Proving I Can Do It

I took Sas Pethrick’s Self Doubt Archetype quiz to see what type of gal she defined me as it relates to my procrastination and fear. And what I found out is that I’m an Innocent. In my childhood, I wasn’t empowered to believe I could do it. And so I don’t believe I can do anything without help. I get kinda panicky when I think I have to do something I don’t know how to do. I am often a doubtful child in a woman’s body.

So at home, I’ve begun to take care of home projects that are bugging me as a way to remember who I really am (a kickbutt self-empowered woman) and prove I get stuff done. And Wow, what a difference a shift makes. I gave re-glued, repaired, restrung, and rehung all sorts of little bits in my house that made me feel broken looking at them.

Yes I can replace the guts in a toilet. Yes I can fix an old door lock box. Yes I can clean that hard to get to window in the stairwell. I can assist in installing a new ceiling fan. In fact, I bet there are a lot more things I can fix if I just put my mind to it. Or do without a single clue. We can’t wait until we know, have enough time, or have enough money because we’ll be waiting our lives away.

But when in true doubt? Hire a professional. I am not doing outright plumbing myself.

And If you enjoyed what you read, subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your emailbox. And visit me on Instagram to see my daily pictures, friend me or like my page on Facebook. Or come find me on Twitter or Pinterest too. I am always practicing Intentional Intouchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

And, as always, Thanks to you for your visit.

F*%ked up

You know, in many ways, I was less eff-ed up throughout my life than I thought I was. Understanding that much of my screwy self was created when I was little living in a dysfunctional family, I did well to come out with the drive to heal that I have. But in a few ways, I was a little more eff-ed up than I admitted I was. In fact, I think we all are. We’re all playing a grand game of “I’m Fine, See?”, but I’m not buying it.

Last year I was certain I was doing everything I possibly could to battle my anxiety. I have been in therapy always, I journal and confess, I read, I ruminate, and I witness with compassion my setbacks. Until suddenly, the fear monster overcame me and my heart was broken in my disbelief. And so I chose to do one more thing to find my way out. I asked for help.

With my anti-anxiety meds, I suddenly felt “normal”. There was no more buzz of fear in my head. No more hum in the sound system that suggests a problem. And as thrilled as I was to no longer be suffering the daily doubt and need to fix me, I also felt like I had woken up in another country. When you think you know the language of life and suddenly you don’t. When it’s always hard and suddenly easy, you wait for the other shoe to drop.

Up to this point, I had been cultivating a theory on how increased creativity can decrease anxiety. Except, what I had truly experienced was that creativity couldn’t take care of the anxiety completely. I wanted it to but it wouldn’t. And I felt such doubt in what I had been working on up until then. So I have awaited a new perspective to allow me new understanding.

At the core, self-trust is what balances and battles anxiety. And however you gain that, that’s your personal answer. Whether it’s creativity, abstinence, habitual self-care, therapy, meditation, the powerful magic of tidying up even one drawer, medication, or any combination of these, the final goal is to be happy and to be less anxious. But what is so important is that we need to do whatever it takes regardless of the stigma f not being OK. Because that snobbish pride prevented me from being less anxious for a long time.

So I’ve decided I’ll go back to pieces and theories I’ve written and mull over what thoughts still resonate and what needs to be overhauled with my new perspective. Raging against the change will not stop it. All that’s left is to find a way to begin again. And then…begin again.

And If you enjoyed what you read, subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your emailbox. And visit me on Instagram to see my daily pictures, friend me or like my page on Facebook. Or come find me on Twitter or Pinterest too. I am always practicing Intentional Intouchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

And, as always, Thanks to you for your visit.

I Was in Happiness Debt

I was thinking this morning about how I used to live my days from waking to sleeping , thinking I was inept and incapable. Every undone thing around me was proof that I was inept and incapable. As I set standards so sky high, I withheld approval for my life to be enough and I was a hostage. This had gone on for so very long that I was in Happiness Debt.

How it is that we come to decide that we are unworthy of happiness is a simple story of a moment in our life, our childhood when we decide that the love we know in our hearts we deserve is not going to be ours. And as we are small, we blame ourselves. This feeling stays in us even as we grow large. And we find ourselves recreating circumstances to continuously prove our unworthy theory.

But having our happiness and hope held for ransom does no one any good. The world doesn’t benefit from our best selves. And I am certain the very people who we got these beliefs from would be horrified if they knew we felt these worthless ways about ourselves.

