The lessons along the way

I am happy to say that I am back on track. It took a while to get here, but I made it and I’m glad.

I was feeling a little hopeless. I’ve been in this situation and my previous response was to give up and close up my life. It was a depressing way to live, and it obviously hadn’t served me well. I made an effort to avoid it and it’s nice. It’s a huge win for me.

I keep bringing this thing up: that these moments of growth being a huge deal. I normally don’t like repetition in writing, but this is one statement that is worth repeating.

Anyway, I made it, and I learned a lot because of it. I have decided a while ago that the point of living is to learn. Here are a few of the lessons this stretch of living taught me:

It’s a lesson in believing in myself.

Part of what held me back for so many years was that I didn’t believe in myself. It had a lot to do with finding external validation. Which is why every time I decided to give up, it was only to avoid revealing my badness to other people. Now that I decided to believe in myself, it helped give me the tools to move forward from mistakes. It made it so that down periods like the past few days didn’t mean that I wasn’t failing; it meant that I was living. And because I was simply living, I could just let these moments ride, confident that I’m still doing the right thing.

It’s a lesson in not caring.

Once I stopped thinking about how others perceived me, it became a lot easier to unshackle myself from my past. Trying to justify myself to others was just too much weight for me to bear. Life is hard enough as it is. I want to be a successful person TO MYSELF. The best way I can do that is to stay present, learn from mistakes, and take those lessons to heart after I drop the rest.

That’s it for this post. This was written from an outline and I’m happy with the result. Initially, I was going to post another 4-line blog. Turns out, outlining allows my creative brain to be free to write without having to worry about where it’s going. Much like the burden of my past, reducing the amount of worry in my writing is the best way to go.

[Last Minute Addendum]:

I had to cut a lot of what I had initially outlined and written because I realized those sections needed to be fleshed out. This is the problem with outlining, drafting, and editing all on the same day.

So, my challenge now is to find a way to post daily blogs while giving myself the time I need to write more thoughtful articles. I already have some ideas.