December: Boundaries

Boundaries.

They can be such a buzzword today, in ways that I never could have anticipated. In fact, until I was in my 20s I never realized what boundaries really were. It was a word that I mostly associated to physical spaces that I wasn’t allowed to go, or a point that marked the end of one space and the beginning of another. These last two years have been years of growth and mess and realizing the need to work through things that you didn’t even realize were issues stemming from patterns and actions I learned when I was a kid.

It’s been a time of learning what boundaries are and starting to figure out where they should be in place and where they could be holding me back. Even if talking about boundaries can seem like pandering to a social movement, I think this is one act of pandering that can actually be helpful because boundaries set up the expectations for behaviors we will allow in our life and how we will treat each other/expect to be treated.

Twenty-nineteen feels like the year of boundaries for me.

Making them, ignoring them, figuring out how I can best serve myself and my relationships with them, and just generally speaking navigating them. Lately, I’ve been working on grasping the fact that boundaries are not meant to be isolating. We aren’t meant to use boundaries as walls to keep us from everything and everyone in our lives, as it can be tempting to do sometimes. We build boundaries with family, with friends, within our relationships and even at work. But they are not meant to get in the way of genuine, authentic connection.

I think that boundaries are meant to be used to promote these healthy relationships. It gives us the agency to say these are the things I need and deserve to have to be respected, and if you can’t facilitate that, we might not need to be in each other’s lives. It gives us the agency to say no to toxic families. To cut ties with friends who refuse to see how their actions affect us and to ask for respect from coworkers and management who we may have let walk over us in the past. But talking about boundaries isn’t just about getting rid of things in your life that were causing harm before, they are here to make way for better relationships and friendships and healthier connections with the world around us. They are meant to allow us to set down the things we were never meant to carry, so we have room to pick up the things that help us grow.

I’m thankful for the people in my life who are also building their lives to be what they want them to be and using boundaries to carve out that space for themselves. Thankful for friends who point out when I’ve crossed the line with a boundary that was set and who are also reminding me to have grace when I break boundaries even that I have in place only for myself. And I’m learning that the more boundaries I set up for myself, the more people who don’t have boundaries for themselves push back at my choices as selfishness. I’m trying to have grace for them and for myself to navigate healthier relationships. I’m trying to remind myself that I do not owe anyone an explanation for why I choose to enforce boundaries of saying no or leaving situations. I’m trying to remember that when it matters, there will be space to talk about these boundaries in a way that only helps build the connection I have to that person.

There are some folks, I know, who think that this is a self-centered way to live. To be constantly considering how my interactions with others effects my well-being can be foreign when in the past I’ve always set myself and my own needs aside to pick up the needs of other people can make me seem uncaring. But I’m learning that the more space I give myself to build more authentic connections with healthy boundaries in place, the more my community grows. The more I let myself grow and sit in my discomfort or the in-progress parts of my life, the larger my capacity for love and relationships I have for my people.

Like every therapist I’ve ever had has told me, you cannot pour from an empty cup, and having boundaries for myself has allowed me to hold space for myself to refill myself before I try to give to others.

Twenty-Twenty feels like it’s going to be a year of noticing more moments of joy. It feels like there is more hope for reusing the bricks I thought I had laid for myself before but this time for a foundation more solid for myself. It feels like it will be a year of adventures that I had only been dreaming about before and I know it’s going to be a good one. I know that this is what I’ve been working towards.

In what ways have boundaries played a role in your life? Do you struggle to keep them in place sometimes too? I know that especially when it comes to family, I have a hard time keeping boundaries because I am a peacekeeper at heart and that leads to me setting my own needs aside to accommodate the needs of the people I love. I’d love to hear your take on this too; all of our works in progress look a little different. But I’m happy to be taking this trek alongside you.

Talk soon.

Make it Make You Better.

An account that I follow on Instagram called “We’re Not Really Strangers” posted this photo the other day. (Which, if you haven’t seen their work before, I highly recommend it. But that’s besides the point.)

