A Harsh Realization

Here’s a pretty big thing about myself that I don’t tell a whole lot of people (but now have told the whole blogosphere):

I don’t want to have kids. There’s a lot of reasons for it and most of it pertains to my disability, but it’s become increasingly apparent that this fact does not make an already difficult dating situation any easier.

This pushed me into a pretty hard realization tonight. I genuinely, truly think I want (and need) to be alone. Not forever, but right now I think it’s the best. I’m just tired. Tired of having to weed through a mound of guys to find the good ones or the ones that won’t care about my disability. Tired of having to find a guy with all those qualities that also won’t want kids. I’m not 100% no on it, but I can say that right now, where I’m at…I’m about 98% sure I don’t want to have kids. Adopt them? Maybe. And of course guys want to have kids. It’s in their DNA and they aren’t the ones who have to carry and deliver the baby. That old “I want to carry on my line and the family name” still applies. And I don’t know if I can be that girl. The one that gives you little versions of yourself and the family and the white picket fence.

So why am I expelling all this energy into dating and trying to find a life partner when I’m not even sure I’m ready to meet that challenge to begin with?

Would it be nice to have someone to always do stuff with and share a life with? Of course. I can’t wait for the day I can finally use those Groupon Getaways that are “for 2” (yes, I’m serious). An anecdote for the occasional loneliness would be great, I can’t lie.

But being single really isn’t some horrible life sentence either. This is what my life has been for so long, I’ve really gotten used to it. Maybe I’m afraid of change and am just putting walls up to try protect myself, I don’t know. But I’m in a place in my life where I just don’t think I’m going to find someone who can give me what I need or someone I can provide what they need to. Maybe when I’m in my late 30s or early 40s I can find a guy who already has kids and has no interest in having any more (don’t recommend trying that at 22 by the way). Right now though, I’m just not sure it’s in the cards.

This thing I was born with. This thing that wasn’t my fault or my choice to have just seems to permeate so many areas of my life and though it’s really so minor in comparison to what other people have to deal with, I’m not going to lie…it’s frustrating and it’s tiring at times, especially right now. It’s one thing to have to deal with it yourself but that’s the thing isn’t it? It’s not just me dealing with it. It’s any friends I choose to make that have to deal with it. It’s any person that I date or am potentially in a relationship with that has to deal with it. It’s my family that has to deal with it too.

I know I’m having a bit of a pity party here but this is definitely some serious personal food for thought. I don’t know if being in a relationship again is really something I want as much as I think I do sometimes.

Balance

“Balance is a misnomer too – all balance requires wobbling.” – Kathy Kruger

I just wanted to share this wonderful article that I read on Tiny Buddha yesterday. A lot of my blogs and thoughts lately have been focused around this idea of “balancing” everything and I think Kathy’s piece really hit the nail on the head. We all have to wobble our way through life. I’m likely never going to be the perfect blend of nice and tough. I’m not going to be able to blog myself into being completely enlightened and have all the answers.

Life isn’t meant to be lived constantly searching for something, whatever that something may be. We can’t go through it constantly running towards some great big answer (and we also can’t spend it running away from those answers we don’t want to hear). There’s no great big moment at the end of it all that we should be striving towards. If there’s always something we’re searching for then we’re never going to be truly happy.

Thank you for the lesson Kathy.

Own It

Original Photo by Taylored Photo Memories

“Own who you are.” These are 4 words my coworker said to me the other day. Simple right?

I haven’t been blogging much lately. I never want to force the process and write just for the sake of writing anyway but I’ve also been trying something the past couple of weeks: not thinking so much about well…everything. My blog (I hope) is about a lot more than just the inner workings of my mind, but I can’t deny that there’s a certain facet of it that starts to put me into over-thinking mode. I think I fully started to realize the great importance in just being. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t or won’t blog, but it means that in life, it’s ok to not analyze every little behavior I have. It’s ok to not be able to get to the root of everything. It’s ok to not be constantly trying to fix all the things I want to better about myself right away. I can just be.

