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Love Offering

Write as a gift to yourself and others.
Everyone has a story to tell.
Writing is not about creating tidy paragraphs that sound lovely or choosing the “right” words.
It’s about noticing who you are and noticing life and sharing what you notice.
When you write your truth, it is a love offering to the world because it helps us feel braver and less alone.

-Glennon Doyle Melton



So here it is: my love offering to the world. My trips and falls, and pick-me-ups, and forward steps all on this journey towards something better- toward my best life. Better physical health, better mental health, better process each day.

It’s hard when you don’t know what you don’t know. You screw some things up, and you figure them out and things get better for a while. You can go on that way, thinking, “Hooray, I’m fixed, I’m free! And I never have to worry about that again.”

Wrong.

And it’s taken me a while to start putting the pieces together.

But here’s what I know, right NOW, in this moment:
  1. I’m better than I was yesterday. That’s my ultimate goal, really. I’m learning to accept that I can’t be perfect. That one is tough because shame loves perfectionists. BOOM. (Thank you, Brene Brown, for that lightbulb moment!) Being inherently a people pleaser, it’s easy to trick myself into thinking people around me are happiest when I’m perfect, whether or not I’m actually happy. And maybe they are, in which case, they’re the wrong people!
  2. Wellness is about ALL THE THINGS. It’s not about just physical health, or mental health, or spiritual health. These different facets become the feedback loop of your life. They feed into each other and feed off of each other. How can you feel good mentally if you feel shitty on the most basic physical plane? And if you’re not sure how to be happy without everyone around you telling you that’s what you are, then you’ve got a lot of work to do. (AHEM)
  3. The status quo is not good enough. The base level of anxiety I’ve lived with my whole life, or the allergies and autoimmune crap I’ve slogged through, or the sheer level of TIRED I’ve always been and just assumed was normal… NOT. GOOD. ENOUGH. And what does feeling good even look like??? I’m still figuring this one out, which leads me to the next thing.
  4. It’s on me. Nobody else. I can’t blame my genetics or my upbringing. I can’t blame that teacher I thought didn’t like me, or the friend who talked behind my back. I can only control what I can control (see #1) and nothing else. WHOA. Cool! That’s the most freeing thing! Also one of the scariest things, but in a, “Look at all of the possibilities, isn’t this exciting?!” kind of way. That means figuring out #2 is IN MY POWER. That’s a space I’ll fight to stay in.



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