wedding things and boobs

things have actually been quite low key since coming back from yosemite. i’ve been making my way through the last 1/2 of the bwt program, planning for the future, closing out projects, working a lot, trying not to let little things get to me, back on the bikram and couch to 5k program and trying not to get too sucked into george r.r. martin’s series.

i let time slip by and before i knew it we were faced with gus and qq’s wedding without appropriate attire.
i did end up having something in the closet that fit the bill but did not quite fit the bust. i remember buying the dress online years ago and had only wore it once due to the fact i could only really survive 4 hours in a strapless bra. 5 is pushing it. (bruised ribs and breathing problems. it’s ugly.)

i don’t know why companies even try and make a 36G strapless bra. the technology to make it a painless experience does not exist yet.

we gussied up and made our way to the Haas-Lilienthal House for dinner and festivities. i loved how people were really invested in the 1930s theme and the atmosphere and the gorgeous house added to the ambiance.

i felt bad that i started to crap out relatively early though as it was getting harder to breath and i started to feel the crushing sensation of hour 3 in the strapless bra of my nightmares.

this brought the boobs to the forefront of my brain and how my motivation to have them reduced had dwindled as school picked up.

so i made an appointment for a consultation with a surgeon in august. she’s pretty popular and highly regarded so the earliest i could get in was august and to tell you the truth i was relieved it is so far in the future. money and surgery fear can be overwhelming. i’ve always put this plan on the back burner using money as an excuse. i can’t do it anymore though.

monday night’s pathology class i ended up talking to lucy and kalash about it and thought about how all the ways my breasts have torqued my spine, pulled my shoulders forward and down, causing my low back to work harder to keep myself upright (anterior pelvic tilt) and while it’s worked ok for me this far in my life, it’s going to start to get harder as i age and my bones start to degenerate.

ugh.

so much to think about. being a planner does not help. i’m planning how to manage an aging body though i still get carded for alcohol.

i’m looking forward to a three day weekend though. i’m filling this time with bikram, restorative yoga, yoga nidra, massage, running, friend dates with kalash and more game of thrones.

monday

nothing like leaving this vista and coming back to reality.

pros to coming back:

• showers
• Rainbow Grocery
• it’s not 40 degrees at night
• Vietnamese food
• non-inflatable mattress

cons to coming back:

• lack of campfires
• lack of star visibility
• it’s not 80 degrees during the day
• it doesn’t look like this (see above)

it was good to come back home though since dealing with this cold we came down with due to the temperature swings (80 day to 40 at night was enough to do it) had me in hibernation mode.  with the exception of heading out to the wes anderson double feature at the castro theater with miss maria i laid about the house in different positions on different pieces of furniture reading and/or eating soup.

getting up to go to work today was hard.

ugh.

sniff.

yosemite

as i feel myself slipping into an older version of me from previous years  i’ve realized how much i need my meditation and yoga practice.

after 2-3 weeks of no yoga or meditation due to letting life drown me in its crap i found myself crumbling over nothing.  

walking home from BART Florence and the Machine’s ‘Shake it Out’ came on shuffle and i got sniffly and teary eyed.  i passed tartine on the way home and for a moment contemplated a butter filled solution before i turned away despondent and heavy.  butter doesn’t solve anything.  i need more than a temporary fix, more than a flaky non-vegan pastry that would only make me feel good for a second before it would wreck havoc on my insides.  

i got home and climbed the steps where the dr. stood waiting for me.  i like how he comes to meet me when he hears me come home.  he opened his arms and i collapsed and sniffled and he asked in wonderment what was wrong.

oh you know.  stuff.

life stuff, the non-important life stuff that makes you tear out your hair because you know it’s not important but you get worked up anyway. i crumpled to the floor of the office into child’s pose and sobbed for a bit.

god, i’m so dramatic.

the dr. deals with me so well.  he doesn’t crowd me and coo and over do it when i get this way.  he hugs me, lets me know that i’m not fat or stupid or crazy and then he lets me just cry it out. he doesn’t get weird about it.  all my previous boyfriends always got freaked out, no one knew how to handle a crying girl and they were either assholes about it or they bailed because they didn’t know how to be around it.  the dr. just lets it be, doesn’t get weird, doesn’t read into it and when i’m done with my spell of it we resume conversation like normal and it passes on in the way i need it too.  when i get this way i need to get it out of me and i need to move forward, let it go and i feel better.  i can’t get bogged down with too much talking, analyzing or babying or i’m bound to wallow in it.  i find that i wallow a lot less because the dr. lets me have these moments and he sticks around for them with just enough care that i feel safe.  i can have this breakdown without worrying how he’ll react to it. 