MAKE IT MAKE YOU BETTER.
(Credit to @werenotreallystrangers on Instagram)

And I’ll tell you what, reading those five words made me stop in my tracks. Because I think sometimes we are told too often to just look for the lesson when something or someone happens to you in life. We’re told to just figure out what the purpose of that experience was and then figuring that out will help us just let it go and move on.

But I think it’s more complicated than that. With things that have been happening in my life lately, I’ve given myself time to just earnestly look at the situations and experiences with those people and I can see all these things that I learned from those situations. I can see the “lessons” that can come from what happened and I can even apply them to my life in more meaningful ways. However, being able to know or see what a relationship or experience can teach you doesn’t make it easier to swallow when the memories come rushing back or you realize how much something really is effecting you. It doesn’t always make it easier to sleep at night or to let go of some of the hurt that they caused you.

So I like the way this post made me think about things.

Make it make you better.

Make the shitty experience or the heartbreak or the lessons make you work to be better. For yourself. Make these hard, gross feelings make you work harder for what it is you want to see in your life. Make the long nights of no sleep worth something. Maybe this means you’re keeping to yourself and letting your confidence on your own grow. Maybe it means making a schedule for yourself that you actually keep so you can meet goals that you want. Maybe it means throwing out the walkie talkie to someone else so you don’t have to feel alone in this new space. Maybe it means holding yourself accountable for your own feelings around the situation. Make it make you better. Don’t let the heartbreak be something that only drags you down. And it’s not because you shouldn’t be feeling all those feelings – you deserve to feel all that you need to and that’s valid. But the thing is, at some point you’ve got to make all those hard emotions work for you and not against you. Make them mold you more into yourself and into who you are wanting to be as your most authentic self.

This is a shorter post, but I had to share some quick thoughts on it.

Because damn, make it make you better feels like exactly the mantra that I needed in my life today. And maybe it’s the kind of mantra you needed to hear on this Monday morning too.

Thanks for joining me where you’re at. Thanks for leaning in a bit. I hope you try to look at the tough things happening in your life and see ways that you can use it to make yourself a little more authentically you.

Don’t be ashamed of being a work in progress. It’s okay if the growing pains get you down some days.

It’s going to be okay.

Talk soon.

Things are hard.

I thought about putting up a disclaimer about how if you think that millennial’s complain too much about how living is hard or how difficult it feels to just exist sometimes or even if you think that people these days glorify mental illness, you should click away. But then I decided against it. Because honestly, life is damn hard. And maybe if you hold those beliefs, it would do you some good to listen to a few people’s stories to get some perspective on how we aren’t all just babies or snowflakes who can’t handle a tough day.

Anyway, I hope whoever is reading this is doing well. I hope your day wasn’t too hard and that you aren’t having to carry too many things that are too heavy for your tired arms. I hope you’re able to see the tiny good things that are happening in your life today. I hope you get to breathe those things in and then share them with someone you love. I hope these things for myself too.

It’s been a rough week. For myself and a lot of people I know. Some for the same big reason of losing someone who should not have had to leave this earth yet and some for things that are happening in their own individual lives. I guess I fit into both those categories currently.

So, I’ve had a rough week. A heavy one. One so heavy that for some reason when I got home today, I couldn’t handle the thought of putting away my laundry and instead of just putting it off until later, I felt like I needed to just sit in my bathtub fully clothed and cry for awhile. And then when I felt like I could stop crying, I called a friend because I knew that I didn’t want to be alone anymore in that moment. And eventually, after talking to them or just having them on the line with me for awhile, I felt like I was strong enough to get out of the bathtub. If you found yourself needing to sit in a bathtub fully clothed because life isn’t making any sense to you either, I want you to know it’s okay. When you feel like you’re ready, call someone you trust and talk to them until you feel like you can handle what’s going on outside of that tub.

When I spoke to my best friend on the phone a little later, when they were calling just to check on me because they know I’ve been having a rough go of it this week, I let them know how hard it was to do the things today. I told them about how difficult it was to see so many people come together to celebrate the life of someone that it doesn’t seem fair that they’re gone. How incredible it was to see so much faith in one family and so much grace given to other people in spite of their loss. And the other seemingly impossible thing is that this best friend and I are going through our own change in relationship. I point this out because this is the other reason this week has been so difficult. But the incredible thing is that when you care about your people, you check on them. You’re there for them, even when you’re going through things yourself. You look at your people and you do what you can to love them well without putting yourself at risk of carrying too much yourself.

