If You Died Tomorrow, Would You Die Happy? - A View on Mindset

If You Died Tomorrow, Would You Die Happy? – A View on Mindset

Change Your Mindset, Change Your Life

In my debut creative nonfiction novel, “Your crossroads. Your choice.,” I mention how I stumbled upon my new partner on this journey, who I refer to as M2. I do not think M2 and I would have connected so deeply if I did not have the beginnings of my current mindset when I met him. I say beginnings because changing how I look at myself, my life and my journey…

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Your Glass Is Never Empty: A View on Perspective

Your Glass Is Never Empty: A View on Perspective

Close your eyes. Evaluate your perspective on your life. Imagine yourself getting caught in the rain. What about being stuck in traffic when you absolutely have to make it to that appointment on time. What is your perspective? As I was walking the halls of my job, I came across a poster with the following message: The glass is filled with ½ air and ½ water. So technically, the glass is always…

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#truth #yourcrossroadsyourchoice #choice #empowerment

You Are Here: The Proverbial Do Over

You Are Here: The Proverbial Do Over

The most amazing thing about life is the ability for a do over. I know you may think this is an impossible task but read the sentence again – life can be done over. It is a cruel irony that hindsight is twenty/twenty, but I think the ability to reflect and learn from our past choices is what drives us on. If we are able to look back at the decisions we have made then we can move forward with our…

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My Dirty Little Secret

Raise your hand if you have ever browsed through Instagram, Facebook or any other social media platform and instantly felt crappy about your own life because you are looking at all the wonderful, seemingly effortless things your friends, family, distant acquaintances and even celebrities are posting about. News flash here, everyone’s life is a hot mess. In fact, the reason why people post all of those amazing dinners, perfect outfits or workouts accomplished is because we all need to be validated. For some reason we have decided as a society that this validation can not be achieved simply by working our way through this game of life without a playbook. The heightened social awareness has caused people to strive to constantly be recognized for their very best. Can you imagine a world where you were judged based solely on your social media popularity? To me, that sounds like a Twilight Zone nightmare, one step away from talking Tina and the pig people. Could you spend every waking minute that you are in the presence of other people, having to keep up the perfection we filter, crop and hashtag online?

Take it from someone who has spent their life attempting to live with that perfect persona 24/7, it isn’t sustainable. The only thing you will accomplish is burning out and breaking down. I have dubbed this perfect, albeit false, sense of me as an “ultimate representative”. Basically, it comes down to taking the idea of putting your best foot forward to an extreme level. It is human nature to dust ourselves off and spruce ourselves up before a major event - first date, job interview, induction into the karate hall of fame. However after the the first kiss has been planted, the job has been won, or the ceremony comes to an end, most people return back to the sustainable, realistic versions of themselves allowing things we purposely hid from the public eye during those major events come back into the open. Our everyday person contains our good parts, but also naturally contains some not so good parts. We are human after all, raised by imperfect people who in turn were raised by imperfect people, and so on. We can all agree that this cycle is as old as our very existence no matter how you believe man came to be.

At a very young age, even before I realized what I was doing, I created this permanent shield, my ultimate representative, to hide behind because I wanted people to only see the good parts of me at all times, the ones that I knew would not be rejected. If ever there was a situation where a piece of the “real me” peeked through and was noticed, it made my life too uncomfortable to continue, even if the response to my true self was not in a negative way. To add insult to injury, this facade of pathetic perfection has followed me from childhood straight through until about a year ago, and I am well into adulthood at this point. I worked tirelessly to always ensure that the things I did, opinions I voiced, or actions I took, were perfect and correct because only then would I allow myself to feel successful.

Wait, what? Successful? How on this green Earth could I, or anyone for that matter, think that my personal, intrinsic, success could be quantified by how other people saw me or perceived my actions? My personal success, as is yours, as is everyone’s, is determined only by yourself. Remember, I am not talking about career success, car success, or house success those are all material things. The way you feel about yourself, the you that you feel proud to show the world can only be decided upon within you. Be warned, I am going to request that you do a little homework now. When you have some time, find a quiet place and flip through your past actions and memories. Rewind past all of your major life events where you would have displayed your regular representative and instead, focus on the everyday, how you handled the little things. What version of yourself did you show the world, the true you or only the best parts of you? How hard did you work in order to make other people happy so that their versions of you they saw appeared successful? Are you hiding behind your ultimate representative as I was?

