Today I am grateful for new approaches and understanding.  I’ve harbored a lot of anger over the years—anger about things I perhaps didn’t fully understand from the other person’s perspective, but it was usually over things that seemed pretty straight forward to me.  So much so that I didn’t have the capacity to look at how I was doing the same thing.  I’m older now and I DO see things from the other side and for some of it I still feel as frustrated but for other things I can slow down and take a more compassionate approach.  I can ask better questions rather than demand specific action from people.  My family are a bunch of thinkers, future tripping constantly and we wind up digging our own holes and getting mad about it.  We learned from earlier generations that we are to have certain expectations of other people or that, because we adapt to others, we expect others to adapt to us.  We want someone to come and save us and give us an answer even if it’s blatantly in front of our faces.  Having any expectation on the behavior of others is a recipe for disaster and I’ve watched how people have cornered themselves into the victim cycle simply because they won’t act, thinking the angrier they get will change the behavior of others.  No amount of anger, frustration, or resentment will make people change their behavior if they don’t want to.  And it hurts knowing that even in situations where we’ve explained ourselves people still choose to do the thing that hurts us.  But that is the reality of it.  So we can look at it differently or we can repeat the pattern by expecting people to live up to our expectations.  Once we understand our own power, we can approach things differently. 

Today I am grateful for reminders it doesn’t need to be complicated.  Over the last few days I’ve put things away and cleaned and organized and worked both my 9-5 and my business and I’ve mothered/wifed/daughtered/sistered/friended with those close to me and we threw in a few adventures discussing upcoming holiday plans.  All the time I’ve stressed and worried and got lost in thought over how long things would take, how much time I had lost, and how stuck in my head I’ve been as of late I really needed that reality check: we can do more than we think we can.  We overcomplicate tasks and create miles of to do lists when all that needs to be done is simply to do things.  Talk about things.  Be honest about things.  Get up and move things.  Try something.  We can’t worry something positive into or out of existence.  We can’t stop time.  We can’t stop how other people behave.  We can’t change what was done.  We can’t make people see things our way.  We CAN be here now and we can do something in the moment.  I had gotten so stuck in my head that I forgot a family function I agreed to host in my home.  I was reminded of it the night before and believe me, that text message snapped me directly into the moment.  And the thing is this: all was fine.  All the things I wanted to do got done.  It wasn’t hard, it was one foot in front of the other, just like I’ve always told myself in my not-freaked-out states.  It’s funny because every time I talk about being brought back to the present I’m always thinking to myself, “You KNOW this, why do you waste this time?” and I end up sharing it here because I know my process isn’t perfect, I know how often I need to be reminded of these things.  I’m human and sometimes need to be reminded of a few things.      

Today I am grateful for reminders of why I made decisions.  Last week I shared that on Halloween I was proud of the choices I made in regards to confronting the people whom I’ve allowed to be the source of my anger and pain over the last several months.  I have no regrets in what I did, what I said to them, in getting the truth out.  I’ve spoken the truth about the elephant in the room in this situation since the start and no one has liked it.  It’s been bleeding over into other people’s behavior toward me and I’ve felt it.  But I am secure in standing my ground, not out of stubbornness, but out of the fact that I’ve taken the facts of the situation, looked at the goal of healing the relationships, swallowed my pride to speak the truth and do the healing work WITH them, and the behavior and treatment remains the same.  None of what I said last week was out of malice and it seemed relatively well received, albeit frustrating at the time.  Not more than 36 hours later, I saw the pictures of the people I’d tried to make amends with for months, the people who I put everything aside to help find a kid, those very people who hugged me as we talked through things, I saw the photos without me.  Look, I am well aware of how potentially childish this sounds and I’m well aware adults can befriend and decide what they want to do and when.  But the heart of the matter is those decisions can still be hurtful when the group I was responsible for “creating” is now doing the very things I tried to do with them from the beginning.  Seeing those photos made it crystal clear that I made the decisions I did for a reason and that I could bleed out for these people and they would look the other way.  I may not be the best at reading social cues but I value relationships and that means having the hard conversations—I’ve even asked what I did wrong and received no response.  So that means it’s simply the choice that I don’t belong in the very thing I built.  And that is fine.  That isn’t behavior I want to allow in my life regardless and I don’t want that to become another wound I need to fix or a wound my family needs to fix.  I’m standing by my choices.  

Today I am grateful for reminders of life.  My new role for my 9-5 is pretty cool.  It’s something very new to me and I am still treading cautiously in many ways, still carrying old habits related to doing what I’m told etc.  But I love the work, I love the freedom that came from accepting this role, the freedom that has taken me some time to adapt to.  I envisioned it for a long time and it took me a long time to get to this point—5 months to be exact.  It was a journey to truly adapt to what freedom meant.  Where the responsibility came in and where I could loosen the reins, where my time needed to be spent, where I needed to be more disciplined and where I could make decisions I didn’t before.  Currently someone near to the role hadn’t been acting themselves, they seemed absolutely exhausted and didn’t look well, and I told them they needed to take the time to take care of themselves because I’ve been on that side of the fence where my sanity and health didn’t matter to anyone—I ran myself ragged trying to be all things to all people to hear a few words of praise, that I did the right thing or that I was doing a good job.  Less than a week later, this person was in the hospital with chest pains. Thank goodness that initial evaluation came back negative but the following days this person declined and now they are on leave.  No matter what’s happening in a job, we are in fact ALWAYS replaceable to a role—they will always find someone new to do what they want them to.  So remember to take the time to live life, take care of ourselves—the work will always be there but we will not always get another opportunity to do the things we want to do—and if we run ourselves into the ground for the sake of a role, then we never will.  Take care of ourselves, live.  

Today I am grateful for embracing my power.  If we spend our time thinking of all the things we have no control over, we can find endless ways to be a victim in this world.  When we focus on what we CAN do, it shifts the entire story.  The only one truly keeping us where we are is ourselves.  If we don’t do the healing work I spoke of yesterday, a majority of our time will be spent in avoidable agony for ourselves and ways we possibly hurt others.  There are infinite things we have no control over in this world and it is a terrifying prospect considering all the ways our lives can go sideways.  We can spend our lives creating ways to avoid all those things but the truth is we will NEVER find a way to avoid all the potholes in life.  I can’t emphasize enough how life changing it is when we focus on what we do have power over.  In spite of what we may think, we do have a lot of choice and power in this world—nearly as infinite as what can go wrong.  We can choose our reaction in every moment and that can be decided by either our wounds or our truth.  When we let the truth be the guide, we understand our feelings, while important, do not run the show.  I’ve spoken of that many times and it is always worth repeating: how we feel isn’t the reality of the situation so we need to make sure that our interpretation of something isn’t skewing our entire view.  We have to learn to pause and ask the questions—is this what I really feel and is this how I want to behave?  Is this truly me or is this an old reaction?  What are my real boundaries and how do I do the work to establish what I need?  People are flawed and imperfect and there is no way we can avoid our emotions occasionally spilling over into what we do.  But we can always pivot and take the reins again.  We DO have a choice.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.