I want you to know that even when your people are there for you, it’s okay to break down. I tried to go out and get stuff for dinner for myself tonight and ended up having to pull over because I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was playing a song that I love really loud and singing along and then everything just sort of washed over me again and I had to just sit there in my car and cry for a minute. Music still blaring, plans to get food now canceled, I just sat there and cried and got angry with God and then let Them come back to me and just sat there letting myself feel all the things. And that sucked. But I let myself have that moment anyway.

I want you to know that if you’re having a hard week, it’s okay. If you’re having a hard week, you aren’t doing something inherently wrong. If you’re having a hard week, you don’t need to be ashamed of it. If life feels heavy right now, it’s not because you deserve to have all that weight on your shoulders. I want you to know that there is no right way to go through hard things. That some things may feel heavier to you than to other people, and that’s okay. I want you to know that sometimes you’ll need to sit in your bathtub and just cry it out for a second. And sometimes you’ll need to be with your people. Sometimes you’ll have to go on a run until the hurt feels less and sometimes you’ll need to sleep it off. No matter how you go through your things, just remember you don’t have to go through them alone. Even when it’s hard and messy and you are embarrassed to let people see you in that, you’re still worthy of being loved through those moments. And if you need someone to talk to, just know I’m here for you too.

We’re all just figuring this out as we go. Have a little patience for yourself. Have a little grace. We’re all works in progress.

Talk soon.

I can’t read the instructions..

Have you ever had one of those moments when you find yourself a little paralyzed with the feeling that everyone else somehow has things figured out and it’s you that is the absolute failure of it all? I guess that question is probably redundant, because most if not all of the people I know have had moments similar to that. Those moments when you wonder how you’re even supposed to begin chasing after the things you want to do when you can’t even be sure if that’s what you want at all. Moments when it honestly feels like you couldn’t be farther off track than you are. Where if you had a compass leading you to the right place, you used the needle to patch a hole in your shoe and put the rest in your pack useless.

My point is, we’ve all had those moments of fear of being broken or wrong. In my relationship, my person and I used to have this thing we would say when one of us were just feeling used and broken beyond repair.

“You’re not broken, you’re just IKEA furniture and the instructions are all in Swedish.”

We aren’t broken, we just can’t seem to find the instructions to put ourselves together for the day.

We aren’t broken, we are just being built by instructions that we can’t read.

This little ritual of being there for each other started kind of as a joke to make ( I think) me laugh in a tough moment. We had recently been to IKEA and they, being the pun master that they are, had spent much of our trip there cracking jokes at all the crazy things that items are named there. The difference in language making the perfect breeding grounds for puns at nearly ever piece of mass produced furniture.

So when at some point after that I said in a moment of tough mental health that I felt just broken and didn’t know how to fix myself, they looked at me and told me that there isn’t anything to fix, that we just have to keep building as best we can with instructions we can’t read. Half joke to make me laugh at the idea of the instructions for our life being tucked away somewhere in IKEA’s massive warehouse of home goods but it really did make me feel better in the moment.

It’s probably been over a half a year since we started saying that to each other but it still holds just as much truth to me. It’s okay if I feel a little lost a times, because we really don’t know how to read the instructions given on how to become who we are supposed to be. It’s okay to feel a little confused because sometimes we can’t even find the instructions on this piece of life at all. So we’re all just winging it with every step we take.

I feel like I’m in a strange place in my life right now. Where my instructions seem to have some photos included to show me what things might end up looking like, but I still can’t read the bullet points to figure out how I’m supposed to get there.

I’m in a place where it feels like growth is sprouting up all around me and I just need to hold on tight to keep a grasp on all the things I’ve learned up until this point to bring with me to wherever this chapter is supposed to take me. It’s a little lonely. Especially when you want to tell everything to your person, but you know you have to filter some of it for now until things change a little more. But it feels okay I guess. I know that there is someone out there right now who already knows me for who I really am. And even if I don’t get to see that reflected in them often anymore, it gives me some sort of peace to know that I am loved as I am even in my season of becoming.