i rolled to my side after it was over and he brought out the ipad, laid next to me and we looked at photos of waterfalls at Yosemite and i felt better.  we gathered ourselves and met Tris and Malinda at their new place in Glen Park for dinner and had a lovely time with friends.  I was grateful for the ride home so I could crawl into bed at a reasonable hour so i could read until an unreasonable hour.  i don’t know how many nights i’ve fallen asleep with a book in my hand.  

i’ve had weird dreams that have ranged from game of thrones themed adventures to riding bikes with horses. 

this weekend is craniosacral weekend and i wonder what strange energies that will bring. 

i can’t wait to live in a tent for a week.

sleep

after two evenings in a row without having something booked or planned i feel almost normal.  or whatever tenuous grasp i have on what is ‘normal’ for me these days.

the dr. is home.  i get home while it’s still light out.  he meets me at the top of the stairs and takes my backpack for me.  depending on how i feel i take a hot bath and read or listen to podcasts.  i pick up the clothes on the floor of my closet.  we make dinner.  no big whoop. i fall asleep on the couch sometime around 10PMish.  sometimes earlier.

we look at tiny internet in bed  before i pass out.

it’s been two days of this and i’ve never felt better.  the combination of free hips and more sleep i’m feeling less tragic these days.  i picked up the first game of thrones book and have put away the technical non-fiction for awhile and i think this too has contributed to less brain strain.  i realized that there was close to nothing i’ve been doing lately for recreation.  filling out some extensive detailed paperwork monday moring at dr. eric’s i realized how little i do that’s just simply for the pleasure of doing it. i currently have close to no real hobbies removed from school, anatomy,yoga or fitness.  and work.  work is always going to be work.

this is the perfect time to pick up an epic book in an epic series of books and get lost.  i don’t remember the last piece of fiction i’ve read that i could get lost in.

i moved most of my text books off of my desk and into the bookcase the dr. moved into the living room so i don’t have to stare at them everyday.  i’ve started up on my quest to listen to the entire catalog of ‘this american life’ podcasts  going back to 1995.  this will come in handy for this weekend as i recover from wisdom tooth removal this friday.

if anyone needs me i’ll be in bed…with ira glass and george r.r. martin.

out of body

after 16 hours of intense yet enlightening work this weekend on top of my very first chiro appointment i’m feeling completely out of it.

i am inhabiting a body that is completely foreign to me.

it’s almost the same feeling i had after my very first bikram class.

last week my brain was gooey.  this week my body is light, airy, there’s room inside for all the important stuff and when i get up from my desk to walk somewhere i feel like i’m walking on the surface of the moon.  gravity is still working but it’s not affecting me in the same way.

ugh. i hate trying to put these things into words.  when eric asked this morning what’s going on after i got teary eyed explaining the non-invasive, gentle psoas and pelvis work we did this weekend in ortho-bionomy i couldn’t do much more than string together words that described the strange mini muscle spasms firing in all sorts of random places.  i feel physically fine and mentally messy.  my brain keeps trying to find words to say why i’m emotional, why the tears, why my voice starts to shake almost instantaneously and I don’t really have any words left.

i ended up shrugging a lot saying, “I don’t know.”

i know that the work i need to do is to be ok with not being ok.  knowing that i don’t know and it doesn’t matter that i don’t know why my left psoas is such a drama queen.

i really didn’t know how my appointment with eric would go and after some paperwork, some minor tears as i retold the events of sunday psoas we got to work.  after some analysis, i got onto the table as he did some light work.  i don’t know how to really describe it as i was trying to get my brain to shut up as it tried  to catalog each movement.  he placed my legs in positions, he pulled and shifted and then he stepped away.  the pauses in between movements i found my attention drawn to the strange things happening in my left hip.  since it felt like it was the first real quiet environment my hip was worked on it’s almost like i could hear it and feel it pulsating and moving inside.  my brain gave it a visual.  it felt like a low intensity electrical current running in a circle from the inside of my lumbars down to the front of my body to the hip and down below the inguinal ligament and traveling back up through the sacrum to the lumbars.  i felt like my hip was radiating heat.  nothing was an overwhelming or strong pulse, it was more like a quiet hum as the loop went around from lumbar to pubic to sacrum back to lumbar.

