“Shame Shames; That shame may not even be ours.  We take on the feelings of other generations.  We Can break the subconscious patterns of shame.  It’s not about who’s at fault, it’s about how we end it,” JB Copeland.  No one is unique in this—every family has a history of shame over something.  We all have a history of things that make us feel less than in some way, and we aren’t sure why.  It can manifest in so may ways—we never confront people when we’ve been wronged, we try to please people by putting everything we need last, we don’t ask for help, we repeat the patterns of self-deprecation and low self-worth because we feel a certain way about ourselves whether we can explain it or not.  If we look at this strictly from an historical perspective, society has shifted continuously and the definition of what is “acceptable” has shifted with it.  For Pete’s sake there was a time when we let each other die if we couldn’t gather enough food, then it became about the amount of money we brought in or how we earned a living, then the type of clothes we wore, then the type of house we have and the things in it.  But there are other things too—like how we look, how we feel about our nose or our legs and why we can’t explain how annoyed we are with those features or how we do certain things—like we just don’t dance in public etc.  Those things aren’t ours.

We feel so much shame in this family and it is deeply rooted on both sides.  I can trace the moment it was passed to my mother and I can trace the moment it was passed to me—and I can see the moments that I’m passing it to my son.  So that’s key.  This isn’t about carrying those things anymore and it isn’t about blaming those people because the truth is, they really may not have known better.  It’s about understanding what happened in those moments, knowing what was handed to us, and seeing the potential where we can do the same thing—and then stopping that pattern.  We can’t change what happened but we can stop it from happening again.  I know shame for my appearance has stopped me from even trying things that I know I would have loved.  It has stopped me from believing that I could achieve my biggest goals.  It has allowed me to accept poor treatment in many scenarios because I felt I deserved it.  And I spent too much time trying to prove my worth, and in that journey, I further solidified that I was somehow unworthy—and I exhausted myself in the process.  The weight of shame wears us down because we never knew we weren’t meant to carry it.  We never understood we could stop carrying it at any time.            

I’m looking at a physical representation of shame every time I walk into my Aunt’s house.  There are real patterns of addiction to various degrees in the family and addiction led my Aunt to do some terrible things.  I know she felt shame about what she did every day—and she felt pain about the loss that she knew resulted from the things that happened in that house.  Only that would have prevented her from reaching out for the help she so clearly needed.  We have other patterns of shame in the family including making people feel shame over who they are, specifically for things they can’t control.  It’s a deflecting mechanism for the shame others carry as well.  In that regard, this isn’t so much about the shame that was passed down but rather what carrying shame can do.  It can take something beautiful and render it completely useless.  It can destroy the most solid of foundations.  Our inability to admit our wrong and correct it is one of the most destructive things.  Follow that with the realization that we were wrong and too proud to admit it, and we end up carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, and we will collapse every time.      

It’s up to us to stop the patterns of shame even if that means admitting the shame we feel and what has happened.  The other person doesn’t even have to acknowledge their role in it.  We simply need to be ready to take on our responsibility for what happened and deciding that we are going to do things differently.  We do this by having compassion for those who passed on a pattern that they didn’t even know they had or didn’t know how to break.  We remember that we are one, we aren’t targeted by these people, they didn’t know any better and they were repeating what they were taught.  When we receive shame it feels like one of the most personal things ever but it really isn’t.  We want to break the pattern and we do that with love, and appreciation and practicing gratitude.  That will guide us to our purpose and finding our purpose gives us our passion, the ground to change our patterns.  With purpose we aren’t afraid to face the pain of years of trauma and shame that was passed down because no one knew what to do with.  Our foundation doesn’t have room to carry that any longer and we are strong enough to say that is enough.  The shame ends with us.  

