About this time last year, I stopped practicing some healthy habits I’d worked very hard to create. I stopped regularly working out. I stopped writing every week. I stopped honoring my calendar and found myself working at odds hours of the night. In short, I stopped being the woman I wanted to be.
What do you do when you’re not living the life you want to live?
It didn’t happen overnight, yet still, it happened. And I don’t really understand why. Truth be told, I’ve done this before. Living the life I want to live, crushing my goals, feeling focused, confident, then almost as if on purpose, as if self-destruction was my intent, found myself on a divergent path headed in the wrong direction.
Even when we don’t understand ourselves, we still have to accept ourselves.
I was unhappy. Embarrassed… Fighting myself to get back on the path towards full self-expression. And then yesterday I wound up giving the very advice that I myself needed to hear. I was talking with a friend in an unhealthy relationship. She’s frustrated because she knows she needs to leave yet somehow can’t, and she doesn’t understand why. I reminded her of a lesson I had once learned but have apparently since forgotten… that even when we don’t understand ourselves, we still have to accept ourselves. We still have to love ourselves. We have to do the thing we know to do even when it’s hard.
We all face challenges; we all stumble. Sometimes even the smallest step forward can feel colossal and impossible. If it were easy, we wouldn’t spend $10B a year on the self-help industry. In talking to my friend I realized I too was fighting myself, frustrated and stuck. I decided to heed my own advice: Just because I don’t understand how I got here doesn’t mean I have to stay here!
To get in motion I joined a private Facebook group of fellow speakers who meet online to help one another make time to write. And I’m pleased to report that this morning I successfully wrote for two solid hours. I’m done with the self-loathing. I’m done with the negative self-talk. I’m done trying to understand why I fell off the wagon. Because spending any more time trying to understand how I got here gets me nowhere.
Feeling Stuck?
Are you stuck? If walking away seems too hard, try walking towards something instead. Just take one step out of your head and into action.
#cocktailnapkinquote #swayfactor