I’ve noticed something lately.
The ideas in life that we are attached to, the things we lean on or depend on, the pieces we think we can’t live without… end up trapping us into a life that doesn’t fulfill our soul.
For me, it was my little family and the roles I played within it.
When I got married there was no way in this world I was ever going to take that ring off. One of my deal breakers when choosing a partner was that his nuclear family was still in tact, thinking that would mean he would have the same commitment level.
When I had kids I invested myself into being a rockstar stay at home mom. I had my babies naturally to ensure they came into the world unaffected by anything, I homeschooled and my world revolved completely around the kids and their well being.
I was willing to do anything and give up everything, and when I say everything I mean everything, for my family and the roles I played within it.
Other people put this emphasis on their work. Their role in their business is the most important and they give up everything to see it blossom.
Others put this focus on having fun and they give up everything in the name of having a good time.
This kind of attachment to making this one thing our whole life stifles our spirit.
Our focus is external, and we stop listening to ourselves and our hearts and soul in the pursuit of whatever our thing is.
I’m noticing the people who continue in this pursuit, and sacrificing everything else in life… feel an emptiness inside they don’t understand.
It’s not that they don’t care, in fact it’s that they care so much they’ve neglected what’s inside.
I couldn’t live my life that way anymore.
The cost of what I had given up was too high.
I had to let the life I had planned crumble away.
It was painful.
It hurt to watch everything fall apart that I had given so much of myself for.
But on the other side of that hurt and pain, I found I could create a life as I go. A life that is dynamic and flows and changes as I do.
When the idea of what I thought life should look like crumbled away, all of the most important things became visible.
I started to get to know myself.
I found a way to express what was inside of me, and that healed all of the wounds inside of myself.
I had the freedom of a blank canvas on which I could paint the story of my new life.
My new life still holds the same fundamental principles as the one I had before, but by giving up my image of how that is supposed to look, I’m able to experiment with new colours
And it’s vibrant because now my spirit gets to choose what goes on it instead of what my mind thought it needed to be.
“Never get so busy making a life, that you forget to make a life” – Dolly Parton