Things change… they always do. Some change comes full circle, while others just stop. I love change. I always have…. the good kind though!
Change is hard
Right now, we are talking about the change no one really wants. The hard kind. The kind that just stops. The kind you have no control over. The kind you don’t want to go through. One of the hardest things for a control freak (like me – yes, I own that!) is to accept that some things are beyond your control and you must trust that it is meant to be this way. That in the end, you will see why it had to be this way. If you are like me, you go kicking and screaming through it, asking the “why me?” question over and over. Grasping for answers when there really are none. You don’t see them until you are meant to! This was totally true when my world fell apart. But did it really fall apart? Or was I just not willing to see things for what they were? When the one thing you held onto wasn’t true, everything else shatters. Either way, at that moment, I felt that I was not ready to go through the change that just stops. The kind of change you realize that needed to happen for you to be happy. I did it anyway because I knew I had to, not only for me but for my children, too.
I needed to learn to love myself.
Learn my worth.
Learn to feel safe.
Learn to trust.
Lessons I didn’t want to learn
I didn’t want to learn those lessons! Deep down, I already knew them. Really, I did, or going through it wouldn’t have been so dang hard. You can’t understand why you let someone treat you like you are less than. You can’t understand how you forgot your worth. You can’t understand why you let yourself live in a place you didn’t feel safe in. You get angry because life wasn’t supposed to be this way. You knew better. I was in survival mode and fear paralyzed me. It was hard to even look in the mirror and see the reflection looking back. Is that me? How did this happen? The not-so-funny thing is you hope things will change, or worse, the people around you will change. Hope can save you and hope can kill you. You get to make that decision for yourself. That is what you can control. I chose to save myself rather than hoping things/people would change and drowning myself in the process when they didn’t. You want the good changes. The changes you think are what needs to happen. And there you go trying to control the changes you want. It doesn’t work like that, and that is definitely a lesson I didn’t want to learn or accept. So, God or the Universe, however you see it, made the changes that needed to happen for me. I was forced to see everything I already knew but chose not to believe. Everyone has a breaking point. I’d reached mine, and you better believe I went in kicking and screaming.
Embrace the change
You know what’s funny? After initially fighting this change, I came to embrace it. I would ask myself, “Why did you not want this?” and “Why did you hang on so hard to something that didn’t make you happy?” Even now, I still can’t quite answer that out loud. I’d like to believe it’s because I had faith that things would change for the better at some point. I’d like to believe that I didn’t want to give up on someone that I cared about. But deep down, I know it is because I knew that my life would completely change and that scared me. Thank goodness I leaned into that fear. Maybe not at first… but eventually I did. Little did I know that this restart was exactly what was best for me. After loving myself again and realizing my worth, I started to feel safe and learned to trust again. I was healing from the trauma. I’d love to say this was a short journey, it wasn’t. It’s a journey I am still on!
What I can say is that I love this change. I’m glad I chose to save myself. I’m glad I leaned into my fear. I learned my lessons, I embraced the changes. All of this brought me to where I am now. Right here… this place, full circle. And right now, I don’t want to change a thing.
Keep Living Your Best Life!
Michelle