It’s time for my own little reality check/gauge of where I’m at-and the reasons why.  I’ll skip to the latter part first, the why.  It’s me.  I’m why I’m here.  I’ve been stuck in the past for years because I kept looking backward.  I kept looking at a time when I felt safe in my life, younger, protected by my parents.  And I craved that protection because felt I was born on the outside and didn’t have a lot of people in my court.  I won’t deny I was born with a certain level of stick up my ass, thinking I knew how to run the world—no one has the confidence of a kid who knows nothing of how we operate in this society.  But at that time I still felt a certain level of acceptance by people who could protect me.  It seemed they accepted me and perhaps, as a kid so far separated from my siblings, I think acceptance is what I was looking for.  This isn’t revelatory information, I’ve shared about that plenty of times.  But I never looked into why I wanted to stay there.  Sure there are facets of my life that make me uncomfortable now.  I still don’t feel like I fit in and it’s because I’m trying to fit into places not designed for me.  The other issue is control and fear—I wanted to be perceived a certain way and I got all too familiar with being the victim, real or imagined.  I became incredibly familiar and comfortable with those ideas of victimhood.  That taught no one has the confidence of a person stuck in a specific space who has been there so long they actually do know everything about a topic.   

The work I’ve done and the stories I’ve shared are true, and the fact that I’ve been redundant at times, trite at times, perhaps melancholy and boring, doesn’t minimize that truth.  Nor does it minimize the truth of the experience and the actual trauma that came with it.  It just took me a really long time to realize that I’m choosing to stay stuck there so I can keep spouting the same lessons I’ve shared before.  I’m proud of the work even if it is a bit redundant because I know people have come in and read this at different times for different reasons and maybe some new spins on the work caught the eye. I genuinely feel like I’ve been able to help some people.  But I know I’ve been lacking lately because….I’ve been lacking.  I’ve been missing the energy, the excitement, the effort to create because the message felt stale, even to me.  It was never intentional, of course, but I allowed myself to stop prioritizing what mattered which was to refine the message and STICK with the real message and the how of helping people become their best.  The holidays hit hard this year because the end of the year snuck up on me like a freight train and, as a family, we were faced with some significant challenges with our parents.  Challenges that made us deal with mortality, our own mortality specifically and it felt like the world was moving too fast.  But was that because I’ve stubbornly persisted in trying to stop it from moving?  Maybe.  But it was also because all I had to work with was old information in new circumstances—a wake up call to practice what I preach every day.    

My support system has systematically been removed from my life and I can say it serves the point to help me realize my own strength but the truth is, when you lose the truest sense of safety at key points in life, it creates fear and anxiety.  It’s living under the constant tension of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve lived in anticipation of crisis nearly my entire life, always prepared to handle it on my own.  I’m great with crisis, terrible with minor inconvenience.  Regardless, that level of readiness has caused its share of issues including a fear to move forward and break out into something actually new.  Something relevant.  Again, the work I’ve done stands, but I don’t want to continue looking for ways to share the same message.  I’m cool with finding new ways to share those lessons, but the world is moving forward quickly and there is no stopping what’s coming.  No matter how much I feel I’ve progressed, there is still more to do—and more productive things to do—to encourage real progress.  I fought like hell to hang onto the past because it felt safe, it was real, I knew what happened there, and I honestly thought the people around me felt the same way.  That’s hard for me because I’m a stick-with-it-if-it-works type girl so it was also about my comfort.  If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.  Well.  There are things that needed to be fixed that recycling the same issues wasn’t going to resolve.  And it still won’t.  Seeing how quickly people can drop from our lives and for whatever reason, has made me acutely aware that confidence, security, clarity only comes from ourselves.  We need support, yes, but that can and will change.  So, bear with me as I start the process of the 1% shift every day.