Another fall and I’ve lost another Aunt.  I’m almost numb to the way this year has gone.  I can’t say I’m not hopeful for a good turn around, but this is not what I thought it would be.  And now this loss, a year after my last Aunt, all while things seem to be turning around, has created such a mixed feeling of…otherness.  This year has been a wake up call to me that I do not want to continue in a certain vein where people tell me what to do—I’ve always had that underlying drive that didn’t want to report to anyone, that thought I knew best, that found my own way.  And, as I shared a few weeks ago, I’ve realized how much of that was ego.  I felt guilty for wanting the things I did, I restricted myself hoping for the even bigger pay off, and when it didn’t come, I felt like my world was falling apart.   

We can’t make people be who we want them to be.  People react very differently to stressors and seeing the condition of her house is a testament to someone going one way with tragedy.  She tried to freeze time.  The house was still a mess and this isn’t about cleanliness.  This is about how she tried to hold onto everything that was once the loss happened-and she did it repeatedly at different stages.  The brain handles trauma differently and she definitely faced trauma, loss after loss.  I feel like I relate to her in some ways—it’s why I cling to things in the past as well.  But I see the way she let her life fall apart, how the pain became too much.  And I see the parallel to the loss of influential people in my life early on—as she lost her father, I lost my grandfather, I feared death, I feared more loss.  I have relics of time gone by and I know that it wasn’t normal.  So I began cleaning all of that and then I walk into this and I am proud I started when I did. But this isn’t about cleaning and clearing and talking about the positivity of letting go—again.  It’s about understanding where we are at and meeting ourselves there and then reframing our lives.  When the foundation, the walls, whatever gets knocked down, build something new, don’t try to make it what it was.   

This loss is also a testament to letting people in.  When tragedy happens, we aren’t meant to isolate.  My entire family has a history of doing that—we can handle it on our own.  But seeing how life can become so unmanageable after loss, our minds can become unmanageable, it makes me realize that there is infinitely more we can let go of.  We hold onto things thinking it will help us remember—and it does.  It’s a record of our lives, the experiences we’ve shared.  But the things aren’t the experience itself.  The things aren’t a substitute for the person.  I know I have the things I do because I didn’t want to let go of the person, the idea, the image.  This was a circumstance where positivity and love and trying to refocus didn’t help a damn thing.  There are certain depths that it’s too deep for any of us to go—and it’s painful to witness that sinking in people.  I feel that sinking tendency in myself—between new responsibilities, uncertainty at work/home, troubles in relationships, health scares, losing my support system, this has been the time when I wanted to give it all up again.   

But what I’m seeing is that people will never be who we want them to be, who we think they are.  With all of these losses I’m seeing that I’m missing the version of who they were—not the version of who they became.  The people they became are not the people I knew as a child—that person never would have allowed themselves to fall apart like that.  And then I see that the truth is they will always be themselves and we have no say in how they live their lives.  We have an image, a perception of people and when we get behind the scenes, we see who they really are.  They aren’t always capable or they never were the version of themselves we thought they were.  We can watch people deteriorate, we can offer the life preserver, but if they aren’t willing to grab it, they won’t survive.  We can’t make people be the best of themselves if they don’t see it in themselves.  Not to be dramatic but there has been a lot of tragedy, loss, and near loss in my life starting from a young age and I have a firm example now of what happens when we don’t deal with that—my Aunt shared a similar story line.  I will not let my life fall apart because I can’t hold onto all of the what was.  And that sucks because some of that what was, was really good.  It felt good.  It was who I thought I was, it was a part of me.  So how do we evolve this complicated relationship where that version of ourselves, the one we held up as the epitome of the greatest because we didn’t know what the greatest was… is exactly what’s drowning us?