It can be exhausting trying to live up to the kind of person we want ourselves to be. There’s no one else who puts that pressure on me other than myself. I want to be nice but not too nice. I want to stand up for myself, but not upset anyone. I want to inspire but not sound self-important or superior. I’m trying to squeeze myself into this little box sometimes. I’m trying to achieve this “perfect” balance of everything in order to be a better version of myself tomorrow than I was today.

So when my coworker said to own who you are, I wondered if I was really doing that. I had gotten so caught up in self-improvement that I think maybe I lost myself a little. Striving for this balance and focusing on it so intensely was stopping me from really living and being. I’ve been trying to assemble all of the puzzle pieces of myself instantaneously so I can see the finished picture. But which one of us can truly say that we’re a full, perfect puzzle? I’m pretty sure none of us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still love and own who we are right now.

I had been talking with my friend Dustin about a list I wanted to make of all the reasons I accept and love myself for. So what better place to do it than here on my blog. I urge you try it. It’s quite enlightening!

I own and accept myself for:

• Being nice to everyone, even if they don’t necessarily deserve it
• Standing up for myself but also knowing which battles to pick
• Caring…about people, about the world, etc
• Having a disability
• Sometimes being upset I have a disability
• Not being perfect and not always saying the perfect thing
• Being a little over dramatic sometimes
• Making some dumb decisions in life
• Not being positive 24/7
• Being the kind of beautiful I am, even if it’s not what society deems as the standard

Just because we stop to say, “you know what, I own who I am!” doesn’t mean we have to stop trying to better ourselves either. Growing and learning are a constant part of life, they never stop. At least, I hope they don’t. But I can still sit here today and say, you know what? This is who I am…flaws and all. You can like it and accept it or not, up to you. I know that not everyone in life is going to like me. I could be “perfect” and there would still be people who wouldn’t like me. The important part is that I accept me.

#nofilter

So I will be honest, I am not really an advocate of the “selfie” (photos you take of yourself with your phone or camera that often get posted on various forms of social media). Oh I took many of them back in the days of MySpace. Standing in the front of the mirror, looking pensively out the window…all that good stuff. But these days I just prefer to have pictures taken of myself by other people or with other people in them with me to capture moments and memories. That being said, please excuse the one I have below

You’ve probably already read my struggle with defining myself by the makeup I wear and how hard it’s been for me over the years to go makeup free; that fear that people would think I was ugly or less desirable if I ever let them see me without makeup on. I told someone once, it was an “earned privilege” to see me without makeup…male or female, it didn’t matter.

Even now, as I took the picture of myself sans Instagram filters, sans special lighting, sans contacts even and with still-wet hair from a shower, I felt that knot build in my stomach and the questions arise. Do I really want to let people see this, flaws and all? Complete strangers? Guys? Girls? Should I still just keep the mystery of it alive? But it was for that very reason that I knew I had to do it. I had to step out of my bubble. I had to step out of my comfort zone, not just to be true to what I talk about here on my blog, but to be true to myself. It’s not about the responses I may or may not get from people. At the end of the day and when I wake up, this is what I look like and if I’m not ok with that…if I don’t love myself with makeup or without, then how can I expect anyone else to? I love dressing up and playing with makeup, that will likely never change, but what I also know is beauty is so much more than something that comes out of a tube or a bottle.

So this is me…#nofilter

Comparison

“Comparison is an act of violence against the self” -Iyanla Vanzant

I love Iyanla Vanzant…possibly more than Oprah (yes, I just said that). Ironically Oprah is how I discovered Iyanla, but I just spent the last few minutes reading some of her quotes and my mind is already completely blown. I’ve been thinking a lot about this particular quote over the past week though.

We live in a culture of comparison now. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest…with just a click of a mouse we have access to the personal lives and goings-on of hundreds of people all at once. We can see what fabulous trip they just went on. See their wedding photos. Hear about the second baby they have on the way. Hear about their fabulous trips and all the places they get to go. We’re automatically set up for comparing ourselves to one another. The only way to fully tune that out would be to get rid of all social media and probably not watch any television at all and let’s be honest, most of us just don’t want to do that…myself included.