Right now, my instructions seem to be pointing to a period of calm. Where I need to remind myself that it’s going to be good for me to slow down and focus on only a few things for awhile. The diagrams included seem to show growth happening in ways that aren’t necessarily visible to everyone. And I think that’s right. Not broken, not missing pieces, just taking some time to read the instructions that no one else can for awhile. And praying all the time to be blessed in these actions. Praying for the ones that I love more than anything to be growing as well.

It’s okay if you don’t feel like you know what your next step is supposed to be. It’s okay if you feel out of place. Just remember that you aren’t actually broken. You don’t need fixed. You are just a work in progress trying to put the pieces together with no instructions. And that’s okay.

It’ll be okay.

Whole from the pieces.

Sometime last year I was IMing my kindred spirit coworker about life or mental health or feeling like a fraud of a writer ( or something like that, I’m sure) and she ended up sending me a simple message that for some reason has continued to impact me almost every time I have begun to feel like my efforts towards the things I love are mute or when I feel like I have started to let my past define my current situation.

(yes, this is the same screenshot mentioned below.)

The best part of this simple message is that it is completely lacking grammatical integrity and is a perfect example of how these two former English majors converse regularly when we get together. Correct spelling be damned, she suckerpunched me with her one-liner to the point that I took a screen shot and made it the background on my social media for all to see.

“u r artist. u create whole things from all the pieces. love you.”

In a quick 13 word IM, she completely affirmed in me that regardless of all the garbage that may be in my past or all the things that have happened to me, I get to be the one to pick up the pieces and decide how I want to make things whole again. That somehow, I am completely whole even when I thought I was shattered by things in my past. Is that something that you can understand the weight of? Reading this message was HEAVY for me. Because for a long time I was struggling to convince myself that these things that happened to me didn’t take away from who I am as a person.

Yes, I think I already knew that I was a whole person even with my past. Yes, I knew that I am a writer regardless of whether or not I get published this month or not.

But to have admit that having a friend like this in my life at my old job meant the MOST in ways that I doubt even she fully realizes sometimes.

SO. Here I am in 2019, doing the best I can to take my hard days and find the small good things in them. I’m looking to build my tribe out of people who push themselves and each other to be better. To surround myself with people who know that it’s okay to be human and have hard days, but also remind each other that we are fully capable of making something whole out of all the pieces of the messes we make around ourselves.

Does all this positivity mean I don’t still have awful days? Or days where I let things get the best of me? No, not at all. I still have days that leave me feeling like I’m in pieces. I still have days where I’m fighting my mental health and trying to keep a grip on the life I am trying to build for myself.

Yesterday, I fell going up an escalator and messed up my knee, but my person was there to make sure I got it all taken care of. I was panicking and worrying about whether or not I needed stitches or if something worse is happening under the surface. But this person was there to make sure I was breathing and be behind me as I took the stairs one step at a time. I felt a little broken and a little bit like an inconvenience but they reminded me that I’m no less worthy of their time just because I got hurt on accident. It was just another one of those moments of realizing that sometimes it’s the people around you who help you to pick up the pieces every day when you aren’t able to.

I guess what I’m saying, is it’s important to have people in your life who you can lean on and trust, knowing that you would do the same for them. It’s important to have people who will send you messages to remind you that you are whole as you are and you don’t have to change something or do something more to be worthy of good things.

And if you don’t have a person like that in your life, let me step in and be that for you. We could all use someone else to be there for each other.

I’m only human. Only a work in progress. But I’m proud of where we are going and growing this year.

Talk soon.

Little Big Things

Today was spent mostly just majorly cleaning house and continuing to pack (and apparently get rid of things? The trunk of my car is actually full of stuff) in order to get ready for my home appraisal tomorrow. It’s the final step of selling my house before we actually get to close on it and I’m kind of nervous about it. I don’t think there should be any real issue… but not having things in your control can feel completely overwhelming sometimes. 

It’s also the last full week I’ll be living here before I officially move to Indy. Which means I’m about to have to make my first full payment for this apartment along with fees and deposits for taking Charlie girl with me, and that realization has been making my wallet a little bit sad this weekend. Payday isn’t until Friday, and I knew that I needed to get gas to be able to commute those three hours total every day until then so I’ve been worrying a little bit about making that work. 