We have to let go.  Sometimes we have to dive deeper so we can get our bearings and then we come up for air.  We touch the things that triggered us in the first place.  We get close to the pain and see that we can survive it—if we let ourselves go through it.  My boss/mentor/owner of the company suffered a huge loss at the height of the evolution of the company.  She could have easily let herself drown in it, go down with it.  But she didn’t.  And clearly the point of this story is that no two people handle that circumstance the same way, but this is moreso about choice and mindset.  We need to train ourselves to find the way out by seeing where the light gets in through the cracks.  We have to know when to break down the door and when to walk to the next one.  This loss sucks, nearly any loss sucks.  But if we can take it for what it is and learn something from it, break the patterns, then there is a chance it doesn’t all have to fall apart.  And even if it does, we can rebuild.  Don’t let the fire consume us, learn to rise from the ash and make something else.

“If you can’t find happiness in the ugliness you’re not going to find it in the beauty either,” Joanna Gaines.  This is the epitome of perspective and how we choose to look at life.  We can either be the only one who has ever dealt with anything like we’ve experienced and no one can relate or we can accept that we are on a similar continuum.  We need to be able to manage how we see things and how we react to them.  We need to understand the power we have over how we interpret things because until we assume responsibility for our thoughts and actions, someone else will always have the power to determine how we feel and what we do with our lives.  We have to choose to see the good in everything or at least make an effort to understand that, while certain things may be rough, while we wouldn’t consciously choose them for ourselves, there is a reason for it.  And even if we don’t understand the reason, even if we never understand it, we still learn how to move forward with it as it is. 

I know the mental strength it takes to see the good in every situation, it can feel like dragging the weight of a mountain with us.  But witnessing the things I have over the past several years, the culmination of many of them in this year, has shown me with 100% certainty that we will never move onto something good if we choose to see the bad.  I’ve seen my family trying to manage things on their own because we are too proud/scared to reach out for help when we feel like we are drowning, like somehow we got ourselves in to this situation so it’s up to us alone to get out.  The brain will always try to reconcile what has happened, it will try to logic how we got here and who did what, who is responsible.  The brain is in survival so it’s looking for the guilty/responsible party for where we are and why we feel the way we do.  The truth is that all comes from within.  It’s all on us—and we can break the patterns that didn’t belong to us.   

To play off of yesterday’s topic, that broken bone will heal and while it may be different than someone else’s it doesn’t mean that they don’t know the pain of a broken bone.  Stop trying to make ourselves worse off than everyone else and trying to be the victim—we don’t need attention from the negative and we don’t need to highlight anything that causes us pain.  I’ve also learned that if I break a bone in the process of trying to do something unique and I failed, it doesn’t mean that I have to bear the weight of it on my own.  I can still have people help me put myself back together and continue on my work.  We can use that pain and turn it into something productive.  If we can’t see the light in our darkest times then we won’t appreciate it when it gets brighter.  It can suck being in the dark, looking at the ugly, so if we can appreciate at least being alive with it, the chance to create something new, then we can start seeing the beauty around us—and appreciate the beauty we create. 

I have a friend and colleague who struggles with nearly identical mental health issues and patterns that I do but we define our experiences differently.  I will fully acknowledge that the cause and how we got to where we are is entirely different.  I will also acknowledge that the same diagnosis can present in different ways.  But what I’ve noticed in the difference of our experience is how we choose to experience it.  He still refers to himself and defines himself in the victim mentality—and he was a victim.  I was too and then I learned the hard way that the help I needed was not available to me.  The adults around me that could have helped me simply didn’t.  When I went to get help I was told that it wasn’t that serious—and I knew that I had to figure it out on my own.  I had to break the patterns, both mine and what was given to me, on my own.  As much as that left me broken in its own right, it did give me one thing: it made me acutely aware of how powerful we are and how much power we have over the mind.  I may not always execute that power correctly (ie I’ve become too controlling over certain things and I don’t always believe in or apply my power to my own experience) but I am 100% aware of what the mind can do.  And in spite of the physiological difficulties I can’t change (the chemicals that make me experience life like this) I have been able to navigate and compartmentalize my life to make it manageable.

