choose your own adventure
The night before my 36th birthday it dawned on me; This is it; you’re doing it sister.
My life, the life I had been fighting so hard to get just right - the one my perfectionism told me was going to begin just as soon as I was able to feel organized, with a perfectly fit body, hair and makeup on point and a dairy-free, gluten-free, egg-free meal on the table for my family at exactly 5pm – was passing me by.
In a moment of stillness, it became so clear. As though all the chaos in my brain halted just long enough for me to truly appreciate the gaze of my husband staring back at me. The fullness in my heart knowing my 3 healthy boys were sleeping soundly upstairs and the awe that I owned the house around me settled in. How long had I been playing this game of dress up? I had entirely missed the fact that this wasn’t make believe at all.
A heaviness lifted as I made a decision. More accurately, I committed to myself that this was the year I was going to come back to life, come back to myself. I realized the slow path to vacancy in my own skin that I had been on, and I shuddered. After finally being real with myself and those closest to me that I had been struggling with some severe anxiety, I began working with a therapist. I had become aware that I had buried a part of who I was somewhere and together we began the work of retracing steps to find her beneath the trauma and exhaustion of life, and motherhood particularly.
Becoming a mother rocks you. It rocks us all differently, but I have yet to meet a woman who has journeyed the path unscathed. However, being a mother was not the only reason I had found myself here, and in fact, it was more likely the scapegoat, my excuse for not tuning into my own needs in the name of martyrdom. I have yet to receive my trophy.
COVID has estranged us from so much of what we know and who we love and cast us into a vacuum of insanity. Parenting has required every ounce of patience we could muster on the heels of utter exhaustion and the fear that we are doing it all wrong. All systems in our body have been firing to protect us and keep us going another day but without a pause, some stillness, we so easily become puppets, mere shells of who we truly are just going through the motions. I feel so compelled to share this deeply personal experience because I know I’m not alone in sacrificing life’s precious moments.
I write all of this only to say: it doesn’t have to be this way. I love to borrow the wise words of Marie Forleo that “everything is figureoutable”. It tells me that COVID restrictions and mandates, my mother’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, my son’s life-threatening allergies, the car accident, the parts of life that feel like they are happening to me, none of it is the end of the story. Old Me had buckled under the pressure of these circumstances, New Me is reminded that we choose our own adventure in this story. It’s the reminder of these choices that gives me life and fans the flame.
So now I’m sitting with that fire, asking what is next. I am sitting with the discomfort of not having a clear and concise answer to that question. I am reminding myself that this unsettling feeling is also exciting. Choose your own Adventure, that’s what next.
As we close the chapter of what was 2021, I am carving out a space of gratitude for all of the discomfort, brokenness, tears and ‘hard things’. It’s the refining fire and only method by which we grow.
Wishing us all hard and beautiful things in 2022.
xo.
Gretchen