Don’t despair! The first step to a solution is admitting you have a problem, that an ultimate representative exists. Would you like to know who is responsible for this nightmare? You of course! Well more specifically, your inner critic, so say thank you for this Frankenstein-esque creation. Feelings of anger and frustration are normal at this point so sit with them, acknowledge them and then LET THEM GO. I understand that no one wants to admit to unknowingly working so hard to hide themselves from the world but if you can’t be honest with yourself then you can not begin the process of letting go. Face your inner negative Nancy head on with kindness because judging things you have done in your past will do nothing but cause your self critic to jump with joy - negativity is the very thing they thrive on! 

If your inner critic doth protest, and believe me, they will, politely smile as you place a big piece of duct tape over their mouth, tie some rocks to their belt and let them sink into the darkest recesses of your mind. With any luck, repeated taping and dumping will cause your critic’s power to lose hold over you until one day you find yourself not listening anymore. The day that happens make sure you do a little happy dance and pat yourself on the back - the journey to self acceptance is a long and rocky road but so worth the effort. You do not need the fake representative displaying a perfect version of who you are, people will love you no matter what, trust me. I tentatively started stepping out from behind my representative’s shield this past year and at times I felt naked and exposed, convinced the whole world was going to point and laugh me right back into my corner. But guess what - no one did. Show the world your true self, beautiful quirks and all, they are the things that make you unique. Begin to learn to love yourself and let the world love you too.

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If you do this, you might be insane...

As my key turned the pins within the lock and the door cracked open, that tiny, powerful piece of paper fluttered to the floor. With it went my heart. What kind of paper could hold such power over me, you wonder? It was a notice of a certified letter that had to be delivered directly to me or picked up at the post office. I know!! The terrible scenarios and complete demise of my life flashed before my eyes too! Wait, what? A notice of a certified letter doesn’t strike fear in your heart? Actually, better question here, why did it strike fear in mine? This experience brought back another memory, stirred up another time where that same fear of being “in trouble” occurred.

I had this boss that would put three dots in the subject line of every email he sent to me. To make matters worse, he would simply write in the body of the email - “please come see me.” As I demonstrated with my earlier story, I had the propensity to always assume that I was in trouble for something I had done wrong. Those emails would fill me with a sense of dread and I would begin to run numbers in my head as if I had lost my job. Why did I always go from 0-100 on the crazy train of guilt? I was for better or worse, probably to an extreme fault always trying to do the right thing, keep people around me happy.

Inevitably when I tracked my boss down and found out what the email was about, it usually ended up being something innocuous like formatting an Excel spreadsheet or discussing some scheduling conflicts. I would repeatedly tell him that putting those three dots in the subject line sent me into a tailspin and if he could always just add, “not a big deal,” it would make my life easier. His reaction was usually to chuckle and gently usher me out of his office. He never understood that my life was surrounded by a sense or more of a need to control as much as I possibly could. When I had control, I had comfort, because I was unable to find comfort within myself. I could never understand why he would continue to add those three dots to every subject line he wrote me in the four years that we worked together because it never occurred to me that he didn't live in that same controlling environment that I was a voluntary prisoner of.

With all the turmoil that has happened over the past year of my life it has become blatantly clear to me that you can't control what is going to happen in your future, you can simply make the choice at each and every crossroads you come to that will lead you on the best path forward. That choice may turn out to be the wrong choice, but at least you made it for yourself. The choices I've made in my past were made with others in mind instead of myself. As I continue to write, through my books and my blogs, several things have become my new mantras: hindsight is always 20/20, you always have a choice, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot control what happens in the future. 

Case in point, the year 2016. That was the hardest year of my life and although I thought I may have had things mostly under control, looking back now I see I reached some of my darkest points, points that I am just beginning to see I had hit. It's encouraging to know that I'm making my way out of those dark points and stepping back into the light, taking positive steps forward to heal myself and to try and pass my message of happiness and choice on to others. But getting here was not easy, and is certainly far from over. I spent a lifetime trying to control the uncontrollable and look what happened in my life. One of the worst case “what if” scenarios to experience, divorce and the shattering of my family and my life’s very foundation.