when i think about it now i’m realizing the soft tissue in the middle of this electrical current, the hip rotators that live there are the ones that feel like they are holding onto something for dear life.

i was grateful that eric also addressed and worked on the weird pulling i had noticed in my mid thoracic and the hot spots he found in my neck i didn’t notice (C4 and C6 were rotated in opposite directions) which kept my brain from over analyzing or spending too much time on my hip.

after the softer adjustments came more direct work (but we hadn’t had any real spinal adjustments or cracking yet) .  he held one point in my left foot that felt sore to the touch that translated straight up my leg into my hip.

oooh, meridian, maybe?

there were still some pauses between the more direct work but they were shorter.  when he had me move into sideline, adjusted me close to the edge of the table and curled my arms around myself i still wasn’t sure what was going to happen even though he was explaining what he was doing as he did it.  i wasn’t completely there and so i didn’t really know what was happening until he did something that felt like he picked up 1/2 my body and bounced quickly on top of me with my hip off the edge of the table.

i heard and felt the SI joint crack and shift.

i didn’t have much time to process as he quickly moved to the opposite side of the table, set up the move and did the same thing except the first time i tensed up and nothing happened and the second time the same crack and shift.

when he moved me back onto the table and asked me to lay on my back i exhaled and for the first time in awhile felt like my hips almost even, resting firmly on the table.

i was quite surprised that i wasn’t in tears.  the procedure wasn’t painful in any way.  it was just new and strange.

eric went to get something and i just closed my eyes and tried to scan my body from head to toe to see how it felt.  when he came back he wrapped both my arms around a small teddy bear, kept them there, and reached both arms around me to my back to adjust one of my thoracic vertebrae.  i couldn’t tell if it was just one.  it might have been 2.

he moved on to my neck and held a point and manually moved my head around in a method that felt very orhto-bionomy-ish.  i felt some tensions let go before he adjusted my neck twice, once in each direction.

each adjustment i felt a strange shudder go through me.  none of it had felt painful at all.  it was just a completely new sensation.

my brain has closely linked the sound of cracking to breaking and it really had a hard time realizing that nothing was broken.

eric let me lay there for a moment.  i hugged the teddy bear,  it’s fur soft and worn. for the first 10 years of my life i had a blanket i absolutely needed to go to sleep.  i would take the satin edge of the blanket and rub my thumb and forefinger down the edge, around the corner, around another edge, over and over, the blanket twisting in circles, until i fell asleep.  while i stopped sucking my thumb i couldn’t give up the blanket until it was bribed away from me with a hello kitty watch and promised to be returned to me on my 18th birthday.  lying there in eric’s office my right hand automatically, without any real thought, came up to the bear’s right ear and did the same rubbing motion i had used to do on the edge of my blanky.  it had the same feeling as the worn down satiny blanket edge and i felt, for a brief moment, like a little kid winding down for the night, right on the edge of sleep.   i imagined many people, men and women alike, holding the bear in the same manner.  i liked the idea, the visual, of full grown adults wrapping their arms around a stuffed animal.  i thought of men in business suits and women in severe looking blazers and obnoxiously expensive watches cuddling this bear.  i loved how universal this felt, how something so small could bring so much comfort.

he didn’t ask me if i wanted to hold something, he just laid the bear on my chest and wrapped my arms around it.

it’s the little things.

when i sat up i was surprisingly dry eyed.

not a tear in the house.  no quivering throat, no facial convulsions.

just me and probably some really intense bedhead and this feeling like i was inhabiting a body that was not my own.

eric checked in with me and i sat and thought about it for what seemed like a long time.

“I’m fine,”  i replied.

he smiled in a way that felt familiar.  it’s the same smile he gives me when he thinks i’ve said something funny or weird, which is something i found i often did in my fundamentals classes with him.

because i’ve only seen him in a classroom setting i had expected margarita to come bouncing up behind me to give me a hug.  it was just us though and that was fine and i felt fine and while i had anticipated waterworks and complete and utter breakdown…it didn’t happen.

and it felt ok.

i felt…ok.

we talked a bit about what my illium were doing, my left being pulled superior, anterior and medially (I KNOW, WTF?!) and my right going in the opposite direction and how my rib cage is slightly shifted to the right.  i asked about my psoas and he noted he sorta delicately worked around the edges of it. it’s a process of unpacking a suitcase.  whatever is holding there doesn’t want to be dug into right now so he let it lie.

