The Forty-Fifth Post of Sisu

It’s been hard to keep up with this blog and this project the last month.

Here we arrive at the intersection of two things: my desire to use this space to learn, grow, share and heal and my feelings of guilt and failure when I can’t maintain a daily practice.

Perfectionism in my life had far surpassed its usefulness and now lies firmly under the title of maladaptive.

Where once I felt like I had control over it, it is now taking control over me.

I think when we experience long term stressful events we can easily fall back into the patterns and roles we learned as a child.

At least that’s been my experience.

So instead of seeing my monthlong battle with daily epilepsy symptoms as a sign to slow down and be kind and gentle with myself, my internal systems start to panic that I now have no way to prove my worth.

It is heartbreaking to write and doubly so to experience.

But this is not what I want my legacy to be.

A child who learned how to survive and became an adult whose maladaptive survival techniques made her fall apart at the seems.

It is unsustainable to place our value and worth in the hands of others.

To constantly look for external validation that we deserve to be here.

Not just because of the pain that it causes us, the striving and the letdown, but because we will never believe them anyway.

A key feature of perfectionism is the deeply held belief that one is not good enough. That worth needs to be proved, day in and day out.

Through our every word and action we need to prove that we deserve to be here.

A simultaneously held belief is that others do not.

Everyone is fine except me.

So when we do, produce or say something and we wait for the reaction of the person or people around us, we are not actually expecting our worth to be confirmed and validated.

If we do receive praise or approval, we won’t believe it anyway because our belief in our lack of worth is so much stronger.

At best, it becomes an internal battle of which voice will be believed.

At worst we don’t even feel it.

The love so readily given to us by others isn’t even felt.

We smile, but sadly.

I would love to believe that.

And we carry on.

Striving, pushing, hustling.

Hoping this next thing will finally be what completes us.

But it won’t.

And if we do get the confirmation that our work is not good enough, we will bitterly accept this rebuke because we knew it all along.

We were never really worthy and we knew it.

Angry and bitter, exhausted and confused, we carry on anyway doing the exact same things and expecting different results.

I have written ad nauseam in this project about how I wish to improve my resilience.

Yet yesterday, I listened to a podcast episode on Hidden Brain (if you don’t listen to this podcast, you definitely should!) about escaping perfectionism where they identified a key component of perfectionism being that those who experience it have the tendency to self-protect.

When we think something we produce won’t be good enough, we don’t try.

We procrastinate, we make excuses, we try to take ourselves out of the game because we can see we can’t do it perfectly.

We are also trained into a high degree of self-loathing and a low degree of self-compassion.

We will try to put a thousand things on our plate and do them all perfectly but they will literally never be good enough for us.

So what we see as having low resilience is actually completely off base because we are in fact doing more than others, can persevere and produce through many an adversity yet we will never see it.

This tracks so much with my personal experience that I didn’t even want to admit it.

Those closest to me have been telling me for years how they admire my strength and fortitude and I literally have no idea what they are talking about because I am waiting for perfection.

I have run ultramarathons, one even with a gnarly head cold (which I ran ten minutes faster than the previous) and I have the absolute audacity to tell myself that I have no resilience whatsoever.

It’s not that I can’t take criticism, it’s that I will tear myself apart no matter what the result.

Obviously, I have realized that this is an insanely unhealthy way to live my life so I have continued down an even deeper path to my own healing.

Recently I bought many books on various aspects of my mental and physical health because I genuinely believe that epilepsy, which I developed as an adult, is the intersection of my maladaptive coping mechanisms.

It was born of a time of great stress and pressure and it comes rearing back around every time that self-imposed (or occasionally environmentally-imposed) stress returns to my life.

Beginning to read When the Body Says No by Dr. Gabor Maté had confirmed my suspicions that stress is vastly more correlated with I’ll health and disease than we are willing to acknowledge as a society.

