If you weren’t raised in the town you were raised in, if you hadn’t attended the high school you had, if you didn’t have the childhood you did, if you hadn’t gone to the college you had, or surrounded yourself with the friends you chose to… who would you be?
I’m not asking you to reenter your past and think about all the ways in which your life could have gone better, no. Please don’t go down that road. Red light. Halt!
But I am asking… who are you? Who are you without the clutter you may have taken on your whole life, who would you be without the pain you have faced, without the pain you may have even caused? Who were you when you came out of your mother’s womb, fresh and brand new to the world- which then shaped you into who you are today?
If you don’t know, but want to explore who you are under the clutter of the culture and pain… this newsletter is for you. If you’re struggling with parsing out who you truly are and how you’ve been changed and shaped through the ins and outs of your life, this newsletter is also for you.
I believe no one is regular. I believe no one is ordinary. Everyone is complex. Everyone is unique.
Everyone was born with something special inside of them, something that distinguishes them from everyone else. Are you searching to try and figure that out? Are you searching to feel seen, heard, and loved?
I am too. Constantly. Here’s a secret…you’re on the right path.
I am here to help you discover how beautifully and wonderfully made you are and hope to ingrain the solid truth about yourself into your belief system because everything around us tries to tell us everything opposite of beauty. That we suck. That we do not and cannot live up to anything. That we are failures. That we are uglier than others. That we are dumber than others. I mean we are being whipped with these lies left and right creating an agonizing war inside of our minds.
So journey with me through the battlefield of dust and enemies that blind our way and block us from seeing the true and absolute light.
I am fighting through the battlefield as we speak, rediscovering who I was created to be, not the junk of what I took on in the past 25 years. I’m in the middle of parsing through what is real and what is not real. What I have taken on in my childhood, through much pain, through my poor decisions and what is part of my true nature as Kelly. My psyche is built on truths and lies. But in order for me to be sure of myself, to be solid in who I really am and know how to navigate others and more battles that come my way, I must practice and learn who I am to my birth core.
My good friend told me last week that I’m too hard on myself. She’s right. It’s so easy for me to fall into self-deprecating ways. This means that I believe in the lies, more than I should. This only proves that I have tons of work to do in understanding the beauty of who I am. I have just scratched the surface and it hasn’t been easy.
But, here is the thing. This is work. You must put in the work. Because if you don’t, you’ll be scooped up and carried along with the vicious river that funnels between the trenches, allowing powers to take hold of you that have no right to.
So where do we start?
Sometimes you cannot start until you reach the bottom. You cannot control that. But if you’re in a hungry seeker and curious phase, you are ready to begin. Here we go.
You must be broken down before you can be built back up.
I can’t break myself down properly. Because I am a self-deprecator, you already know this. I break myself down all the time. I need some lady stranger who I don’t yet care about to be an outsider looking in on my life with fresh eyes. I need a professional who is not afraid to tell me I’m wrong. To tell me I’m right. To point out reasons for why I think the way I think. I have to be willing to cry. I have to be willing for her to tap into the dark holes of my soul. She must be used to breaking me down. You guessed it. Therapy. No, it is not for everyone. My theory is that the ones who claim it isn’t for them are the ones who are too afraid about what they might find. They’re not ready. That’s okay. Not everyone is. But, as I said, we must be offered to be broken down before we can discover the real truth.
You must let go of your present desires.
If you have a dream you’re chasing after, you must be willing to surrender it. It’s important to have aspirations don’t get me wrong. But what if your dream chasing is not a part of the call on your life? What if you’re chasing it for the wrong reasons? It took me some time to figure out why I wanted to be an author. For the title “author”. For the name. It sounds hot. I sound smart and successful and everyone would be impressed that I wrote a book. I’ve had to surrender that motivation. To apologize for it because chasing that is for the wrong reasons. It’s self-serving. Not giving. So you may wonder why am I still writing? Because I have not been taken away from writing yet. The book has not been deleted yet. Therefore, there may be something to it. If there wasn’t, it would have been ripped out of my life upon surrendering it. Until it is or isn’t, I keep writing and I keep trusting. Every day is a mystery. I still am not sure what my calling is. In the meantime, I write.
Now for the thrilling part!
Write down the good qualities you have always believed about yourself. Here’s an example.
Smart
Curly and curvy
Hard-working
Motivated
Creative
Loving and caring
Strong
Gentle-spirited
By the way, these are not the qualities that make me up. Just a random example.
I don’t love myself yet. I can’t even use myself as an example above AH. But I do hope to get there. But the only way I’ll be able to love and to serve those who deserve love is if I understand who I am first. I have to understand what is me and what is not me. What is true. What is a lie? The qualities I’ve named have stayed consistent with me throughout my 25 years. Except for being fun. It still bugs me that I don’t know how to have fun since I’m not getting hammered anymore. Was that the only reason I was fun beforehand? Ugh. Still working on the answer and the solution to that. See? Constantly working through it.
What are the qualities you wrote down about yourself? How do you feel? Share them with me, I want to know!
If you’re anything like me, these shouldn’t be a revelation. I didn’t feel any type of way, really. But the practice of knowing the good and solid beliefs about yourself is a start. Why am I doing this in the first place? So I can be the mother, wife, and daughter God created me to be.
I am confident you’ll feel a taste of the thrill once we explore the lies you believe about yourself and then debunk the shit out of them.
That’s next. Stay tuned.
This, my friends, is a writer in rediscovery mode. Who’s with me?
XOXO,
Kelly.