i made a second appointment for an open adjustment next week to unpack another layer and walked out of the office with the sun in my eyes and the wind cold on my face.  i had no idea how to get downtown from where i was but i saw a bus pull up in front of me and just decided to get on it.

when i realized i was on the 30 stockton i relaxed knowing it took me relatively close to the office but the moment the bus hit chinatown i felt myself start to shut down. i wasn’t really ready to be shoved around by people my height so i got off the bus and walked 2 blocks east until i was out of the thick of the chinese markets and back to the familiarity of the financial district.

i looked at my clock.  it was almost 10AM.  this explained why the streets weren’t as busy as anticipated.  everyone was already working.

i turned up the volume on my ipod and listened to beirut and imagined i was walking through the streets of an old czech town to buy a loaf a bread.

the random things my imagination does to make the financial district more palatable.

i quietly slipped into my desk without much fanfare or anyone noticing i was a lot later than i had thought i would be and i was grateful.  i put my headphones back on and went about the tasks of the day. voice mails, emails, meetings.

i thought about this weekend and the connection between needing to be safe to be able to let go and how my journey this past year has been firmly about digging deep into the things that make me twitch and learning that the only way i’ve been able to let go of anything is by going into it deeper and embracing it tighter.

i thought about how sometimes it looks  like i’m seeking out suffering because i seem to be diving deep into those places that make me uncomfortable.  it’s only because i’m banking that whatever’s on the other end of all this work is a more authentic life.

in the meantime i do the work.   i do what i can to listen to my body and do right by it.  i do what i can to not let my job run my life.  i try to balance school, work and play and err on the side of more play.  it’s a consistent practice.  just like remembering to breathe during the tough parts.  sometimes you need someone to remind you and hand you a teddy bear.

tired

good morning.

i can’t keep my eyes open this morning and my brain is fuzzed over with something that feels like a cross between starburst and cotton candy.  it’s an awful sticky mess in there. i’m not blaming the 3 glasses of champagne after class.  it’s just the state of my life lately.  i’m treading water. i’m working hard just to stay afloat.  i remember when i first learned to tread water my first thought was how much more exhausting it was than actually swimming.  this coupled with the fact that you weren’t really going anywhere, just working to keep yourself from drowning, made me realize how much i disliked treading water.  so much work for nothing.

that is, if you consider non forward motion doing nothing.

change of perspective.  it’s something i need.  my attitude lately has been, “just do enough to keep yourself sane.” though my entire being is wanting to either completely stop and rest for a couple of days or push through the malaise, be uber agressive, like MMA agressive about work and school and kick this funk in the teeth.

and i really wished i had it in me right now to attack my task list like a crazed meth addict but i just can’t do it. trying to find balance is hard and sometimes i wonder if it’s just not in my nature. i feel like that can’t be true as it was proven in class last night that my balance was pretty good as i stood on john’s balance board/squishy thing.  i found my center pretty easy and was able to maintain it.

i dunno.  this is the lack of sleep talking.  it’s weird.  sometimes i get 4-5 hours and i’m fine the next day. sometimes i’m a complete zombie and no amount of legal drugs can keep me awake.  coffee.  you are useless to me.

i’m feeling antsy since almost every square block in my april calendar is filled with 2-3 things and you know how i can’t handle being that busy.  i start freaking out about when i’ll find time to shower or go to the gym, two things i need to do MORE of these days.

maybe this oral surgery next friday is a godsend.  getting a wisdom tooth pulled the morning of 4/20 may just be what i need.  a time out from life.  and some vicodin.

home

the dr. gets home tomorrow night and i can’t wait to tackle him.

while i thoroughly enjoyed slothing in the apartment by myself i miss him so so much.

ugh. i think i’m crying.

closer

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth”
― Pema Chödrön

it’s been a slow journey into figuring out what’s going on in my head and an even slower a journey figuring out what’s going on with my body. at some point in my life i disconnected the two and put the brain in charge. here, you seem to know better, take the reigns.

and from that point forward my brain told my body what to eat, how to move, and to shut up when it wanted something more than what my brain could provide at the moment. are you sore? do you hurt? too bad, i’m going to the gym anyway. are you tired? do you need more sleep? our job is more important so you’ll have to deal.

my body became the victim of an abusive relationship.

trying to mend again to become a whole being has been difficult. learning to coax information out of my body, listening to how it feels, what it needs and what it wants has been hard. it’s voice is tiny, quiet and unsure.

until lately.

enter: left hip craziness.