While I was packing up the last of the stray books around the house, I randomly decided to flip through my copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote and in the back of it was $21 just tucked carefully into the back. I’m not sure why past Ally decided that it was a good idea to just store that money there, but tonight I just had this overwhelming feeling of relief was over me knowing that I would be able to get gas this week without having to worry too much about the last of my bills here at the house. 

It just felt like such a blessing from God to be able to find that tonight. I had been worrying about a lot of things all day and then They just sort of made me feel like, nevermind your worrying, We’ve got this when I found that money. I know it might sound strange or too simple to feel like some sort of purposeful blessing but I like knowing that it feels like a God thing when something works out in a way that you didn’t expect. It feels like a good thing for this week. 

My house is getting to be pretty empty now. My kitchen and office are only boxes now my furniture has all been pared down to basically all that I’ll be taking with me when I move. I’ve gone through all of my clothing and gotten rid of anything that I no longer wear or that doesn’t make me feel like myself when I wear it. I’ve picked out a new candle to use when I actually get my apartment so I have a new smell to associate this new space of mine with. I’ve taken these little steps to try to feel ready. 

And God reminded me tonight that They’ve got this move in Their hands, along with everything else that is going on in my life. 

And I’m thankful. 

My messy work in progress of a life feels like it’s doing okay tonight, all facts considered. It feels like there has been a slight reprieve from the strong waves of life tonight, and even if it is just for tonight I am so grateful. The smell of eucalyptus mint candles are filling my senses and I’m tucked in on my couch with Charlie as I type this. The house is clean and I am safe and tomorrow is a new day. 

I’m trying to be positive tonight guys. I’m doing the best I can. I hope you are too, even if that just looks like putting on clean pajamas before you climb back in bed tonight. Lean into the mess. It’s a chance to make something new from the wreckage. 

Treat-yo-self… or something.

Why is it that when we go through a break up, we are almost certain to go through some sort of “treat-yo-self” phase.

You know the one. Where you go out and, if you can afford it, you buy yourself a new shirt or shoes or something or you go to Target and buy a candle that feels good. Or you do the next best post-break-up thing which is almost certainly getting your hair cut or dying your hair. 

Well I checked those boxes off today. Literally all of them. I blessedly did not go out in public until about 5 tonight so the stores were back to normal and most of the aftermath of what is known as Black Friday. 

And my house currently smells like a weird but good mixture of mahogany, cedar, and eucalyptus. I made dinner for myself tonight and I’m wrapped in a cozy blanket and sweater. 

I walked into a salon today and got my hair cut. It’s my favorite undercut that I’ve gotten so far and I’ve been getting undercuts done for over two years. It feels good. It made me feel a little lighter somehow. 

And yes, I am realizing now that this blog post really just seems like a list of what I did today. But really, I guess it’s more of a question. Why does doing these cliche things somehow help? Does it actually help to buy a candle that smells different than you remember them? Does it somehow help to get your hair cut? Why had you put off cutting your hair in the first place? Why is it that it’s so hard to be alone? 

I have two days left of this little holiday break before I will be diving back into work and back into getting ready to move to Indianapolis. Two days to go dark for a little bit and give myself some time to be not okay. Two days to stop holding my breathe and just lean into whatever this feeling is. 

Two days will not fix anything. Two days will not make anything feel better. Two days will just be a chance for me to be me… on my own for a little bit. 

Just because we don’t want things to happen how they do, doesn’t mean we can’t still hope for something different in the future. We have to look forward, right? Even when things get to be too heavy, we have to look out the window and try to see that there is something outside to still experience. 

It’s a work in progress, right friends? The hurt and the lonely and the feeling too much is part of it. That’s what I’m telling myself anyway. 

Breakups… amiright?

OUT and About

Tonight was weird.

And not just weird because I was watching Frankenstein and his creature for the last two hours. But it was weird because I was sitting in this theater looking around and I found myself looking at my hands and my wrists and the shoes I was wearing. No one else around me would have noticed me doing this, but these small parts of me just felt… so right tonight.