Not only that, but that with certain cancers and autoimmune diseases, the tendency of patients to self-abandon and people please is the largest predictive factor in terminal disease onset.

A bone-chilling read for someone who has spent a large part of their life doing exactly that.

But the thing is, not everyone is asking me for that.

There are some who do, but the majority of people in my life look out for me better than I do.

Just the other day I was telling some new coworkers who I do not know well about my recent health problems and how I have just two more weeks at my current job and they said, “That sounds like a really long time.”

I nearly cried.

Because this entire last month of feeling like death nearly 24 hours a day almost every day I have felt like I am letting them down by leaving and looking after myself.

And yet people who hardly know me said it’s completely understandable and that they would have quit immediately.

I think we perfectionists need this kind of feedback in our lives.

We need to see more normal strategies for self-care and stress release, and healthier approaches to living life in general.

Because I felt like an asshole giving a month’s notice and the majority of people I’ve spoke with thought a day would’ve been acceptable given the circumstances.

There is nuance to this as there is to everything, but it is eye-opening to see the connection between ill health and abandoning yourself.

So, perfectionists, let’s ask for feedback more often.

And if you have a perfectionist in your life, please give it.

Know that they might not hear it or feel it all the way, but they need it.

It could even help save their life.

The Forty-Fourth Post of Sisu

I never know how to begin the positive posts. 

I have gotten into such a habit of only writing when I need to work out the negative.

But I have had a breakthrough recently and it feels important. 

It feels like bigger things are coming. 

Possibility feels probable now. 

And while I have talked about the many factors that make up resilience, mindset has come forward as its most dominant element. 

My mind has been trained towards the negative not just because I am human, but because at some point I lost faith.

In my efforts, in other humans, and in the possibilities of my life. 

Covid was a hard time for everyone. 

For some much harder than others. 

I got lucky with my physical health, but the cost for me was the destruction of my mental health. 

I looked around me and saw an unsafe world, but that could only trouble me to an extent when I saw that myself and my loved ones were safe.

But when I looked around and saw a complete lack of support, I gave up.

I thought, “Fuck it. Nobody cares about and supports teachers so my work, and especially my hard work, no longer matters.”

I’ve written a lot about this time period, mostly from a place of anger and resentment, but I am still realizing how much it affects me to this day. 

I think I often underrate my need for other people in my life. 

Not just for social interaction, but for support. 

I am not the island I have often pretended to be and I need faith in other humans like I need air to breathe. 

Losing that trust and optimism led me to losing myself. 

I felt unmoored in an unsafe, unfriendly world and, to a degree, I gave up on my dreams. 

A lot of things stopped feeling possible to me and as an eternally hopeful optimist, I no longer knew where to go. 

I felt like I didn’t fit in my body and that my body didn’t fit in the world.

I neither had a place within or outside of myself. 

And I started to think that everybody knew something that I didn’t.

But on a deeper level, that everyone around me was on some level deeply untrustworthy. 

That the comments and sentiments I so regularly came across about teachers during lockdown were everyone’s secret feelings about me as a person. 

I felt my self-worth collapse. 

I was ready to take everything personally.

And I did.

And, well, you can read how that went. 

But last Friday everything changed. 

I felt the shift.

I have been looking for it for years and thank God I finally found it. 

I like to learn lessons the hard way and it seems I needed to spend a few years without a helpful mindset to remind me of why I lived the way I did up until that point.

That optimism, ridiculous faith, courage, trust, and a growth mindset, a deep belief in people, might not be the way some people live their lives, but it is the way I need to live mine. 

I am lost in the darkness without these things. 

It is the slow death of me. 

For years I have not recognized myself so I have been looking for myself in others. 

Understandably, I have not liked what I found.

When you are looking for the outside world to define you, it is dangerous who and what you can attract. 

But if there is one thing to be said about me it is that I am resilient. 

The irony of course being that I so often fail to recognize it. 