something definitely woke up in my left hip from last year’s psoas awakening. some portal to another dimension opened during dr. eric’s trigger point workshop and instead of rainbows and unicorns all sorts of evil bats and monsters came out. unidentifiable. strange and sad and angry. i had no idea that someone could anchor and stretch a muscle and have such a reaction. there’s stuff in there. not in everyone. people have perfectly happy psoas’. not mine.

it’s like my left psoas was the angry voice my body never had.

the right psoas? twitchy and weird but not as bad. it felt like a yippy little chihuahua as compared to the rabid pitbull with an unfortunate childhood on the left. the left is like the disturbed kid who who carries a knife in his pocket and a gun in his locker and the right is the kid whose parents love him, he gets straight A’s but he listens to a lot of death metal.

now that you have a more accurate description of both my psoas…

after having work done on both, i felt taller and more free. i felt physically more upright. i was walking differently. my hips were moving in new ways.

my brain was more messy.

i was more emotional and more agitated. i wanted to identify and catalog what was going on so i could come to a logical conclusion to what had happened and why my left was so mad. i wanted to give it a story so i could file it away and move on.

of course, this just led me nowhere closer to what was truly happening.

and i may never really know what’s truly happening and i’m coming closer and closer to being ok with it.

who cares what the story is. i’ve stopped caring because ultimately, the story doesn’t matter.

fast forward. several months later. i feel back at square one with both psoas except now i’m aware of their existence in my body and what they do for me.

i stretch them in pigeon and other hip openers but they have not spoken to me in months.

i find out this week in deep tissue we’re going into the psoas. nice. i’ve been wanting to have this conversation with my psoas again. i want another break through and i’m eager to figure out more of what’s happening.

not much happens in class though. my psoas is quiet. my teacher comes over and explores my left hip which has been having some tingly sensitive things happening with it. not much comes of that. possible nerve entrapment in the lateral hip. the tingly sometimes painful sensations in the lateral and anterior hip translate into low back twangy-ness. this is my professional dialogue i have with myself. i write these words down to describe how my left hip feels.

when i lie down on my back my sacrum and low back ache and it feels a little burn-y. when i lie face down the front of my hip feels like tiny firecrackers go off and my back around L5 and S1 feel twangy and a little screamy.

i walk around and sit down and go about my days and the hip is ok in most positions with the exception of lying down. i am grateful i am mostly a side sleeper who sometimes rolls onto the back.

and when i roll onto by back i wake up due to the twangy and roll to the other side.

this, coupled with glued scapulae that don’t like to move and intercostals and scalenes that strain from breathing (hello, even more reasoning to get the breast reduction of my dreams) and tight extensors on my right forearm from computer and mouse use i feel a bit of a mess.

after a month of recovering from the chest and head cold of my nightmares i have come out of the fog amazed, wide eyed and confused by all the things that hurt.

being made aware of what is going on in my body is like realizing the years of abuse and neglect. couple this with the exhaustion of school and work which fuels the lack of motivation to get to the gym has made me feel at a loss on what to do. i cannot seem to take care of myself in the ways i used to. things have changed. i’m no longer shaming myself into going to the gym at 5AM every day because i want to be a size 6 and i’m slowly moving towards the healthier viewpoint of wanting to go to the gym because i want to feel good. its a very hard negotiation for me so i’m erring on the side of not going. i’m also just strapped for time. it sounds like an excuse but it’s also a reality for me currently. if i didn’t need to sleep then maybe i could get it all in. my priorities have been my work and my study as well as working on finding a balance when it comes to mediating the constant fighting between my brain and my body.

i need both but my brain needs to take a backseat these days because it lives in this body and if it doesn’t let the body do its thing, the whole system will collapse.

in letting all of this blabber come out the only solution i see currently is setting some time aside after work or class for movement at home (since the gym feels like an elaborate thing that takes up more time that i simply just don’t have right now), most likely yoga and meditation. start small. 20 minutes. nothing big. it doesn’t have to be special. it’s just me and a room. nothing else to distract and no fancy gadgets or heart rate monitors, iphone apps or podcasts to tell me what to do. just finding that quiet place so i can really listen and maybe my body will tell me what it needs.

i think it’s finally starting to open up more now that i’m feeding it well and not eating a cliff bar and calling it a day or eating ice cream for breakfast (in my defense, i only ate 1/2 a pint of cappuccino coconut bliss one morning because it was the only thing in the house at the moment, this has not been repeated since).

i just need to take the next step.