Sitting in that seat I felt like myself. Completely. I felt this weird sense of.. pride maybe? This feeling that all the work I have done for myself the last year and a half had come to fruition in the form of me being able to be in this crowd dressed how I want to, happily out as a person who is gay, happily choosing to actively live my life the way I want to. The simplest thing of just wanting to feel like myself in the clothes that I’m wearing always seemed so trivial to me before, back when I just wore what I had always worn or wore what I thought I was supposed to. But here I was tonight, feeling so right in these faded black jeans and a new jean jacket and these green shoes that I bought for myself on clearance at Target. I never knew how presenting myself as I really feel and dressing in what makes me feel good could make me feel just so okay with where I am. I was in this crowd of people and I just felt confident in a way that I haven’t always gotten to feel.

The human condition is so intense sometimes.

We are constantly changing or being presented for the opportunity for change. We are constantly growing. We are seeking good as best we can. And this season of life that I am in right now feels like one that is welcoming me into it.

It doesn’t feel like I’m being shoved into a season of growth for once. Or like I’m being forced into a season of sadness when things happen to me that are out of my control.

This feels like a season of my choosing.

It feels like hope. It feels like hard change and excitement like I haven’t known yet. It feels like stepping out of my comfort zone. It feels like spur of the moment adventures with my love. It feels like a new job and a new city and a new chance to lean so much farther into myself (more on the new job and city situation soon).

According to my Facebook memories, a year ago I was back in the same theater seeing a different performance that my younger brother had been working on. And I can remember sitting in that theater feeling so uncomfortable with myself being so close to other people in those auditorium seats. Feeling so insecure about how I looked and whether or not these people may *have* to accidentally touch me because of our close context. I was so aware of these feelings of being a burden to people who probably didn’t even give me a second look that night.

And tonight I was sitting there just so very aware of how much I simply felt like myself. And that made me happy. Happier than I can explain. Because I’ve worked hard to get myself to this semi-okay state of being.

I can’t wait to see where I’ll be at a year from now.

Who knows? This work in progress still has a few more miles to go before I start to run out of road.

Take a moment to be proud of yourself for the baby steps you are taking for yourself in the right direction.

Take a moment to appreciate the change of mentality you may have with your life compared to a year ago.

Take a moment to be grateful that we get the chance to change every day.

I’m proud of you for trying.

Here’s to this next season of growth.

Struggle

Yesterday was a hard day.

I’m tempted to call it a bad day, but the attempt is being made to not always equate rough mental health moments to being these inherently “bad” things. So calling them hard or difficult feels better and less judgmental than calling those very human moments bad.

Yesterday I had to lean on my significant more than I have in a long time. I had to let her see me at my worst. My can’t-do-anything-but-stand-and-stare-at-nothing-when-we-should-be-leaving moments and my crying because I feel like my brain can’t just allow me to be myself moments and my harder moments when I can’t see that she wants to be there for me and that I’m not actually making her regret being with me because I live with depression and anxiety.

I know first hand how hard it is to live with these rough mental moments, but sometimes sharing them with the person who loves me is incredibly difficult. Sometimes it’s hard to accept that I’m not a burden just because I am struggling to get myself out of bed and dressed for work that day or because I don’t want to go out when being around people sounds too overwhelming for me. I feel lucky to have someone who cares about me so deeply that she takes the time to remind me that even in those hard moments I am still me and I still deserve to be loved and cared for.

So yesterday was a hard day. And we went to bed early to try to combat struggle that had settled into our shoulders with the weight of the day. And this morning we woke up and it felt like a new chance.

Stay in bed a little longer. Snuggled in a little longer. Make breakfast. Open the blinds. Just stand and breath for a moment, child.

Then I can tackle the day. It’s Tuesday, the start of a short work week thanks to Labor Day. Get dressed for work. Drove in the morning sunlight. Thanked God at a red light that she let me have another day.

Mental illness is a beast. It can convince you to believe that bad dreams are real and that the people around you actually don’t like you at all. It can wrap around you in make it feel like you have to just do what you can to cope when you feel like you’re in too deep to climb back out. It can make it impossible to see the hands there waiting to help pull you out. It twists truths and can make you forget who you are when the days are hard and dark.