The quality I have been looking for so desperately that I started a blog about it is, in fact, one of my strongest qualities since birth. 

But it is dependent on many a factor and I cannot let those go. 

It does not stand by itself, but in the strong company of others.

We are all born with natural dispositions and others develop over time. 

I believe a bit in nature and a lot in nurture. 

But I know that while some people need logic and realism I get lost in them.

I follow my gut, my heart, my intuition. 

My nature is wild and it affects me less if I believe strongly in the goodness of others and get let down than if I never believe in them in the first place. 

This may be yet another ramble and I know it is unfinished, but as I am frantically typing this before work, I must finally go. 

I may have a massively optimistic and unrealistic sense of time, but both fortunately and unfortunately the tram lines do not and I must away. 

There is so much more to the story, but my brain works faster than I can type so you will just have to wait for the next installment.

The Forty-Third Post of Sisu

“When day comes, we step out of the 

Shade, aflame and unafraid. 

The new dawn blooms as we free it.

For there is always light,

If only we’re brave enough to see it. 

If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Amanda Gorman

I keep finding my mind in despair.

When I look for it, it is hiding in the darkness like it wants to get lost there.

It is tired, scared, and lonely. 

It wants to give up hope.

To assume that this is all there is and ever will be. 

Sadness.

But I know this is a trick of the mind. 

It makes sense to be and feel tired. 

I am in the middle of a medical emergency.

But my thoughts are feeding the stress and anxiety that are necessary to keep me there.

So I turn towards hope.

I try to be brave enough to see and be the light even when I am struggling. 

I try to slow down. 

To appreciate this new perspective. 

To lean into a greater appreciation of who I normally am.

What my body and mind allow me to do and be. 

Because right now they cannot be that person and it will be heartbreaking if I let it be. 

It’s funny how life makes you prove what you say you want. 

I wanted to be more hopeful, resilient, optimistic. 

So life has given me the hardest time in which to do so. 

Try to be hopeful, optimistic, and resilient through this. 

Because if you can find those qualities now, you will always be able to find them. 

If you can find gratitude now, you will never go without out. 

Great training, albeit painful. 

The different parts of me fighting for air, fighting to take up space.

But I want hope to win. 

I want resilience to win. 

I want optimism to win. 

We are always changing.

Life is always changing.

So while this is an incredibly difficult time for me, I will not lose myself to it. 

I will look back and remember all the magnificent things I have done in my life and I will look forward and imagine what else might still lie in store, knowing life usually veils the best from me. 

Lets it be a surprise. 

Alright then life, keep your secrets. 

I can accept that I am here, now, in this fight for a reason. 

That you are not always trying to weaken or undermine me, but make me stronger. 

That you are putting me through the experiences I need to learn and grow. 

I said I wanted to be hopeful, resilient, optimistic, strong, so let me prove to you that I can be.

The Forty-Second Post of Sisu

“You are fragile and that is okay to accept.”

It’s the first time I’ve accepted those words as a gift and not rejected them as an insult. 

I have built na identity out of my capability, my strength. 

Look at her go! 

Look at all that she can do!

Even I don’t know how to be when I can’t. 

When I am home sick with epilepsy symptoms that make me feel like my body is failing me, still that little voice whispers that I should be using my time productively. 

Still the worry is there that if I take this much time off running I will have nothing to come back to. 

I read a post on Instagram the other day that self-care is productive. 

I tried to believe it. 

I would love to believe and act as if my health is the most important thing right now. 

I have certainly fought for it hard enough.

And yet I still find myself feeling so time poor that I want to fill every moment with tasks from days previous that have been left undone. 

Desires to learn and do yet unfulfilled. 

That should not be my job right now, but I am making it so. 

I am trying to make myself work, to be, to do something greater than myself all the time. 

And it is exhausting. 

Not as exhausting as the job that feels like it is slowly killign me. 

But still, I am exhausted. 

And I am bored.

