My dear sweetheart,
I know exactly how you feel right now. You see it. You know that there are ways that you’ve participated in your own suffering for so long now. You didn’t always get it but you do now. And that’s painful. Honestly it’s excruciating. And there is a helplessness to it. It’s almost as if you don’t think that you would ever be able to overcome these patterns that you’ve got yourself into that are just habits of being you now. How would you ever stop being yourself? Is that even possible?
I’m writing this blog right now because I saw you today. I saw you in your exhaustion. I saw you contemplating returning to work after a holiday season and rinsing and repeating this whole mess again. I saw you wondering, is there ever a New Year’s resolution that really would change your life. I wanted to reach out and tell you, while there is no resolution there is acceptance. And while there is no quick fix, there is a road I’ve taken and many like me have taken that will lead you to more peace. More joy. More content. More of a life that you want instead of a life you feel you have to lead, because it’s what you’ve always done.
I know you think you’ve lost the plot. I know you think it’s impossible to live a life without feeling exhausted and possibly even hating getting up in the morning and doing it all over again. I know you think that pining for an idea of a life that you were sold you “should” have by now is the only way to get your shit together enough to have goals in place to course correct all this. What if I told you you’ve always been on the correct path? What if I told you that designing a life that you want to be in means looking at your life from the perspective that you are exactly where you need to be? What if I told you that exhaustion with recognition that you’ve participated in patterns of behavior that keep you trapped in a life you don’t like is exactly where you should be right now?
I imagine hearing some of those last questions makes you want to smack me across the face and honestly, I understand that. I wanted to smack my own self as I started to recognize these things. I wanted to rage against the machine that had put me in the place where I had meticulously created a life that I was told I “should” have when in fact, it was a life destined to give me grief. What kind of bullshit is that? That you do everything right and you end up in a space where you hate it? It just isn’t fair! But then again who said life was ever going to be fair. No one did.
And I still think that the reward here is recognizing that where you are is not where you want to be. And the helpless feeling makes sense to me and I hope to help you see it makes sense for you. The helplessness is that all the things you’ve learned to do to get yourself out of a pickle in your life won’t work here. Why? Well think about it. If they had worked, wouldn’t you be in a better place already? Of course you would. I know this has never been a problem with effort. I know you’ve started every January 1 with a whole list of things you’re gonna do to fix your life. And yet you end up back in the same exhausted place. Here where you hate it. Here where the life you’re in is not the life you want to be in. Here in your resentment that you’ve done everything right and yet can’t seem to get it right.
My invitation to you is that maybe this is exactly where you need to be. And maybe you needed to be here as many times as necessary to really get the motivation to look at this differently. To see that everything you’ll do from this point forward is going to be brand new and therefore awkward, uncomfortable, and even painful at times. However, the excitement, the hope is that it will bring you to a new place. That on this next stretch, you will be ready to choose differently for yourself. That maybe you’ll even find that you like living in your life or dare I suggest love it. But only if you choose the road less traveled. Only if you go through the doors, you’ve never gone through before. Only if you engage in patterns of behavior that you haven’t even dreamed of having yet.
Have you grown exhausted enough that you’re ready to lay down everything that you know how to do? Are you that tired yet? Are you resentful enough that you’ve done everything right that you’re ready to consider that doing things that way isn’t right for you? Can you feel that very small hope living inside your soul that whispers, “Believe!”
If that’s where you think you are, then let’s begin. Let’s begin designing a new life. A life that you can’t wait to get up for every single day. A life you never knew you could even dream of for yourself. Let’s begin living that life. Let’s let go of the idea that we need to be fixed or improved or find the right goal or engage in the right behavior to finally reach happiness. That has never been how this was going to work. Let’s give all that up and listen to that small voice on the inside. Let’s Believe.