Again, I don’t claim that this is perfect or that it works all the time—but I do know that I have managed to shift my entire mindset toward what I will and will not allow in my mind.  My friend stated that here are simply things he can’t change in his mind, that he has a disorder, that I couldn’t understand what he’s talking about.  And that is when I told him he needed to stop being a victim.  We have nearly identical experiences and he looks at his as something that can never be managed and that he needs to live a certain way because he can never learn to do something different.  Again, I acknowledge the physiological chemical differences in the brain, but I also believe this is a spectrum.  We can move ourselves along the spectrum with focus and determination and a different outlook.  He tried to use the example of a broken bone.  He asked if I ever had a compound fracture of the ulna and stated that if I hadn’t, then I would never know what that felt like.  My response was that I’ve had a broken bone.  There is truth to both scenarios: a broken bone is a broken bone—it doesn’t matter where.  But the severity and specificity of the break can have some differences and that would lead to a different treatment.  To which I told him that’s exactly what I mean: there are other options and avenues he’s choosing not to pursue because he has defined himself as a victim of this disorder.  He isn’t addressing what he CAN do and is focusing on what he can’t do. 

None of this is to say that I’m handling my stuff any better than anyone else: far from it.  I share enough here on a daily basis that most of you know this started as an effort to navigate my own healing.  I’m learning as I go.  But I DO know with 100% certainty that how we approach our healing makes all the difference and that we do have the ability to determine if we stay where we are or if we move on.  There are more ways to cope, to heal, to deal than what we tell ourselves and if we limit ourselves by defining our circumstance a certain way then we will never progress.  We will never heal fully if we limit ourselves to who we are now and what we see now.  We can’t choose our illness but we can choose how we progress with it and if we want to heal, if we want to learn to get to where we need to, we need to embrace the power of the mind and learn that we have more control over it than we think we do.  Even though we have the same issue, we are in vastly different places because of how we define what we are dealing with.  I’m at a different level than he is and he doesn’t believe that he can ever get there because he feels things are out of his control.  I’ve taken control (even if sometimes too far or not in the right area or even consistently) and it has given me a different perspective.

“It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it,” Albert Einstein.  I grew up with the idea that I couldn’t take from people unless I could give back to them.  It’s part of why I decided that I needed to do everything on my own.  I couldn’t take the pressure, the weight of having to repay everything.  I grew up thinking that relationships were a debt, that you always needed to make sure you were holding up your end and then some so people couldn’t say that you’ve used them.  I can’t tell you how many times that mentality got me used.  It hurt putting myself out there so often, helping so many people, doing what I was told and performing to the utmost of my ability only to be left holding the bag or left alone when I needed help the most.  It left me feeling guilty when I had to accept help that I knew I couldn’t return. 

But as I’ve spent more time thinking about this mindset, I realize that this isn’t about debt. It’s about contribution.  Not everything in this world is a 1:1 match.  Just because someone does the brakes on my car doesn’t mean I will do the brakes on their car.  Just because they bought me a book doesn’t mean I have to buy them a book.  What we put back is supposed to come from us.  It’s supposed to come from what we feel, from our talents, from sharing our gifts. We aren’t meant to be copies of each other, tallying what we are owed.  We are meant to be in flow and give what we can.  That understanding flipped things for me.  IT takes the pressure off.  It reaffirms that we are enough as we are.  That our gifts are the reason we are here.  The way we share our energy is more important than the total on the bill. 

For those of us who were raised to take this literally, where we have to give back what we get, I want to encourage you to put that weight down.  You are enough.  You don’t owe more than who you are, you don’t owe what you can’t share.  You only owe the responsibility of sharing the completeness of who you are to everyone.  To be entirely who we are.  It is when we live in that fullness, the complete expression of who we are that we understand the limitless energy that flows in this world.  The exchange is less about dollar for dollar and more about energy and effort and matching frequency.  It’s the most powerful thing.  Just because we don’t have the ability to buy lunch for everyone today doesn’t mean that we can’t make them feel good in our presence.  It doesn’t mean that we can’t open up space for them in our hearts.  Somedays we will prepare the meal and other times we are opening the doors.  Other days we are the guest.  It’s an exchange not a debt and as long as we are always putting in our share, that is more than enough.

