It’s very hard to make a life shift if you’re feeling awful about yourself, but if life isn’t feeling or looking the way you want it to, it’s challenging not to get down on yourself. What do I want? What am I doing here? When am I going to figure life out? We live in a great but crazy time when so much happens over social media. It can be wonderful to connect to old and new friends, to share thoughts and conversation, to reach out, and to find a community of people with similar ideals. All of that can be so uplifting, but it can also make you feel pretty terrible about yourself if you’re feeling vulnerable already. Not everything is glossy and shiny and wonderful, but people rarely post about their deepest fears, their shame, guilt or the choices they wish they had to make over again, differently, nor do they commonly post pictures of themselves on Instagram when they just roll out of bed, pre-shower. It’s no wonder people can get online and end up feeling worse than they did before they turned on their phone or opened their laptop.
If you feel pulled to make some big changes in your life, you’re going to need the energy and the focus to see them through. Also the inspiration. If you’re busy beating yourself up, it’s going to be hard to get motivated. Lots of people get stuck in the blame, rage, shame cycle, which leads nowhere. You really need to start with compassion for yourself, and a shift in perspective can also be a game-changer. It’s easy to get caught up in what we don’t have yet, what isn’t going right, all the breaks we aren’t getting, and every way we’ve been blowing it. A much better way to go is simply to focus on what is going well, what we do have, what is right about us. One train of thought weighs you down, the other lifts you up.
If you have a place to call home, that’s a gift. If you have just one person in your life who really knows you and sees you and celebrates you, that’s another gift (and you can definitely have one, because you can do those things for yourself). If you have a family, even a crazy one, even one you’ve chosen, another huge gift. Your health if you have it, what a blessing. The ability to breathe in and breathe out, to walk from point A to point B if you can. I bet you have a gorgeous smile. I’ll bet your eyes light up when you laugh, or something or someone wonderful surprises you. Maybe you’re a great friend, you certainly have the potential to be. You might be someone’s mom or dad or sister or brother or son or daughter or boyfriend or girlfriend or good friend. You might be the world to someone. The sun at the center of it all. You could impact the life of a total stranger today, just with your kindness. Connection in life is the greatest gift we get. Relationships are what matter. Shared laughter, tears, hugs, conversations. If you start to turn your attention to all the beauty in your life, your heart will fill with gratitude, which feels so good. When we’re feeling thankful, we’re realizing we do have so much, and there’s something very motivating about that.
Think of just three things for which you feel thankful. They can be anything, and then think of three great qualities you possess. Just start there, it’s enough. Write it down if you need to, but allow yourself to really sit with those feelings. You aren’t stuck. It’s never too late to move in a healthy direction, to follow the pull of your heart, to choose the thoughts that strengthen you, to pay attention to what you’re feeding yourself. You just have to give yourself permission, and the material to start–gratitude, and the willingness to take ownership of your own life.
Sending you so much love,
Ally Hamilton
There’s not a single person you’ll encounter today who hasn’t had his or her heart broken, badly, except for young children (and sadly, not all children are exempt). No one would ask for pain. No one would wave it down and say, “Here, pick me! Cut me through to the core, go right for my jugular, so I can learn something, so I can understand despair, and open and soften and walk forward with more information about myself and other people.” And yet, that’s what pain does; it teaches us. Sometimes we would really give anything not to learn the lesson, but we don’t get to choose.
Sometimes a memory will come flooding back to me, whole, detailed, out of nowhere. A fragrance on the breeze, or a song on the radio, or something my kids say as they look up at me, and wham, I’m transported back to a moment I haven’t thought about in years. Sometimes the feeling around the memory is sweet, and sometimes it’s painful, but either way I’m amazed by the experience. Where was I storing that, or has it been continuing on in some parallel universe this whole time? That me that stood on that corner that afternoon, walking one way when I could have walked another. Is part of me still on that corner? Is part of me still having that first kiss, with the sun flooding in through the window, and the shock of realizing that kissing means lips and tongues and a racing heart?
You cannot please everyone; if you must, go ahead and try, but when you’re done you’ll find you’ve gotten nothing for your troubles but exhaustion, despair, and resentment. People in your life may want all kinds of great stuff for you and from you, but no one else has to live your life. At the end of the day, when you’re looking in the mirror as you brush your teeth, you’re either staring at a friend or a stranger.
When we cling to the past, it’s because we have little faith that the future might be beautiful, that it might surprise us, or that we might surprise ourselves. Sometimes the present is so uncomfortable, we simply know of nothing else to do but try to travel backward in time. After all, what was back there is familiar, even if it was painful. The future is not something we can predict or control, so for many people the idea of opening to it is terrifying. There are many, many people who’d rather hold onto their rage, resentment or grief than to nothing at all.
Nothing stays the same, not the house you grew up in, or your beloved dog, or your first crush. You aren’t the same you you were in high school, or even the same you you were last year and neither is anyone else. Do you have family or friends with kids you only see a couple of times a year? Aren’t you always astounded at how big they’ve gotten? We tend to try to keep things the way they are in our heads. This person exists this way in my mind. That guy I dated who broke my heart is a person who lacks compassion and doesn’t think about the effect of his actions on other people. Is that still true twenty years later? Maybe it is, and maybe there’s been incredible growth. My parents were this way or that way when I was growing up, and so now I’m like this. Are they still that way? Do you still need to be like this?
Yesterday I received an email from a woman who told me she’s never been in a relationship for longer than three months, and it’s because, “all men lie and cheat, or they leave.” I asked her how she came to that conclusion, and she said, “Because it’s true.” It turns out her dad left her mom for another woman when she was six, and then had several girlfriends while he carried on this relationship with the woman who eventually became her stepmother. Her mom also remarried, and her stepfather had a roving eye as well. She remembers her mom putting her in the back of the car one night to follow her step-dad and see if he was really going to a card game and she remembers her mom bawling as they watched her step-dad enter a house when a woman opened the door and let him in with an embrace. She said she can still locate that sick feeling in her stomach, just like she had as she held her crying mother in that car all those years ago. (I could write a whole post about the damage done to children when they’re forced to be in the parental role.)