BESTSELF™ ICEBREAKER | Self-Awareness 01
WHO DESERVES CREDIT IN YOUR LIFE THAT YOU’VE BEEN SLOW TO ACKNOWLEDGE?
It might sound ridiculous but those who have been my greatest challenges are those who have helped mould me into the loving, strong, and independent woman I am today. I have not acknowledged – in a public way – my mother and my former husband for providing me with the mirror I needed to be a far better person than I would have been without them there to push me away from their choices. The road map provided by both of them was similar in many ways: do the opposite of what they did and what they said to do.
My daemons were always judgment and jealousy – not necessarily my own, but dealing with the effects on those around me. I can honestly say that I have felt neither of those strong and destructive emotions (or the need to protect against them) since extricating those two toxic influences and resulting situations from my life – one when I was 18 and the other when I was 45. They both told me regularly that I wasn’t enough and never would be. I dwelled in a very comfortable place of fear and longing, I didn’t know any different. Yes, I (figuratively) married my mother – it was comfortable, it was something I knew well.
One morning, after three weeks of Synthroid, I woke up and realized I was living a life that didn’t belong to me. I dealt with an avalanche of crises, not of my making but certainly left to me to fix since no one else was willing or capable. The level of financial and emotional horror was overwhelming but held the greatest lesson of all: I am capable of anything. I moved on with my life with my kids in tow and have not looked back, not even once.
As always, I digress for context, please indulge me. I am grateful for the recent experience of complete transparency and unconditional love so that now I know how to show up in a relationship with no baggage, just good lessons. (Hey, any time a man hands over his phone because he doesn’t want you to worry – I never asked for it – he’s doing two things: working out his own daemons and proving to you that he is trustworthy. Advice: the only absolute truth any woman needs to know in this day and age is simple: if he won’t volunteer his phone, leave. He already has.)