We ended last week talking about magnetic influence, so let’s talk about the power of conviction to bring a vision to life.  I watched a highlight reel of D23 from this past year—it was something I have never seen before and didn’t even know existed.  Apparently this is a fan club and they hold a convention every year similar to one that is held in my business.  What caught my eye about this is the sheer intensity and insanity.  All of these people come to an imaginary world and dress up as fictional characters and they are all held to such a standard but it speaks to the power of group thought and acceptance and more than anything, it speaks to the power of conviction and the ability to stand behind our ideas.  It’s a testament to the power of moving forward on all cylinders, full ignition and not holding back.  Follow all the pieces and let them come together.  I think of all the changes and adaptations Disney has faced over it’s lifetime and the premise is always the same: imagination is king and nothing is impossible.  Disney himself created worlds that no one thought possible and it sparked the children, the imagination, the love, the creativity in millions of people.  Disney said, “All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.”  I wrote a piece on that as well from the perspective of courage but today I speak about that line from the perspective of the power of dreams.  Seeing all of these people suspend their realities to be someone else somewhere else for the time of the convention is a testament to the power of creativity and conviction and manifestation.  These people wanted it all to be real so a world appeared for them. 

The same thing is true for my (or any) business.  There is power in numbers and in energy.  When we come together with like minded individuals and embrace our power, we can make anything happen.  Disney talked of courage and there is courage in pursuing what seems crazy but more so in the conviction to keep going to bring the vision to life.  There is power in vision so don’t ever let anyone talk you out of an idea that they can’t see.  You see it so it is up to you to make it real.  I said last week that when we like ourselves and have belief in our ideas, we attract at a great rate.  This is a prime example of that.  We have to be willing to let go of what we know and build what we see, and we will attract the necessary tools and support because we have faith and belief in our ability, in our skills.  There is power in numbers and when we have an authentic frequency which already operates at a high level, that is amplified infinitely when people of the same belief come together.  There is power in vision, in sharing an idea, in group thought—there is power in conviction.  To reiterate, liking ourselves was never about power over others or ego, liking ourselves was about belief in our visions and abilities.

With all of that being said, seeing this highlight reel and having experienced the energy of a group coming together with a common goal, I want to hit home on this point: if Disney or any other creator can make something unreal tangible, if they can bring an idea based in total fantasy into reality, that is all the proof we need that we can do the same.  It doesn’t look the same for all of us, but we all have the power to create—and we are meant to use it.  It’s magnetic when we believe in ourselves and that power is amplified when others believe in it too.  It’s amazing how people will naturally be drawn toward that confidence, that assurance, and that conviction.  It’s amazing how we can propel ourselves when we have that level of belief as well.  I’ve seen and heard people talk about fearing that type of group thought but I see it differently: I see the magic in creation and how fulfilling our destiny and obligation brings about the power for others to do the same.  It’s showing people how to make the unreal, real.  Like I said above, don’t let anyone talk you out of what they can’t see—you see it for a reason.  Don’t hold back. 