Do whatever it takes to make changes. What we do with our days makes up our lives. Change nothing and nothing changes. In a last ditch effort, I finally chose to see if medicine might help me erase the constant negative buzz. And it did. Try anything that you can think of from meditation to getting a life coach to acupuncture to create a new set of circumstances. We need change in our brains because we are no longer the children we were once. And our happiness now depends on us. As does our children’s.

And If you enjoyed what you read, subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your emailbox. And visit me on Instagram to see my daily pictures, friend me or like my page on Facebook. Or come find me on Twitter or Pinterest too. I am always practicing Intentional Intouchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

And, as always, Thanks to you for your visit.

My Choice and My Recipe for Happiness

My Happiness is mine to choose. And as overwhelming as that seems in choosing what that looks like, I’d rather the chance to vote. So I’ve embarked to rewrite my life script and reprogram my thoughts about me and my life that apparently hadn’t been working for me for a long time. They didn’t have a plan for me. I had to make one up for myself.

It never occurred to me that I could choose happiness. I’d lived so long in misery by rules I assumed governed me, I saw no other choices. But there were so many choices I hadn’t allowed myself to make. Because I didn’t believe I had the worth and value to deserve happiness. If I were destined for that, I’d certainly have had a happy childhood. My fate was sealed in doom.

Imagine my horror when I realized that I had a choice my whole life and I hadn’t let myself choose anything but misery. When I realized I had never committed any horrible crime worthy of serving this miserable life sentence I seemed to be serving. And when I saw that the unhappy low esteemed children we were made life assumptions that we continued to apply long past their expiration dates.

One by one I addressed the false truths I lived by and quelled my anxieties. I reached out from my isolation slowly and asked people I’d never met before to support me. And they did. I discovered that if I kept my eye on what I wanted, what made me happy, what I was thinking, I made better stronger clearer choices that aligned with my values and made me happy. And that my plan for me was like the recipe I’d always knew how to make but had never tried. This is me trying and sharing what I’m learning with you.

And If you enjoyed what you read, subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your emailbox. And visit me on Instagram to see my daily pictures, friend me or like my page on Facebook. Or come find me on Twitter orPinterest too. I am always practicing Intentional Intouchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

And, as always, Thanks to you for your visit.

My Family Self or Myself : Who Do I Know Myself to Be ?

I am on a journey to understand myself. This involves both understanding who I thought I was based on the information I gathered as a child, and who I think Myself to be thus far as an adult. And knowing that I have the power to change what I think of me ensures I stay in process and don’t get stuck in my past. But for people who are used to being told who they are, considering being anyone different may be a daunting and inconceivable project. But it’s quite necessary if you are to decide on what makes you happy because truly no one else knows that but you.

Our upbringing and childhoods play a major role in who we define ourselves to be. And as our primary personality was formed within our households and families growing up, it may put us at internal odds to choose to know ourselves otherwise. We are afraid that if we choose to be someone other than who we perceived our families to want us to be, we may be insulting and discrediting our families. But nothing could be further from the truth.

I completely understand devotion to those whom we love. And at the same time, I can not imagine that our families wouldn’t want us to rise and feel better about ourselves. That they did the best they could is a given. And quietly acknowledging the less than positive things that happened isn’t a bad thing. It just is life.

In other words, we are not dissing our families if we say we have low self-esteem as a result of our upbringing. That our parents did the best they could was a given. But we can not see what we can not see. If they couldn’t bring their own esteem up to a healthy place because of their own upbringings than they were not aware of what they were giving or not giving us.  It was still their best. Sometimes our best is just the best we could do at the time under the circumstances

To claim your lowered self-esteem and to re-parent yourself and trust yourself doesn’t have to cost you the disrespect of your family. It is not in judgement but in compassion that we rise beyond our roots. We give tribute to our pasts and our fight. So having compassion for our upbringings and ourselves will be the permission combination to then decide who we now want to be based on what we need in our lives to make us happy. How do we trust ourselves if we are not governing ourselves by our own rules and standards? We don’t.

At some point, who we are and what we believe we need for ourselves and our families has to be created by us. And that will then be who we are and what we pass along, as functional or dysfunctional as it may be, it was chosen and not auto-set by what we thought we should do. We always have the power to choose our way even if it’s wrong in someone else’s eyes. We only trust ourselves when we do what we know in our hearts is true to us. And trusting ourselves is tantamount to our happiness. You know this too.

If you enjoyed what you read, please subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your email box. And visit me on Instagram to see my daily pictures, friend me or like my page on Facebook. Or come find me on Twitter or Pinterest too. I am always practicing Intentional In-touchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

And, as always, Thanks to you for your visit.