I want to run miles every day and learn languages and travel and see the world and spend time with my friends and family and read every book and finish every online course and be back before dinner. 

I still want everything all at once. 

But mostly, I want to leave no second unfilled. 

No time unused. 

It is not that I am afraid to be with myself.

It is that I fear every second, minute, hour, month, and year falling through my hands like so many grains of sand, faster the more tightly I try to grasp it.

It feels like that, my approach to time. 

A grasping, panicked attempt to do and be everything all at once. 

Sometimes I am not even sure if the goals I want are real or if I just need something to pursue. 

Still trying to make up for the time I wasted in my youth. 

Still circling the mountain, talking about and being frustrated with the same exact things. 

Damn, it’s hard to be human. 

I heard somewhere recently that instead of identifying with the ways in which we are being that are no longer working, we need to act in the ways we want to be or we will stay stuck as we are.

So that is why I see this message as a gift. 

Because right now, I am fragile. 

Right now, I can barely work. 

I feel, and am, very sick.

And I am trying very hard not to feel caged. 

Trapped. 

My fears would like me to think this will be a lifetime, but I know that it will not. 

Everything passes with time, but fears are illogical and they don’t listen to me. 

So I must carry on with or without them. 

I must show them that this is temporary. 

That thank you, I understand their concern. 

It is a valid one. 

These are scary, unprecedented times. 

But they can also be a gift. 

Not to check off everything I’ve ever left unchecked on my to-do list, but to breathe. 

To relax and detox from a situation that is taking me down. 

I can no longer be the person who overpowers their body with their mind. 

My body is so far winning this battle. 

And I will let it. 

Perhaps not win, but at least speak. 

And I will listen.

I will slow down. 

I will hear and then work to reframe every thought on the emotional roller coaster that is the worsening of a chronic health condition. 

I let two things be true at once. 

I can accept the support when it’s given to me.

Joy and Hope: The Forty-First Post of Sisu

It can be hard to break out of our habits. 

I have been a highly driven person for years now, spending most of my free time working on my goals and trying to improve myself. 

I don;t often take breaks and historically I haven’t liked them, but the break that these recent health problems has forced me to take has actually been nice. 

I have been given the opportunity to step outside my life and have a look at it.

To really see what is and is not working. 

Some of it was quite obvious and some things have been rather interesting. 

Time is a topic I have discussed at length over the last couple of years with the people around me. 

I have always felt like I am spending mine wrong.

This is partially a product of perfectionism and a strong inner critic, but I think time can be a tricky subject for many people. 

We want to have full, rich lives, but what does that mean?

Does that mean spending hours on a Saturday studying the language we really want to learn or spending time with friends and family? 

We very often can’t do both and it’s hard to choose between two things we love. 

A friend of mine made a comment recently about the connection between the level of ambition a person has and their overall happiness.

Are less ambitious people generally happier? 

Do they feel less stressed about their time? More free to just live?

I think so. 

Being raised in America with the concept that even your best is never enough and can always be improved can be both a motivating and constricting concept.

It binds you to productivity in a way that can be excruciating. 

I remember “once” (read: many times) crying to my sister that I can’t stop. 

That I need to work. 

You have no idea how behind I am.

But this nonstop hustle has destroyed my confidence and happiness and it has been an effort to rebuild them.

To redefine my values and to consciously choose to live differently.

I am still working on it. 

Some days go better than others, but I think it will be the work of a lifetime to really figure out what a good life means to me. 

How I can balance working towards my goals and letting myself enjoy my life now.

We are sold the idea that they are mutually exclusive, but why?

Who does that benefit? 

Life cannot be simply working towards things because then there is no arrival point.

One could argue that there is never an arrival point, but all the same, I would like to enjoy my life now. 

I would like to hold two truths at once. 

That I deserve this peace, this rest, this joy, and that there are things I am working towards. 

I think it is possible to do this in a happier way. 

