Working on love of self-means letting myself sit in failure! I have a love-hate relationship with loving myself. It has gotten better over the years, with therapy, self-care, archery, hiking and giving less fucks. But there are days that even those prescriptions don’t seem to lift the lies of growing up not feeling loved. So I am sitting in what feels like failure and trying not to medicate my way out of it. Now I know I haven’t really failed, I am a product of abuse and come from a home where I didn’t feel safe so this can easily become my narrative. I also never felt loved for exactly who I am and who I am involved failure! So I’m not failing, but in my adulting, I have looked at how failure needs to be a part of my everyday life. I cannot truly grow, succeed, and love myself fully unless I love my failures or what my ego sees as failure. This is painful for someone who grew up trying to draw as little attention to mistakes as possible, mistakes can make you a target and unhealthy places need scapegoats. So I’m sitting in this tension. The tension of not always knowing how to proceed. Or how to get the word out about what I do. I am sitting in what feels like failure, when my judgement tells me everyone else has this figured out. I’m telling myself “You don’t have to know how to do every fucking thing” But I feel like, in this modern age, you actually do need to know EVERYTHING! Because if you don’t there is someone right behind you that WILL know how to do it better. Well, maybe they will do it better. Maybe they will know how to hashtag the hell out of something and write a book about it and I will still be sitting here in my feelings. And today that idea feels pretty shitty. But if I look at the scope of my life I see this girl who didn’t know how to feel or even what she was feeling, now sitting in discomfort being willing to feel all the feelings whatever they are. And as strange as that may sound, what a gift! I can feel! I can survive my feelings! Those feelings will not kill me! Even though today I’m feeling it all, I know tomorrow I will most likely get up and embrace myself. And isn’t that what we want… to be the greatest lovers of ourselves in all our successes, but especially in our failures!
And not hiding mistakes and failures. But sitting in them and letting them teach us.
FAIL AWAY PEOPLE, FAIL AWAY!