Show the grow!

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Today is my birthday.

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And I am 41 years old!

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I’ve always felt a bit awkward in my own skin. Part of that stems from I am a super old soul on the inside, but look pretty youthful on the outside. Most people think I am in my twenties, which I suppose is pretty nice that I have now aged a bit, because looking like you are twelve when you are twenty-eight and have spawn in tow is a bit trying at times.

Then again, even though I look young, I am starting to feel the grind of age on the inside. My energy and tolerance for things has changed. I am starting to weed the emotional vampires out of my life, and most of all, I am beginning to truly understand the old adage, show, don’t tell.

At this middle point of my life, the need for validation has truly evaporated. Not that I had a huge need for societal approval, but I had a huge drive to be loved by those close to me and bent myself around those I cared about so they would be comfortable. At a huge cost to my well-being.

For the last year and a half, I have been in training. Behavioral pattern alteration training. In order to keep growing, to keep living, one must reflect on the habits and impressions they hold, ruthlessly examen them against what is logical and just, and do the work to cast off what is causing one harm. And it’s hard work for real. The thing is, it’s personal work, and you don’t need to go around telling everyone what you are doing, it shows in what you do.

For instance, I am terrible at saying no, especially to family members. The thing is, from all the studying I have done regarding self-development, in order to grow and accomplish your goals, you have to say no. There are only so many hours in the day, so many weeks in your finite life, and you cannot be all things to all people. I know this well, I was a chameleon who bent myself around everyone around me so that they could be comfortable, and some people took advantage of this and fed off of my energy. Here’s the thing though, I let them.

In order to accomplish my goals, to become who I wish to be instead of the amiable marionette the world will happily foist on me if I deign to allow it, I had to learn to say no. It’s a hard thing for me, I still struggle with it. When someone requests something of me, I instantly feel a rush of emotion to acquiesce to their request. I would also feel guilt if I even thought about not doing what was asked of me. If you notice, everything that I went through was because of me, I was harming myself.

Just as roses need pruning for good growth so do we all need to prune out bad habits for our continued development.

Because here’s the thing, sometimes you can do stuff for people and sometimes you can’t. It’s also 100 percent alright to not want to do something that is requested of you. You have to give yourself permission to be master of your own mind. I cannot believe the amount of angst I have put myself through in life just over trying to be accommodating to people, especially people who thought they had the right to my time. No one does. Period.

Then again, it’s not like I am running around being a NO harpy. In the beginning I did force myself to say no quite a bit because it was uncomfortable for me. Everything I have learned from people farther than I on the growth path is that running into fear and discomfort yields the greatest gains in growth. That’s what I desire, to grow as a human, to learn, to be my best self. Because at the end of the day our time here is finite, and I want to pack in as much good living as possible before I leave.

So even though I am sitting here writing a post telling you about how I am showing my growth by not verbalizing all the stuff I have learned (LOL!), I feel like even writing about it is an action of works rather than blathering about how awesome I am and how much I have learned, etc. Instead, my goal with this post is to paint a scene of just how important it is to do the work as we progress through this life. It is easy to settle into our comfortable patterns of behavior as we age, but there truly is so much more for us to become and experience, we just have to be willing to do the work.

And on that note, I hope you all are having the most excellent day!

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And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's rather celebratory but you can't really tell iPhone, the header and footer images were made in Canva.