Instead of holding a degree of dissatisfaction in my mind to keep me motivated, I’d like to replace it with joy and hope. 

A vision for a brighter future. 

I may have accomplished a lot in the last six years, but holding that dissatisfaction close to my heart did not keep it from spreading, it just ensured that I would find dissatisfaction in my life everywhere I looked.

So that is my new vision for my life. 

To hold joy and hope close to my heart. 

To watch those spread.

To look around one day and see them everywhere I look.

The Fortieth Post of Sisu

Honesty can be really hard.

But since defining my values the other day, I find it harder to not live authentically.

I know clearly now where I want and need to realign my life and I need to do it. 

There is a stronger pull toward positive change than there is to staying the same.

And it started with honesty.

I knew it would potentially put me in a very precarious situation. 

We say things and we can’t take them back.

But I also knew that I would be happier this way. 

I would be able to take with me the knowing that I had stayed true to myself. 

So I shared my truth.

I gave the space and freedom for the others involved to show up however they wanted.

And it was terrifying. 

The vulnerability hangover was off the charts. 

What the fuck have I done? What the FUCK is wrong with me? Why would I do that? 

My brain hit me with a barrage of very valid questions and so I started to second-guess myself. 

But as strong as the pull was to take it all back, to keep the peace, to be the people pleaser I’ve been conditioned to be I just couldn’t.

I had to remind myself again and again that I did the right thing. 

That yes, there was the possibility that I might be the only person involved  who thought it was the right thing, but that still it was the right thing for me.

And against all perceived odds, it actually went well.

To be honest, I’m still a little surprised. 

It doesn’t always go well. 

In fact, it often doesn’t.

When our truth, our true experience is inconvenient or negatively impactful for others, it can be hard.

But they took it well and responded with kindness.

It is amazing how being heard takes the defensiveness right out of me.

I don’t feel like I have to fight anymore. 

I can put down my weapons, take off my armor, and have a civilized discussion about how to move forward. 

It’s so easy to make people your enemies when you think they don’t understand you. 

So here we go, charging forward. 

Doing the hard things to break our own cycles and finally move forward with our lives. 

Our values clear, our selves intact.

The Thirty-Ninth Post of Sisu

Along with hope comes joy.

I think we need access to joy as part of our resilience practice. 

I have spent a long time being more task and goal-oriented than fun and joy-oriented. 

A bit of an overcorrection from my days of youthfully not giving a shit I guess you could say.

So I made myself serious. 

Developed a deep practice of self-criticism. 

Found a lens through which to see my past as an utter failure and used that view to blackmail myself into being what I thought would be a valued member of society.

It has both worked and backfired massively. 

In the last few days of self-reflection I have tried to sift through the pieces to see what’s true. 

What hurts the most and why, what I never needed and what can stay. 

I have done remarkable things in the last six years. 

Things I am incredibly proud of.

And also, at the same time, I have lost myself fully and completely in a myriad of ways. 

Luckily for me, we are always growing and changing os this sense of a loss of self is not entirely unfamiliar to me. 

I have the tools with which to examine my life from a place of greater knowing. 

And also I felt completely fucked and like my life is falling apart around me.

But I have mentioned Martha Beck’s work before and The Way of Integrity is what I keep coming back to.

It is not that I am completely and totally fucked and irreparably broken, I have just been lost inside the dark wood of error yet again. 

Living a life that I thought would make me happy. 

And although it feels like it is all coming crashing down around me, I know that that is because I am living out of integrity with myself. 

I have made choices from a place of fear and doubt, the need for approval and validation being my driving forces. 

But if I can just accept and love myself, I can easily find my forward.

The path is clear. 

It seems so simple. 

It is, in reality, going to upset a lot of people, and maybe even break my heart a little bit, but I know now what is right for me. 

What is aligned with my values and what is not. 

Because that is always where the dissonance lies. 

Joy and fun and play and goofiness and reckless abandon have their time and place. 