Today I am grateful for the truth.  We are in the grim process of cleaning up my Aunt’s house after her death—the entire family is gone now so it is only us able to do this.  Nothing allows us to process what has happened and what to do next like the truth.  That’s the only thing that allows us to make sense of the situation, it’s why the human mind will always try to logic its way through the scenario, why it will always try to come up with an answer—it’s trying to make things make sense.  The brain will fill in the gaps and try to complete the story and then it will try to rationalize what happened and what was going on.  It amazes me how we have differing experiences even if we are in the same moment.  We have these images of who people are, what we think their experiences were, how they felt and what they thought.  And sometimes, if we are lucky enough, we find the evidence we need to know for sure what was happening, the story of who they are.  Sometimes we can hear it and know, sometimes we need to see it.  But the truth is once we know it, it’s there.  Sometimes we need to ask ourselves if we really need that solidified.  The closure we need is in the way we feel anyway.  And now, I have closure.  My brain doesn’t want to accept parts of it, that stubborn belief that people will always be their best and fulfill their potential (and that they want to, but there is nothing more that can dispute it.  This is what happened, and this is the end result.  There is no need to waste energy trying to make it something else.  There are no re-dos in this game, it’s over.  That’s the truth.    

Today I am grateful for clear signs and reminders.  Seeing the patterns in the family that are 100% evident and obvious, has given me a harsh reality check on a few things.  As I’ve been organizing my thoughts and emotions around everything that has happened in the family, I see more clearly than ever that emotional management is the only way to move forward.  If I want to achieve my dreams and goals then it’s up to me to keep that alive—and letting emotions run rampant to the point I’m unable to function isn’t going to do it.  I’m in the mausoleum of a life that someone allowed that to happen.  Holding onto the emotions, documenting every mark against themselves, looking for their dues, what is right.  I’m learning that isn’t the way to “Get what is owed,” that’s how we start to nosedive in this world.  This family had everything—through hard work and dedication and determination, this family literally created the makings of an empire.  And for pride, for fear, for pleasure, for guilt, for comfort, for ego and what it thought it was owed, they literally crashed it to the ground thinking that was the only way.  We have the opportunity to change the view on this, and that’s what I’m going to do before it’s too late.  The sign/reminder is this: to fly free and pursue the life we are actually meant to have, we need to put the emotion away, close the book, and move on. 

Today I am grateful for understanding responsibility.  We are entirely responsible for our lives and the results we get.  We are responsible for making changes when necessary, for pulling up when we see that we are about to hit, for taking stock and understanding when the situation needs us to pivot—specifically when we see our actions are causing more harm than good.  I hear the way the remaining members of the family speak to each other and I hear them in the phrases I’ve found myself uttering as well.  I ask myself, “are these even really MY feelings or is this something I’m picking up from them?”  Worse, I see that it has been engrained in me so long that I’ve managed to pass some of those beliefs to my husband in the way we operate our family, and in my son under the guise of doing his best turning into perfectionism.  That isn’t who I want to be.  I want to do better     

Today I am grateful for learning forgiveness and patience.  In all this mess, I have my Aunt’s cat.  It’s painful but also kind of ironic.  There’s the loss of my aunt just shy of the year mark of my other Aunt, only a month after the loss of my own cat.  I was NOT anticipating getting another cat and now we are managing an outdoor cat from the neighborhood and now we have this cat.  He is an incredibly sweet boy but also unbelievably shy and scared.  It takes a lot of work to get through to an animal like that and the entire process has brought me into the present moment—that’s all I can do is be present.  I feel so bad for this animal knowing the few days of torture he must have gone through right after my Aunt died.  There is the family dynamic to heal in taking on this animal because he is literally the last living link to her.  There is nothing else we can resolve with her, the family is gone, but we have this animal who had nothing to do with the history who needs our help and love.  And it’s requiring immense patience and will and acceptance and forgiveness to move forward.  It’s sad and healing all at once.  The healing comes with forgiving everything that happened, every horrible event in that home, in the family, in the business.  And putting love in its place.          

Today I am grateful for peace.  There is so much to say about this, some I have said before, some I have felt before.  But what I’m sitting with in this moment is that at the end of the day life will always move on, stuff is just stuff until someone puts value to it, empires will fall if we don’t treat them with respect,  it’s our responsibility to take care of our lives and turn them into something valuable outside of physical/material things, and we only have control over how we live and the definitions we put in place/what we give meaning to because when all is said and done, someone will be going through everything and determining what’s garbage and what isn’t.  I’m grateful this entire mess has shown me what it is to let go and how to reconcile the emotion—ok, maybe not now, but what needs to be done in order to truly move on.  We have to make peace with these emotions, these fears, our behaviors, and then we can change what needs to be changed—and that changes the rest of the course.  And I truly am at peace with all of that.     