i also need to have this left hip business looked at.  i’ve been trying to self diagnose but what do i know? i’ve thought of all sorts of things that could be wrong but haven’t had anyone identify it really.  tight QL, tight rec. fem. we already know my psoas is sad and depressed.  during a class break this weekend  i spoke to dr. eric and explained what’s happening and it looks like my left ilium is anteriorly rotated (as opposed to just tilted). this explains the low back pain as the sacroiliac joint is out of whack.  an appointment with eric is in my near future.  not just because he’s good at the technical aspect of what he does but because what he does energetically can point me in the right direction of moving closer to whatever painful things are hiding there no matter how scary whatever comes out of it can be.  and maybe nothing may come of it.  i think i can live with that.  i’m just relieved that i’m at a point in my life where i can start walking towards the things that are uncomfortable and not duck and cover or completely shut down when things get painful.

it’s times like this

where i don’t like making decisions for myself.

gym or rest?  bikram or sleep?

i can’t tell what i need more.  i’m so tired. school and work, for the most part, I feel fine but then I randomly get hit with this overwhelming exhaustion.

and i don’t know if my body is telling me it needs to move (it does!) or if it needs to sleep (it needs this too!).

the rains have started and we’ve really needed them this relatively dry winter but the rain coupled with daylight savings and it being pitch black when i wake up in the morning again makes me want to hibernate.

i brought my bikram stuff to work but we’ll see if this happens.

it’s not even noon and i’m ready to fall over.

the dr. comes back next week.  he was supposed to come back today but he extended the trip since they were making so much progress in germany.  he’s been gone about 15 days. i realize i miss him the most at night.  i’ve gotten spoiled with him putting me to bed every night.  i fall asleep within minutes of him crawling into bed with me.  lately, i lay there and get caught up in tiny internet (damn you iphone!) and my own thoughts.

last night i came closer to figuring out what’s going on in my left side.  possible nerve entrapment in the lateral anterior portion of my left hip.  it felt electric and sensitive when marty put his forearm there.  in looking at my books i don’t know if it’s the femoral nerve but maybe just smaller branches?  this is an instance where i know bikram would help but i just can’t seem to muster up the energy to go.  i went back saturday and while i was all over the place in julia’s class i felt great for going.  then the soreness set in.  my hamstrings were sore all saturday night through last night.  for fear of overstretching my already open hamstrings i skipped class sunday.

and now this week is just jammed pack.  monday class, wednesday class, thursday sampson, friday dinner with the gals, tonight is my only free evening to go to bikram and i’m fighting it.

i’m pretty sure i need to not get all worked up about something as little as one yoga class.

still working on this patience thing.  it’s still rough going at times though i feel like i’m getting better.

so much of this work though leads to bad blogging, not great writing and lots of thinking. so i’ve been M.I.A.

happy

i’m at a point in my life where i never thought i’d be.

i’m not independently wealthy.

i’m not society’s ideal weight.

i’m not famous.

i’m still socially awkward,i still dress like someone who can’t decide if they’re 13 or 35 and i still find escalators stressful.

but i’m happy.

i had started thinking about this happiness business last year when paul had asked me if I thought I would ever really, truly be happy.  it was the most depressing question in the world because i had thought i was happy.  i had thought i was pretty ok but in really examining my life, i wasn’t sure. i didn’t know and i was staring down the line of a long and lonely road of always being worried that i was never going to amount to anything because my happiness was completely dependent on being this made up ideal of thin/carefree/glamorous/socialite/put-together person that wasn’t me.

everything i was doing was to be everything i wasn’t because everything i was…wasn’t ever going to be good enough.

i set an impossible fantasy standard on myself that degraded and made fun of and put down everything i currently was.

things started to shift when i realized that if i wanted to really be happy i needed to really be happy with who i really am and that who i really am is a really awesome person.

it’s really easy to say you think you’re awesome.

it’s much more difficult to believe it and act like you are.

it’s easy to say hey, yeah, i love myself but it’s much more difficult to treat yourself like you do.

it’s a constant practice but it gets easier.

and each day i get better and better and making these small decisions that are in tune with what i’m trying to do, which is treat myself better because i deserve it.

undoing a lifetime’s worth of ‘work hard because you’re not good enough and don’t celebrate your success because then you’ll look boastful‘ is difficult.

but it’s possible.

i want to email paul even though it’s been forever since he asked me that question and say yes.

yes i do think i can be really happy.  because i’m really happy now and i’m 100% sure of it.