It is that I, looking backwards, defined myself as only one thing. 

I saw myself as an arrogant asshole who didn’t care about anyone or anything who ruined her own life and now has to do penance. 

Because at some point I finally woke up and started to care what people think and decided that they probably thought I was a piece of shit.

But that is a massive oversimplification of a decade of time. 

Not to mention that it doesn’t account for many of the facts. 

I let the poetic ruminator within me take control of my life rather than allowing me, at my core essence to do so. 

I forgot my autonomy and decided to blame myself for my reaction to my conditioning. 

Instead, I have now chosen to take accountability for myself and my life, but to do so with the lens of compassion. 

To actually care about myself like a friend rather than seeing myself as an enemy who needs to be defeated. 

Try convincing a perfectionist that we are all imperfect humans who make mistakes and who still have room to learn and grow and watch them try to wiggle out of their seat in discomfort. 

I don’t know if any of this is making sense, but I keep writing here in case it resonates and because it helps me make sense of myself. 

This perhaps convoluted post is to say that the labels we identify with, whether they be negative or positive, dictate our behavior. 

There is a massive difference in how I show up in the world when I tell myself I need to atone for my past, be perfect at all times and seek the approval of others for validation of my worth than when I tell myself I am good and kind and trying my best. I may make mistakes, but we are all human and I can always learn and grow.

I am no longer becoming the energy of the fear of rejection and not being good enough.

I am now the energy of doing the best I can and looking to learn from myself and my life. 

How much kinder can I be to others when I am not personifying the fear of being judged? 

How much more forgiving can I be with myself?

So yes, I think we deserve joy. 

And I think our resilient selves need it. 

We need to ne silly and celebrate the little things. 

Our daily triumphs and the holidays we love.

We get to do this.

We have just this one wild and precious life.

The Thirty-Eighth Post of Sisu

I think that while there are many aspects to resilience, one of the largest is hope.

We need to have hope in order to carry on. 

We need to have hope to keep living our lives. 

We need to have hope to believe things can change and to take action towards those changes. 

We need to the element of positivity to bring light to the darkness of challenging times. 

To remind ourselves that we can do this, that there is a way out. 

I think resilient people are able to hold this lightly and wholeheartedly in their daily lives.

They don’t have to remind themselves to stay hopeful, they just naturally are.

Or they have taught themselves to be. 

How stuck do we feel when we give up hope? 

We think there is no way out. 

No solution that will serve us.

So we fall into inaction and self-pity.

We look for someone to save us and get angry when they don’t.

I am speaking from experience. 

We need hope like we need faith. 

To trust in ourselves, the world and a better outcome. 

I sat down today and defined my values and reflected on how different my life is than what I say is important to me. 

The exercise can be humbling, excruciating even, because it forces you into integrity. 

You must admit that you are not living the way you want to live. 

That maybe lately you haven’t been the person you wanted to be. 

But when I looked at the array of qualities I had chosen as very important, those things I would like to embody to be a person I am proud of, hope was there.

Literally, the word hope. 

So I entertained the idea.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look at this value gap and be hopeful. 

Trust that I can realign my life and live a brighter future.

Trust that I am doing my best and hope that there is an even better best available to me. 

Hope that I can be more consistently kind to myself. 

Be my own sturdy leader. 

I am hopeful

The Thirty-Seventh Post of Sisu

Reframing limiting beliefs is a hard thing for anyone, but having the strength to questions yourself is a cornerstone of resilience. 

Not question in the sense of doubt, but rather to look at things from all angles.

To be able to take in new and conflicting information and sort out the best way forward. 

What makes the most sense?

Where am I buying into my limiting beliefs? 

I have written a lot over the last few years about my frustration with epilepsy.

My anger, my disappointment, my body’s betrayal.

But as I sat with myself yesterday I realized that I don’t feel that coming from my body.

I don’t feel like my body is an enemy just waiting to take me down, excited for me to fail.