I was desperately striving for success but was only setting myself up for failure. I thought that in order to be happy I had to follow the normal, accepted path of mainstream society - get married, buy a house, rescue a dog, pop out some kids and secure a stable routine job in a stable routine town. I thought that if I achieved all these goals, goals that were not mine but society’s then happiness would be reached. By now, can you guess what happened after I checked each one of those boxes off my bucket list? Nothing. Completion of those goals came and went and I still felt empty. The realization that my goals were not really mine devastated me two ways. On the one hand I stupidly, desperately, pathetically hoped they would bring me happiness. And two, I honestly, truly, ignorantly and psychotically believed that achieving those goals would ensure that nothing truly bad would ever happen to me.

Can we all focus on the irony in that last statement? Trying to control my life did not prevent something I spent every waking second trying to avoid and inevitably ending up doing to myself. My life got out of control, bad things happened to my marriage and my soul but I am still here. I survived the lowest low and have come out on the other side. Can I let you in on a little secret? I am discovering through this journey that the uncomfortability and unpredictability that happens in life forced me to look for comfort and strength within myself when there was nowhere else to look. I started to believe in my choices even when they went against what other people may have thought or done. These pieces of strength and knowledge are what I hold on to when my new foundation begins to waver. When I look at the future I see an unknown blur but it is no longer gray or scary. It is exciting and new and potentially amazing!! No one knows what's going to happen, no matter who you are. All we can do is be prepared to try and make the best choices moving forwards. What choices can you make moving forward to put yourself on your way to happiness?

You Are Here

I believe that one of the most amazing things about life is the ability for a do-over. I know your first instinct is to think this is an impossible task, but read the sentence again. We have the ability for a do-over. It is a cruel irony that hindsight is 20/20, but I think the ability to reflect and learn from our past choices is what drives us on. If we are able to look back at the decisions we have made then we should be able to move forward with our eyes wide open. Think about all of those maps that have seen with that have a big red dot stating “You are Here.” You are here, in the present moment, exactly where you are supposed to be. The past has already happened, there is no question to it, there is no surprise about it. You have experienced it and it now resides, well….in your past as memories, emotions, experience and knowledge. These past occurrences are what have molded you into the person you are at your present moment. The future is a question, nobody knows what is going to happen. All we can do is try to make the best choices at each of our crossroads to propel us in the right direction on whatever path we take.

I spent my childhood making choices that took me down paths which always seemed to ensure other people's happiness over my own. This put an enormous weight on my young shoulders and forced me to stop living in the present moment. Instead, I lived in a constant fear of unknown “what if” moments that were likely never going to happen. I tirelessly attempted to plan for the most awful, gut wrenching “just in case” scenarios so that I would know how to handle them. This torturous game of life that I was a helpless player in never allowed me to enjoy the present moment. I set this cycle up early in life because my accomplishments were often met with “don’t get your hopes up” levels of encouragement. Nominated for homecoming queen? Don’t get your hopes up, you probably won’t win. Want to be captain of the softball team? Don’t get your hopes up, you run with a refrigerator on your back and tomahawk when you swing the bat. I was essentially the pig pen character from Charlie Brown only instead of dust and dirt swirling around me there was a cloud of insecurity and self doubt. I thought that the only way to get rid of this cloud was to ensure that my mom, my friends, my husband and anyone else I held dear to me, were happy. I was relinquishing my choice for theirs each and every time.

Recent events have forced me to let go of the past and stop obsessing over the future because I see now that they are the parts of my life that I can not change or predict. All I can do is take charge of the present moment, my big red dot. It is the only part I have control over so it is the only part that I can worry about. I realized that those “what if” scenarios were like a colony of termites invading the foundation of my thoughts. When you see one of those pesky insects in your house you know there are probably thousands more hiding below the surface. My termites are negative thoughts that chewed deep into my consciousness telling me why I should not or could not make the choice to change my life. Situations and experiences that had been happening in the recent past were not making me happy in my current moment. Once I came to that conclusion, I knew I needed to make a change before those negative termites destroyed all of my foundation, leaving me unable to make any positive steps forward.

