Today I am grateful for admitting my faults.  I think the moment we stop wearing any kind of mask and start showing who we are, real change can happen.  I’m not perfect at this—and I want to be clear, when I do something wrong, I’m the first to admit it and I work to correct whatever I did, especially if I’ve hurt someone else.  But there are habits and nuances we never show the world.  This isn’t about over-exposure or trauma bonding so, again to be clear, I don’t think it’s wise to lay out every inner working just to do it.  We need to keep some things for ourselves.  However, we need to have that type of brutal honesty with ourselves.  We can’t hide those things from ourselves or deny they are part of us because they will start to fester and demand attention in ways that create more issues we feel we must hide and so on and so on.  So getting into the dirt with ourselves is highly encouraged and I would say necessary.  It took me a while to sort through the fear around admitting I am some of the things I tried to convince those closest to me I’m not (IE the areas where I am spoiled, the times I’ve acted on ego).  It wasn’t until acknowledging what I really am and what the motivation really was that I started to break through.  The funny thing is I’ve been the first one to take blame and lay my neck on the line for things going wrong for years.  I also was very adamant about not taking blame for specific things, however, the point is that the idea of being wrong was never the issue—it was the perception over what I was wrong about.  It’s in that vein I acknowledge and welcome the lessons from my imperfections.   

Today I am grateful for learning to live again.  I let myself sink into a spiral of depression, confusion, chaos, and self-hatred over the last few months and it has been mentally awful.  I truly couldn’t put my finger on what caused the spiral.  Towards the end of last year I went through a period of general malaise where I was in a funk and I just couldn’t get out of it no matter what I did.  Everything sucked and there was absolutely no reason for it—and I knew that. It eventually passed but I never figured out what triggered it and it came back with a vengeance.  It felt like life was slipping through my hands, and to be fair, my family has been facing our mortality right in the eyes for a while now.  I’m not on good terms with death in the grander context and life events as well as the current time of year haven’t made that any better.  It also won’t change any of the inevitable things that come—my own demise included.  But I can stop acting like everything is dying right now. I’m here right now, typing this.  I’m in my home right now, my husband and son still asleep.  I’m breathing right now.  Those little steps of “now” bring me to the moment.  I’ve also been holding out on the things I love doing. I haven’t been out of the house on my own for a while, I haven’t gone to the book store, looked at clothes, got some food I wanted just for me.  It’s fine because for a while, I really was just trying to survive.  But now I need to introduce some joy back in and that means doing things I love again.  That is living again.   

Today I am grateful for signs.  I’ve been on tenuous terms with religion/spirituality lately.  We attempted to find some peace in faith/religion together through going to local services and it was completely appropriate for us at the time.  I’ll even admit it felt good.  I was seeking proof of that type of higher power so I could learn to trust again and it started off that way.  Nothing bad happened and we agree we still enjoy what we participated in but we haven’t figured out what else we were seeking to get out of that as a family.  We got sick over the holidays, things flipped with the larger extended family, I questioned my place in the world (like literally what I’m doing here), and we didn’t go to services for a while and it’s felt like a barrage of reminders that I’m alone for a while (I’m being dramatic, I know, anxiety is a bitch).  Out of absolutely nowhere, a song came to mind from when I was a child, about 6 or 7.  It was one of the first songs I memorized as a child and I never forgot it.  I looked it up on YouTube so I could hear it and wouldn’t you know—there was an entire verse I NEVER knew about.  I would have sworn on my life that I knew this song in its entirety, I sang it that much as a kid, my sister used to make me sing it because she thought it was “cool” that I knew something she liked.  One night she was on the phone in our shared room and she jokingly said it was on the radio right then and she flipped it on and sure enough it actually was.  So I have history with the song but apparently it might be skewed.  Anyway.  Seeing/hearing this new verse threw me for an absolute loop—like did time bend or something?  Plus the lyrics were so on point to what I’m feeling right now that I sat there with my mouth hanging open.  To me that was a sign that Someone is listening and understands.  There was no reason for me to look that song up when I did other than a whim to hear it again.  That was also a sign for me to look at the past differently.  Maybe things didn’t happen as I thought they did.  I always prided myself on a near eidetic memory and that showed me how the emotion clouds a situation.  Although to be fair, I swear the radio version I remember was never as long as what I listened to.  Regardless.  It was also a sign to keep going.  Keep shedding the illusion and vision of the past and step into the reality of what is and the vision of what we want it to be.     

Today I am grateful for boosts.  I mentioned above that I’d stopped doing the things I love for a while.  I’ve let myself get so wrapped in what I think I’m supposed to be doing that I’ve definitely over extended, over committed, and yet again, took it over-seriously.  I’ve treated nearly every situation in my life as life or death and I have got to stop being such a drama queen.  This is some of that self-honesty thing I’ve been working on.  Anyway.  When it comes to mental discipline I needed a reminder that self-care includes not holding back on the things we need and love.  Even if they seem trivial.  Sometimes we just need to surround ourselves with what we like to do to remind ourselves who the hell we actually are, not who we want people to think we are.  I literally spent over an hour in the book store with my caramel Frappuccino, carrying dozens of books in my bag, different genres and authors, I kept going until I found the book I was really looking for, I found a couple of new series, indulged in a few, finished a few. Then I went next door to Ulta, and admittedly I felt a little out of my element there so I didn’t buy anything, but I found the items I had considered buying and I didn’t rush through.  I took the time to reorganize my office, to read, to nap.  It felt amazing to just be in my element for a little bit.         

Today I am grateful for a different kind of clarity.  I always knew where I held myself back and I told myself it was because I needed help.  I needed someone to do it with me.  Whether it was grocery shopping or just going to the book store, choosing what to make for a meal, choosing what to wear/how to style my hair or makeup, I convinced myself I needed to be told what to do.  Until I needed to be told what to do.  This is a layered and complicated realization, it really is, because it means owning the fact I held myself back unnecessarily, that I wanted people to see me a certain way and cared more about that than I cared about DOING something meaningful.  It means that I could have had an entirely different existence but it also means that I still can have an entirely different existence now.  Sure, some of what I thought would be a joint effort will be mine alone, but that’s the work I’m doing.  It’s my work and perhaps the excuse I’ve used that I needed to have my partner with me to do it isn’t true.  Perhaps I’m meant to just do this on my own in the best possible way.  I’m meant to explore that level of creative freedom.  My current 9-5 offers a beautiful and delicious amount of freedom that coincides perfectly with the projects I’m working on outside.  There’s no reason to wait for anyone’s approval on that.  Instead of waiting for everyone to be on board, just start building the ship.      

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead