Something to be Proud of

I have a suggestion for you.

If you are a person who struggles with perfectionism, lean towards negativity, or just have a tendency not to recognize your accomplishments.

Start keeping a journal.

Or hell, you can do it on scrap paper.

But a journal would be a good thing for you to look back on, so even if you have to bind those scrap papers together or put them in a jar, try to keep them in one place.

But most importantly, start writing down, each day, what you’ve accomplished.

What you’re proud of.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the last few years, you’ve noticed I’ve been struggling.

With life in general, but also overall to find meaning and purpose in my life.

I’ve seen this struggle in a lot of people.

To find meaning we need to connect our activities to purpose.

But I know I, and many others, can get very numb to the phrase, “Find your purpose.”

It is great advice if you know what your purpose is, but if you don’t, like many people, it can leave you feeling angry, bitter, resentful, and even more lost than you did beforehand.

So start small.

We don’t need to find our purpose today.

But we do need to find meaning.

Or realize when it’s not there.

When our daily activities do not, in fact, reflect a life we want to lead.

So I encourage you to start small and start with yourself.

“What if I have nothing to be proud of” I hear you say.

Trust me, I’ve been there.

On low mental health days, I still am.

But I also believe we can find a way.

We can find something small each day that we are glad we did.

Making the bed, eating some food, cooking a healthy lunch, going on a walk.

But it is important to notice.

If you look at your life and realize you hate everything you’re doing, take a minute to pause and breathe.

Give yourself a hug.

Try to find a way to be compassionate with yourself in this moment.

Don’t beat yourself up.

We all get lost sometimes.

We all get off track and wake up one day and say, “What the f*ck am I doing with my life?”

If it wasn’t so common we wouldn’t have phrases like “dark night of the soul” or “midlife crisis”.

Psychologists, therapists, and coaches wouldn’t have a job.

So trust me, you’re not the weird, horrible outlier who needs to be cast out of our society.

I spent the better part of two years thinking that there was something irreparably broken with me and only me.

Then I started talking to other people.

Reading books.

Listening to podcasts.

Ohhhhh.

We all feel this way sometimes.

To be honest, felt a little bit annoying at first, because we all want to feel special, even if in solely a negative way.

But I digress.

However, if you do find yourself in this situation, maybe give The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck a read.

I hope it helps you, but if it doesn’t, it will likely motivate you to find something that will.

Search for books, podcasts, music, or people that will resonate with you.

Know you are not alone.

And start to think: What could I do, even on the smallest possible scale, that would make me happy or proud of myself?

Now, be careful with this.

I once *cough* many times *cough* fell into the trap of thinking that I have to and in fact deserve to only and always do everything that I always want to do that would make me happy and proud and bring me joy and that everything and everyone that held me back from this desire was my enemy and needed to be eliminated from my life or treated with the bitterest possible form of resentment.

This is a recipe for a much deeper, self-righteous form of anger and upset.

Don’t do this.

It’s not that fun.

But if you can find moments where you can do something you’re proud of, do it.

Even if it’s getting out of the tram and walking home one stop earlier.

Or if you drive for your commute, going on a short walk when you can.

Packing a lunch for work instead of eating out.

Choosing something even slightly healthier than you normally would.

Cutting 5 minutes off your nightly Netflix routine.

And then write those things down.

Every day.

Show yourself that you are a person capable of positive action.

That you don’t need to wait around for external validation.

YOU can make yourself proud, sometimes even in hundreds of small ways, every single day.

And remember, these can be small ways, and can be specific to you.

What works for me may not work for you.

The point is to show yourself compassion and to celebrate all of your achievements, big and small.

It’s so so easy in today’s fast-paced society to feel overburdened and overwhelmed, exhausted at the end of each day and start to see everything as a chore.

To completely forget about why you’re tired, and what positive things you have accomplished and to just focus on exhaustion.

And that’s not to say that your life could just be incredibly exhausting and it’s time to try to change some things to make it more sustainable for you.

But if you’re feeling like your life has no meaning, it’s a very easy slippery slope to say that nothing you do matters and to lose all sense of autonomy and pride in what you are trying to do.

Making it through a difficult day is something to be proud of.

And if you can become your own cheerleader, it will be so much easier to find a way to improve your life.

It might be hard at first, but you do deserve to feel good about the effort you put into your life.

The 45th Post of Sisu

This last week or so I’ve felt like I do not have a resilient bone in my body.

That I have nothing to say about strength and resilience because I have none.

But that’s not true.

I’ve been deep in survival mode for the last year.

Being in that place gives you the kind of cognitive distortions that you need to survive, but they also make the world a very hard place to live in.

It could be argued that just living in today’s global society is an act of resilience.

It takes indescribable amounts of strength and focus to maintain good mental health these days.

We need boundaries that, for my generation, we never even considered.

We were the ones who grew up with social media.

We watched as it was born.

We experienced the world before Google and the fumbling through the internet immediately after it.

Typing out the lyrics of an entire song before the internet would let you find it.

Things are “easier” now.

But easier only in the sense of more convenient.

We are overloaded with apps and information, and for sensitive and easily distracted souls, it can feel like a barrage.

A constant attack.

A battle that we are always losing.

For perfectionists, losing feels like a personal failing.

But I have felt defeated for far too long.

I’m taking my life back and I’m taking you with me.

While I like to have an outlet for my struggles, I am going to do a better job of telling you what helps me.

Because if you read this and resonate with it, that’s great, but I don’t want us both to stay stuck.

So, today I will share with you some things that have helped me.

After a year of grappling with a level of burnout I have only ever felt once before in my adult life, I would say we need to be far more realistic in our time boundary setting.

I know for me I need joy, freedom, challenge and progress to move forward in life.

But if I try to add nine hobbies a day outside of a crushing work schedule, I will not survive.

Tricky as it is, that means it’s also important for me to have a job that doesn’t feel like it’s killing me.

I need a greater work life balance.

So I have finally left teaching in search of free time on nights and weekends.

The relief has yet to hit me, but I hope it will soon.

Which brings me to patience.

I wanted quitting the job that was sucking the life out of me to make me feel free.

While it did when I put in my notice, the panic, anxiety, stress, and mild depression have stayed.

And that is beyond frustrating.

So I am looking for more sustainable ways out.

Ways to understand and master myself.

Books, videos, podcasts.

Validation and a way forward.

Something and somewhere better than what I’ve had and where I’ve been.

So, some things to recommend if you are feeling stressed out and burnt out, on the verge of giving up:

Books:

Podcasts:

I listen to a lot of different podcasts, but by far We Can Do Hard Things, Hidden Brain, and the Happiness Lab have been the most helpful for me when I’m struggling. Here are some episodes that have helped me recently:

Activities:

Running
Hiking
Jogging
Spending time in nature
Journaling
Meditation
Art or some kind of creative activity
Spending time with friends
Deep talks
Laughter
Spending time with pets/animals
Weekend getaway
Taking a bath or long shower
Drinking tea
Drinking water
Stretching
Yoga
Naps
Doing less
Scheduling nothing during free time

I hope these things help you and I hope they continue to help me.

I want to get back to myself, to clear this fog of defeatism and get back to the happiness and joy of life that I know is out there waiting for me.

I hope you do the same.

With love,

Megan

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.

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.