All of the red flags I’d looked past for the last 3 years, the lies, the exclusion from tons of events after I’d fought to bring them in my life, the disregard for my/my family’s feelings while their feelings were law…none of that goes on between friends.  So the question became why am I trying to salvage these relationships with people who don’t give a shit let alone standing so close to the fire after they poured the kerosene? 

That is a pattern I’m ok with breaking.  Sure there are some implications for my son because he is friends with some of their kids, but I need to be an example that self-respect isn’t about making ourselves convenient, it’s about being who we are even if it makes others uncomfortable.  It’s about telling people what we are/aren’t willing to accept in our presence and knowing our value.  Value means more than what we are willing to give up for someone else—value is knowing when to walk away from those who seek the chaos, those who fan the flames, those who light the match and then wonder why you ran.  I’ve struggled with these decisions over the last several weeks but the truth is, when we look at the reality of the situation and understand that people who care about each other don’t treat each other like this, then it makes it all the easier to walk away.  Sure, I can own my part in the pieces where I could be a better friend but I was never malicious even if I was sloppy/forgetful at times.  As I gave grace to them, I had hoped they would do the same for me but that didn’t happen.  And that is ok.  I don’t have to be everyone’s cup of tea.  I’ve learned to carry my own and I will carry on.  And I am ok. As Jay Douglas says, “I don’t need you to understand why I left because I’m done explaining my boundaries to people who only respected me when I had none.”

“You can’t sustain actions that directly conflict with how you see yourself,” Success Insider.  This is a reminder that we can tell ourselves we are a certain thing but if we aren’t that way (or don’t really feel/believe we are that way), our mind will fight us every step of the way toward that vision. That explanation may sound a bit defeatist but it gives me hope in a way because it makes sense from a neuropsych perspective.  If we don’t have the pathways in our brain that tells us or is familiar with the action we are trying to accomplish, we will default to what we know.  The other reference in this is that we can say things like, “I’m a millionaire” over and over again but if we automatically think of our bank account and know it isn’t at that level, then we fall back into the patterns we have of NOT being a millionaire.  That may be an oversimplification to a degree but the point is valid: if we don’t FEEL what we see in our being, we will never see it in our reality.  We have to become what we want to bring in what we want.

With time and focus we can shift the way the brain thinks—that is part of the concept of neuroplasticity.  We can shift our neural pathways to create new beliefs.  But if we don’t match actions to those beliefs, we will end up in the same position we were in at the beginning.  We can’t start new things when we repeat the same pattern.  We can’t change if we don’t change.  Until we believe AND do the work to change how we feel/act/view ourselves, we will always fall back on the path of least resistance to what we do know.  It takes time and patience but it also takes focus and belief.  Building a new vision and becoming something that matches it so we can bring it into reality requires work.  When we start to see the results of those changes, we start to form those pathways and the more we walk those pathways, the more they are a part of us.  I will NEVER claim the work is easy but I will always remind us that it IS doable.  Simple isn’t easy, discipline isn’t easy, but consistency is key.  Start small and keep going and eventually we will become that vision.      

Anna Kai: “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got is that no one is ever going to ask you if they can do more for you if you don’t tell them they’re not doing enough; If you’re telling your man it’s fine, they’re going to assume it’s fine, because men don’t fix problems they don’t think exist; That goes for everything in life, people love low maintenance friends, low maintenance partners, low maintenance employees because it means they get to do the bare minimum and still look like a hero. And we accept the bare minimum because we would rather be loved and starving than a bitch that’s fed.  People will keep underdelivering if you keep overcompensating. Took me 34 years to realize that the key to getting what you want in life is not by being loved, but by being loud. Because you don’t get points for being easy, you get forgotten.  And if nothing else today, I’m just here to say rest in not peace to the years where I tried to be the kind of woman someone would want because now I’m the kind of woman who gets what she wants.”   There is so much to say on this piece yet I find myself searching for words.  We have to learn to be ok with whatever people think about us because that is only a perception of a tiny fraction of a minute percentage of the world.  How we feel and operate is what determines what we get out of the universe and if we are constantly telling the universe that we have enough that we got it, we will never get more and we will constantly shoulder the burdens of, well,… the universe.

I think the nuance of Anna’s words is important.  It can be taken literally to the point of being a total bitch and doing whatever it takes to get what we want but it can also simply be that we need to give voice to what’s on our minds.  As I shared from Sarai Speer yesterday, misplaced humility has long term consequences on the nervous system up to and including the habit/tendency to overcompensate for those who underdeliver.  Humility isn’t a bad thing but when that is our knee jerk reaction and we misinterpret silence as humble, we lose our autonomy to those who will speak for us because they think we can’t.  We were given brains to generate ideas and voices to share them and bodies to execute them so I’m not sure where along the line it was told/believed that it was better to do as we were told than as we knew.  There was a point when we found out that being quiet was better and safer than making noise and we took that into our DNA.  We’ve evolved long past that lizard brain where we’re afraid of being eaten because we make a little peep yet we still behave that way.  If we want to get what we want, the universe doesn’t know what that is until we give voice to it.  I don’t believe it is up to others to fix our problems but I do believe it takes two to tango and if there is an issue then we need to somehow find that balance between reasonable expression and appropriate delivery as well as discretion as to whose problem it really is (ie, is this something for that person to fix or is this just something I WANT them to fix).  There is enough space in this world for us all to get what we want, we don’t need to be assholes to get it. 

So to the latter and former points about not being an asshole while keeping our voices strong enough to speak when needed and HEARD, using our voice is a gift that does have responsibility behind it.  Use our voices intentionally and often.  Let the humility we feel come from the fact that we GET the opportunity to be heard and that we CAN be heard, not when someone deigns that you’re worthy of it.  Don’t let someone choose the moments we step up as the moments we quiet down.  We have a voice and every much the same right to use it.  We don’t need to be a bitch to get what we want but we sure as hell have every right to be a bitch when someone tells us we can’t have what we want or that we need to prove/earn it.  We are all worthy just because we are here—we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have a purpose, and because we have a purpose written on our souls, we don’t need anything else.  So we don’t need to waste any time trying to be a picture of what someone else wants to be in order to prove that we deserve what we want.  And the things we want are no indication of our value in someone else’s eyes.  We have a purpose and a point and a voice that we are meant to use to get there.  If someone consistently tries to shut us down or shut us up, ask the question of what don’t they want someone to hear?  How are we disrupting their story?  Then we need to let them do their thing because even if we are changing a story they tell themselves, that doesn’t mean ours is any less valid.  Speak the life we want into existence.