This started as a personal outlet. A living, breathing journal so to speak. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew that I had to. I’ve always sort of lived in my own head. Keeping my thoughts to myself, writing things down and thinking, wow, that’s good, yet never bringing myself to share. I didn’t grow up in a home where we shared our thoughts and feelings. It wasn’t that we were told we couldn’t but rather that we were not taught how to. My parents truly did the best they knew how in raising our large brood of children so this isn’t a dig at them. We all do the best we can from the knowledge we have and the rest we just make up as we go. Sometimes we get it right, many times we get it wrong. I know this first hand as a parent myself.
I’ve been afraid on so many levels to just put myself out there. Deeply afraid. So much so, even as I write, just me and my computer with no one looking back at me or over my shoulder I have the type of knot in my stomach that you get when your nerves get the best of you. Here’s the thing, it’s not just the personal exposure that gets me terrified. Professionally, the knot is exponentially greater! The level of anxiety I can often have when I have to speak in front of crowds, large or small, write an article or produce anything that someone else will see or use causes me to pause just thinking about it. My hands have been a sweaty mess, my mind has gone blank, I’ve even become short of breath right up to the start of the presentation or discussion I’m leading! All of that, and, I’m great at what I do. That’s why I’m sharing a piece of my story today.
No one knows what they don’t see.
Many people find it in themselves today to reach out to me to tell me how they admire the way I’ve moved through becoming divorced and now being a single mom or a mom in general, or how impressed they are with me professionally and the work I’m doing. My feelings are always the same. I love nothing more than the fact that me showing up gives someone else the push or the desire they need whether for a moment or a season, and there is nothing more special about me than there is about any of you. The world is out here being the world and I’m getting tossed around like everyone else! I choose to show up, overcoming a little bit more each day.
The reason I’m putting it out there is because I don’t have it all together and someone needs to know that. We get to choose how we make it through all the mess and we don’t have to be batting 100 every time. What matters is that we are coming up to bat!
One final piece to share.
Keeping it short today, so I’ll share this final piece. I had a pretty tough couple of days at work recently paired with, you guessed it, a couple of pretty tough days at home. The kids were just coming off of a break and getting back to school was soooo ratchet! I’ve been working A LOT! Don’t take that as a complaint, it’s not, but it is a point of validation for me because in working a lot I’m doing work I love and feel I’m accomplishing some great things, but there is a lot of change happening. With change many times comes mountains of challenges. I hit the type of wall I’d never hit before and you know what the first thought I had was, “I’m not good enough”. Now the challenges that met me during these rough couple of days had nothing to do with who I was, only where I was in the process. That’s the point. As I tell my sons all the time, we can do hard things and we don’t have to take it as a punishment when things go the wrong way or we don’t hit as high as we were aiming.
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