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead

“The most magnetic thing in the universe is you liking you,” JB Copeland.  When we like ourselves we are able to support who we are and we are able to draw our power because we know our skills and our abilities and when we like that about ourselves, we continue to draw power and attract those who can help bring that to life. The universe is attracted to love and positive energy so when we like ourselves, we are attracting all of the positive around us as well.  If we are going to give up what we knew, if we are going to realize that the change is worth the fear of stepping into the unknown and release the weight of carrying what we told ourselves we had to carry, then we need to know we are capable, that we love ourselves, that we appreciate our abilities. 

People struggle with this because they think it comes down to ego—so either they shut the concept down because they think ego is bad or they take it too far and become egotistical.  Liking oneself actually has nothing to do with ego.  Liking oneself is an appreciation for the life we have and life in general.  When we like ourselves we find these innate skills that need to be used to navigate through our days, how we help others, how we show up in the world because when we like ourselves, we find our authentic frequency.  If we struggle with appreciating what we have then we will likely not be comfortable appreciating what’s to come.  We won’t be open enough to receive it.

Liking ourselves is more about taking up the mantle of our capabilities and accepting responsibility for the life we want to create and how it impacts others.  It has very little to do with what we want and more to do with who we are so ego has nothing to do with it.  It’s us refining our skills so we can enter the flow of life and live as we are meant to.  So we can help others by being an example of what it takes to serve, to life, and to share.  When we do those things, when we know who we are and we accept that responsibility, the universe responds intensely by opening all the doors to what we want and are meant to have.  Serving our purpose and bringing it all together mean more than any material thing we can show the world to prove our worth.  How we use our skills and what we share with the world is where it matters—and that all starts with liking ourselves enough to accept who we are and to own our role. 

“When you command the universe for change, don’t flinch as the old world shatters to dust beneath your feet,” Wild Woman Sisterhood.  I like this little reminder as continued encouragement from yesterday.  As someone who has spent a majority of life trying to keep everything under control and making it appear a certain way, as someone who frequently fell apart at the slightest inconvenience, I can attest that I wanted things to change without changing.  I can also confirm that I felt that anything that fell apart was a personal attack and a direct reflection of my worth and ability.  I was never taught that sometimes the old has to fall apart to make way for the new.  I read Billy Crystal’s “700 Sundays” (the book the show was based on—I wrote about that a while ago) and there is reference to Zutty Singleton about the rose—how sometimes, even as beautiful as the flower is, we need to cut it back to make way for something even more.  I struggled with that because I have an intense appreciation for the bloom of what got me here.  How do I let go of what is perfectly good in order to get something else?  Can’t we just expand?

But as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned that we simply can’t bear the weight of all of it.  We can’t have the life we used to have and a new one—we aren’t designed to carry both.  The brain can’t live in two worlds at once.  And the fact that we can’t hold it doesn’t indicate we are weak.  We have to learn that when things break it isn’t because we have failed or that we are incapable.  It’s because we are so strong that the old ways can’t hold us.  We are evolving and developing to a new level.  Destruction is terrifying but it is also a good sign.  When we clear the landscape, we have room to build anew.  We can always appreciate what was and what got us to where we are—but that is what served as a foundation for us, not a permanent residence.  If we decide we want something new and suddenly all we knew is falling apart, take heart.  The universe is showing us our power and how it responds to what we want.  Appreciate it because we wouldn’t get what didn’t align.  It’s not as if things will empty to never fill again.  No, we are clearing space to bring in what we are meant to have.  To serve a bigger purpose. Embrace the change.