Whoa. I had to do what? First, let’s have a mini round of applause here. The act of having this thought, that I was unhappy in the life I am leading, and then taking steps to change that takes a lot of guts and courage and a little sprinkling of crazy. The routines, safety nets, and knowledge that my life was essentially planned from here on out was a pretty enticing thing. Some of the “what if” termites were settling down because aside from going completely off the deep end and stressing over the sun turning into a supergiant or freaking out that a volcano under Yellowstone would erupt, I only had death and my unhealthy relationship to focus on. Screw that! I am only 37 years old which is not even forty which I have been informed is the new thirty so I am basically celebrating my 28th year of life! I am not ready to throw in the proverbial towel and wait for my imminent death to catch up with me. So what now? What steps do I need to take in order to change my life and begin to lead the one that is going to make me happy? I think we all realize what the first step in the journey had to be - I had to take ownership of my decisions. Whether or not I truly stood behind them 100% yet, I had to become my own advocate and take action. Fake it until you make it and all, right? I promptly fumigated my negative thought termites, cleaned out all of the crevices and cobwebs and hopped onto my own cheerleading train.

Awesome. I was halfway there, right? Wrong, I have a lot of work left to do but isn’t it 95% motivation and 5% something else? I have the motivation but I needed to come up with the something else, the thing that will propel me into the next phase. I knew that beginning to change my stagnant life had to start with a single choice. A single thought set in motion, a little push to get the ball rolling so it could gain the momentum and lead me to success. So I did it, I put something in motion to alter my future, I chose to end my marriage. Please, no moment of silence of needed, this is not a reason to mourn but rather a cause for celebration! Honestly, it was probably the first thing I have ever chosen to do completely for myself in my entire life and it’s scary as hell. But it is also exciting and refreshing and feels completely right. Closing one door does allow for others to open but they aren’t necessarily going to do it on their own. I will need to be my biggest advocate, my loudest cheerleader and my own personal life coach in order to make my dreams a reality. This is where the other 95% comes into play - I have made my choice, taken my next big step and now I need to make sure I follow through.

Take a moment and think about the choices you have made throughout your life. Not the little ones like what you had for dinner last night, but the bigger ones, the ones that shape who you are and where your life is going. Are you happy with all of them? Are there any that you can change? If there is even one thing that you have thought of that would make you happy to change then do it! Hold on to that thought and start to develop a plan to make your desires turn from a dream into a goal. What’s the difference between the two? A dream is something that you have the possibility of completing, a goal is something that you are taking measurable steps towards achieving. So, what is your goal?