 

And yet, eventually those hard moments do pass. You play that song that’s been making your significant smile for the last few days. You get up and stretch a little. You try to smile. You notice how incredibly blue the sky is and you try to be thankful for that moment. The good doesn’t erase the hard, but it does make the hard more manageable.

Yesterday reminded me that I need to be a little kinder to myself in those moments. Yesterday was a reminder that I am such a work in progress. Yesterday was a reminder that I am loved, as I am-however I am EVEN in the hard.

So keep moving. Keeping making human attempts at loving yourself and taking care of what you need to. Keep looking for the things that set your heart on fire and make you feel alive. I see you. I’m here too. Let’s build lives that let us climb high and fall and climb higher.

 

a FORCE

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion until acted upon by another force.

We’ve all heard this countless times since we were in third grade science class. I didn’t realize until now that I always equated it to other inanimate objects like balls or feathers dropped from high places instead of to people as well.

One of the most striking questions that I love my significant to ask me is “What do you ACTUALLY want to be doing?”

I think sometimes it is easy for us to keep doing things because we aren’t sure how to change our own trajectory. Or even if we see the steps we need to take to get out of the valley we are in we may be too afraid of the what ifs to take that first step. For me, when my person asks me what I actually want to be doing, it isn’t a slight towards me and my current choices, it is her seeing that my heart may be set on something different and instead of following those dreams or ideas I am staying in the safe, comfortable zone instead. I may have made a home out of my fear of change but all it takes is asking ourselves where we would rather be to open that door and walk out.

So, what do you ACTUALLY want to be doing?

Do you want to be working with students in higher education?

Do you want to be writing?

How about changing professions all together?

Have you thought about going back to school?

Should you pick a different degree?

Is it okay to have a couple jobs in the interim of finding your next “real” job?

Do you need to have a “real” job at all to be happy?

Today I submitted my application to a Masters of Library Science degree program. If you’ve followed this blog for a couple months, you probably know that back in the spring I applied for a Business Masters program and was accepted. But as I met with the adviser and looked into the classes, I just wasn’t excited about it. (And please don’t misunderstand me in the coming words, you don’t have to be and probably won’t be excited about every little thing you do in life.) I went to start classes in the summer and found out that the class I was supposed to start that week wasn’t actually the right class for me to be in as a beginning student.

Frustrated, I spoke to the professor and talked to others who had been in the program before me and I ended up dropping the class. And then I dropped the second class that I was enrolled in for the summer as well. And then I simply didn’t register for classes for the fall. I didn’t bring grad school up to anyone who knew that I had started that process. I tried to steer conversations with my colleagues away from the topic if it somehow came up because some of them are currently in grad school as well. Simply put, I felt like a failure for not feeling like that program was the right thing for me.

At some point along the line before I dropped the classes, my significant asked me if I was looking forward to this program. She knows I love learning and was looking for a challenge now that I have been out of school for over a year. I remember trying to come up with logical reasons why it was a good choice and why I wanted to do it – all of which were true, but they were such weak reasons to stick with something that my heart simply wasn’t in. So when I told her that I was going to drop those classes, I was afraid she was going to think I was just quitting it because it was going to be hard.

But she wasn’t disappointed in me. She was glad that I was listening to myself and taking time to find what would fit me better. A separate time that we had been talking and she asked what I wanted, I said that I would love to be a librarian one day and get to be surrounded by words all the time like that and hopefully get to work on a research team aimed at preserving local history.

Fast forward to the last couple weeks and I finally made the decision to lean into this thing that I had saved for “one day” and hope that if it is something that I truly want to do I will figure out a way to make it happen. And today I finally submitted that application. This person who had previously not been in motion now feels like she is back in motion.

I think I’m learning that it’s okay if being a force means that you finally sit down and write 750 words to describe  why I think I should be a part of this grad program after weeks of not being able to. You can be a force and only take tiny steps each day to reach your goal.

So my challenge to you is to ask yourself what you actually want to be doing. To take a tiny step to put an object in motion.

You’re a work in progress. Lean into it.