My body feels proud of me, of our accomplishments. 

Ready to take on the next challenge with very little complaint. 

I have put it through years of tough training.

Race, after race, after race.

Always striving for more. 

And it glides along gladly, happy to be a part of it. 

It is my mind that tells unhelpful stories.

It is those stories that must be overcome.

The stories of “I’m not good enough” or “this is not enough” that steal my happiness and make me doubt myself and my life. 

It is my mind that is the questionable partner, not my body. 

My body that asks for so very little, but shouts when it needs something. 

How can I begrudge it that? 

When it so very rarely even gets a seat at the table.

How could I not help this body that, in spite of everything, gets me through so much?

Is that not strength? 

What I have been calling weakness is a body that has allowed me to run an ultramarathon in the middle of a weeklong head cold. 

A body that let me move across the world a weak after a near-fatal seizure. 

My body accepts everything, but sometimes, it does speak up. 

It quietly and firmly demands the rest it needs.

And I have the nerve to let it upset me.

But if I take away the feelings of angst towards myself, could we, my body and mind, finally form a more perfect team? 

Could we be stronger together? 

My body, that has done almost everything I have ever asked of it and my mind that can find solutions to nearly any challenge?

Together, we could be close to unstoppable. 

Together, we could be whole.

The Thirty-Sixth Post of Sisu

I think it takes courage to examine our lives and thinking. 

To identify what is and is not working for us and to ask for better from and for ourselves.

The older we get the easier it can be to go with the flow, to give up on our dreams.

We get tired.

It’s too hard.

Life has already taught us that it’ll be too difficult. 

There are too many people younger than us who have achieved far more. 

We fall into the prescribed patterns of comparison, jealousy, and judgment and begrudgingly give up on ourselves.

I’ve torn myself wide open on this blog and shared a lot of real and true things that I am not proud of. 

I don’t always paint myself in the best light. 

But I need a place to be honest. 

I also need writing (and running) to process my experiences. 

I look forward to both and both help me in complementary ways.

A key struggle of mine these past few years is reconciling the deeply at odds extremes of my personality.

I love to wake up at 5am and get more done in a morning than most people get done in a day.

I also like to melt into the couch and eat junk food. 

Okay, well I like that less, but realizing that that is a reaction coming from an internal attempt to balance my energies helps me to direct myself differently. 

I am still merging too much with my emotions to be able to recognize the different aspects of my personality and stay in the driver’s seat. 

But awareness is the first step and one of the benefits of this blog is making me more aware of myself. 

I need adventure and adrenaline just as I need time to rest.

So how can I incorporate both into my life without becoming my laziness? 

By first recognizing that rest isn’t laziness, it’s necessary.

If I want to be a highly effective person who can do a million things and run a million miles, I need to be able to rest and recover. 

My deeply critical thoughts about my normal human needs are conditioning and they are false. 

They do not bring me peace and they do not help me grow and thrive. 

They are what keep me stuck. 

What make me feel like I am never enough because I haven’t “cured” myself of the parts of myself that I don’t like.

Because when I really look within and can be really loving, kind, and honest with myself, I don’t want to be a robot. 

I want to be fully human and messy and complicated and normal without thinking I am a failure. 

I want to give myself the gift of compassion and understanding.

That being human is normal and okay. 

To remove the separateness I am always forcing upon myself.

Making room for all aspects of myself and my personality while letting the core of who I am remain in control. 

Trusting myself to experience everything I experience while knowing it won’t overtake me. 

Being the calm in the storm. 

Part of the path to greater resilience for me is greater acceptance of myself. 

Knowing that who I am is valid and important and that I do make a positive impact on the world.

That who I am is enough and that I can choose how I show up in the world, not just wait around for it to be dictated for me. 

I think we all need to remember that. 

That we do have choice, we do have agency, and that if we allow ourselves to actually experience it we can create more authentic lives for ourselves.