I think one of the toughest mental obstacles I’ve had in my life is comparing myself to others. The majority of it has been physical comparison (there’s that limp again). Never feeling pretty enough or like I blended in enough. Even on days where maybe I finally felt like I was pretty, I’d go out to the mall or the beach and there would be 10 girls I perceived as prettier than me and I wouldn’t feel quite so good about myself anymore. When I had a guy I was dating or was interested in me, there would be other girls around who would be juggling two or three. Girls that were getting asked out all the time and jumping from relationship to relationship and I wasn’t.

Even today, I don’t always feel like my life is where it “should” be for a lot of different reasons. I look at where other people are and can’t help but ask “what did I do wrong that my life isn’t at that place too?” Did I make too many bad decisions along the way or not take enough risks and this is where I landed?

This is exactly what Iyanla means. I have literally spent years of my life beating myself up…mentally and emotionally…by comparing myself to others. I’ve devalued everything about myself and my life just because it didn’t match up with someone else’s. I’ve discounted my outer and inner beauty because I don’t look like a random stranger I saw walk past me once or that airbrushed model in the latest issue of Elle.

I’ve felt a lot of pain at the hands of others but I can tell you from experience, there is no greater pain inflicted than that which we inflict upon ourselves. This is not an easy pattern to break, for any of us. Even without social media this would be hard, but now we have a whole added layer we have to mentally overcome in order to feel right with ourselves and not compare our story to someone else’s. I’ve come along way on the path against comparison but it’s not easy. I still have plenty of days where I feel less than. Plenty of days where I feel like I’m not up-to-speed in life for my age. But the first step is being able to recognize that you’re comparing and be able to recognize the immense toll that can take on you so you can go forward and try to correct it.

Let’s not make ourselves each other’s enemies by comparing what we have or don’t have. We are all in this together. We all have things we wish were better in our own lives. We all have things maybe we wish we could change about how we look…insecurities. The most powerful thing we can know though is that in that, we are the same. We may be different people. We may all be individuals and that’s fantastic. But when you start to focus inward on yourself and what you have to bring the table, what great qualities you have to offer this world…suddenly what everyone else is doing doesn’t quite matter so much. When you relate instead of juxtaposing yourself against the person across from you, that’s when you can stop the violence.

Everything that…

Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth. -Iyanla Vanzant

Those Who Can’t: Blog

This was the status on someone’s Facebook that I saw last night. Now I don’t know what the context of said status was, whether it meant those who can’t write blog or those who can’t do anything blog, but it brought me to that point we’re probably all familiar with somewhat; that point where you want to post a passive aggressive Facebook status to counteract the other person.

But instead, I decided to counteract it by doing the very thing the status so condescendingly referred to (and hopefully not passive aggressively so ) I don’t blog because I’m not living my life and would rather sit behind a computer and write about it. I am certainly not America’s next great novelist either but I also know I’m a decent writer. Blogging isn’t any less of an art form than writing a memoir, or a poem, or any other kind of writing is. It’s just a different forum.

I blog because I have a story to tell. I think we all do. I think we all can learn from each other and if my story can help even one person in the entire time I’m alive, then I feel like I’ve done something right. I’ve said this many times before, but growing up, we didn’t have blogs, we didn’t have social media. We had AOL Instant Messenger (ahh memories) and that was about it. I didn’t know there were other people out there feeling the same way I did, living with a disability…struggling the same way I was. I wrote a special blog for MDA and I had people tell me how moved they were by my story and how much it helped them to hear that someone else out there felt exactly the same way and was going through the same struggles. I can’t even put into words what kind of impact that has on me.

This was a great moment for me to test that whole not caring what other people think mentality. At first, I got really angry and even a little hurt. How dare someone I don’t even know judge those of us who blog? I even thought for a second, “Is what he’s saying true, even just a little bit?” Then I realized what I was doing…letting a complete stranger make me question something that I love doing. Something I know is helping me and helping others.

There’s always going to be people out there who have something to say. Sometimes it will be positive, sometimes it will be negative. The key is to keep that noise out. We’re all allowed to have an opinion and I think it’s great that we can and that we’re free to express it accordingly. But just because you have that opinion doesn’t mean what I’m doing is stupid or wrong. It doesn’t make me any less of a person than you are. I couldn’t be happier with what I’m doing and with what blogging has done for me so Mr. Facebook Status, I’m sorry you feel that way, but I blog…and I can.