How to Take Care of Yourself Part One

so many options...

I'm reading this amazing book called Rise Sister Rise and listening to Tara Brach and blowing my own mind almost daily with new stuff to think about, and new stuff to think about myself which translates into new stuff to think about us. Like this: 

I am a people pleaser- many of us are, it makes self avoidance so much easier. If I'm working on making someone else happy then I can totally avoid looking at my own contentment which means I also avoid looking at my own discontentment which means yay! I'm safe! Which I understand now is complete bullshit, I've known it for a long time, but there's this big difference between knowing something and understanding something.

Like how I knew I had a big drinking problem for ever, but I didn't understand it until I just blammo, GOT IT. Got it hardcore on the last morning I woke up hungover and saw my future full of shame, empty bottles, full ashtrays, and deep sadness.

I sometimes think about my life as a series of lines and tributaries- all these ways and paths to places I've been a thousand times before or never seen, that the places I've been maybe I've always been looking left when I really needed to be looking right, or the places I've never been I haven't gone because I was afraid or it seemed too hard or mostly because I felt uninvited by my own ineptitude.

I am inviting a lot of opposites and bravery into my life these days. And by that I mean looking at situations from ALL the sides, not just the ones that are comfortable to me, or the ones I know, but trying to see it from another point of view, and then another, and then another because all things don't have just two sides. There are a thousand sides to see, then another thousand after that, and by looking and seeing I can make informed decisions. So I try to see things from a few different sides. (not a thousand though, I mean I don't have that kind of time) That takes patience- and that's one way I take care of myself, by having the patience to not rush my brain and my heart into rapid fire judgements but to take my gut reaction and then de-gut it, look at it from exactly the opposite reaction, and then work my way around the circle to see where I might land when I stop being dragged along by myself.

I spent a long time thinking I felt one way, and then opened myself up to the possibility that maybe I had no frickin' clue who I was at all, but that it would be pretty cool to learn about who I might be, and then allowing for that person to change and metamorphose and be dynamic rather than stagnant.

One of my biggest mistakes has been sameness. I have always thought that I would strive and push and pull and get myself fixed into this idea of the woman I think I'm supposed to be and then I'd happy. That if I weighed the right amount and wore the right thing and said the right words I would somehow be initiated into the secret society of people who have their shit together and other people would wish they were me and I could feel glad and even superior and wooo! be at the finish line. All I'd have to do every day was be this same person, over and over again.

How fucking boring. ACK!!!

I am not even the same person from when I wake up to lunchtime, much less even when I go to bed, how did I think that would ever work? I found so much freedom in the idea that I do not have to stay the same, that I can like blue one day and orange the next, that I want to be alone this morning but I need company this afternoon, that I am anxious today and tomorrow I am courageous and calm. I am an ever evolving, ever changing being. THANK GOD. It means that I lose feeling groovy, but it also means if I'm having a shit day that can change at any moment. It's kind of all up to me.

I put a lot of pressure on myself about this blog, I take it so seriously these days, never publishing anything because it isn't "significant" enough, or I don't proofread it enough, or I compare myself with other people and get bogged down by what I imagine I'm not and then I don't write because you know, I'm suffering from paralanxiety. So this morning I'm just writing what I'm thinking about, and then instead of picking it apart I'm going to publish it, just like I used to do.

This is where the bravery comes in: allowing myself to be me. Not complicating it by wondering what someone else might do with my life, not holding back because someone might think I'm stupid, not talking myself out of putting myself out into the world. There's a place for us, there is one other person out there who reads what I write and thinks "me too". Even if that someone else is me. :)