Baskets Are a Hidden Death Trap

Baskets. What? Yes, you read correctly my friends, baskets. Those useful tools that have been holding things for man since the dawn of time. While the real things can prove to be exceedingly useful, I also want to call attention to the more imaginary, metaphorical baskets that live within the recesses of our minds. Let’s break each group down. We’ll start with the more obvious group here, the physical baskets. One continuous loop of twine, rope or thread wrapped around a skeleton or even a group of vintage army men melted and glued together can form the backbone for a useful basket. Anything that can create a somewhat amorphous half circle or a rigid cube shape can be called a basket as long as things can be put into it and stored away. When my ex-husband and I began to date, he was still living at home. He had his own room (thankfully) and that was his own personal domain. His mother managed to do most things for him but being in charge of his room, well, that was completely his responsibility. As I began to stitch myself into his life, I started to notice that he was very, VERY messy. Not pizza boxes under the bed and empty soda cans on the side table gross, more of an unkempt messy, clothes and papers and…things…everywhere. He claimed to have a system but looking back now, and after having lived with him, I know it was really just who he is. Fast forward to our first home and I was about to throttle him over his messiness. Until I discovered the basket. Being a scientific gal, I decided to conduct an experiment and see if leaving empty baskets at strategic locations around the house might encourage a natural migration towards orderliness. It worked in the beginning and I felt like I was on top of the world! My home was nice and neat which meant that I could allow myself to be happy. Wait, allow myself to be happy? What did my happiness have to do with his physical things? Did the baskets really solve anything or were they simply a band aid that was hiding the larger problem behind the disorderly house? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t change my ex-husbands behavior, he will forever be a messy individual. You see, no one has the power to change another human being. Change needs to be intrinsic, something the person has to crave before it can be attainable. I could not force this natural desire onto my ex-husband no matter how many baskets I put around the house. What I could change however, was how I chose to react to his actions and begin to look at the thing I was trying to find a basket for - was I truly happy with the choices I have made in my current life. There was no physical basket big enough to handle all of his crap because the physical was not the true problem. The emotional baggage that this question came with would not leave my mind no matter how hard I tried to organize it and put it out of sight. I desperately held onto the hope that just like putting useless physical things into a useless physical basket and shoving them away into a useless physical corner, I could put this gem of a question into a metaphorical basket within my mind and pretend that I had taken care of it. As I am sure you could have guessed by now, this did not work, it simply allowed me to continue to live a delusional lie. OK, let’s take a minute to dive into the baskets that we can not see - the ones that we use to compartmentalize thoughts, feelings and choices in our minds. In trying to keep the peace in my marriage I put feelings that I thought were “wrong” into these mind baskets and buried them deep down in my grey matter. They stayed there, sealed up tight, suffocating parts of the real me that I lost over the years thanks to these hateful baskets that I have been using in my mind. These pesky enemies pose as helpful organizational tools when in reality they are enablers in the path to my destruction. My anger, frustration and annoyance at my ex-husband that had been piling up for years was getting more and more difficult to put away in my brain baskets and they turned out to be a little more stubborn at fighting my attempts to bury them away. Those baskets did not want to be forgotten. They would not allow me to continue to pretend that I was happy leading this boring, routine, predictable life. The way I saw it, I had accomplished all of the major check marks – job, marriage, house, dog and children. What was left? Retirement? Death? Both of those options were years away and not quite what I was looking forward to. When the realization that I could not change my husband finally settled in, and those brain baskets of feelings I had toward him were overflowing, I realized I had to change something if I wanted this marriage to survive. I started to see that by putting these feelings I had for him in my metaphorical baskets, I was choosing his happiness over mine. Each time I let something go, each time I created a new basket in my mind for my feelings I was doing a disservice to myself. Marriage is about communication, respect and teamwork. My ex, as much as I shudder to admit this, saw me as a step in for his mother, a job I did not want. His physical actions may have been able to be modified with some baskets around the house, but the baskets in my mind where I kept the emotional discourse between us turned out to be harder to organize away. Although you may still be holding onto the myth that baskets could be the key to an easier marriage, I see now that the marriage has to be on a solid foundation first if it is going to be a success. Once I realized that my metaphorical baskets were literally pouring out of me because I had shoved so many feelings down, I knew that I had to make a change. At that particular crossroads in my life, I chose to end something that was a major source of unhappiness for me – my marriage. This left a lot of space in my mind now – all of those baskets that I used to hide my feelings in are empty. I am wondering what to fill them with moving forwards. Peace? Serenity? Travel? Chocolate? The coolest thing I know is that the choice is mine and mine alone. It is daunting to try and find things to fill these emotional baskets with that don't resemble the scared or negative variety. What kinds of baskets are you hiding, tucked away in the recesses of your mind? Are there things in those baskets that diminish your happiness? Message me and let me know what things you have been hiding away and maybe we can brainstorm action items to clean out those baskets and begin to fill them with things that make you choose, things that will make you happy.

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones But Words Can Damn Near Kill Me

If someone asked me what I would rather have happen – a solid punch to the gut or a glimpse into the mind of someone who was judging me, I would gladly accept the punch to the gut. Physical pain can be handled and forgotten but the emotional pain that comes from hearing negative words, even from a stranger, is devastating and long lasting. The bruise to your psyche you experience from some well positioned hate words will last well beyond any physical bruise you receive. Did you ever notice, that our brains have a funny way of cycling these negative words on a never ending hamster wheel within our minds, often keeping them just below the surface until you least expect it. Words have the ability to cut a person, deeply. The hardest thing about these cuts is that they are invisible to the naked eye, because cuts made by words do not show  to the outside world, they settle somewhere else. They settle on your confidence, make their home on your happiness and eat away at your ability to believe in yourself.

All of those hamster wheels of negativity are spinning at warp speed in my mind right now. This is my very first blog post. Ever. Which means I am currently thinking of a thousand reasons why I may fail at this new venture. What I am beginning to realize however, is that among all the negative “what ifs” there is one positive “I can” that I am latching onto with all of my might. Life’s a bumpy, chaotic road that none of us have a map to. When you think about it, we are all in this together trying to stumble through with our best foot forwards most of the time but at the end of the day, no one, not even the most powerful person on this chunk of space rock, has any idea what the future holds! Really puts your problems into perspective doesn’t it my friends? I am trying to grow personally and professionally everyday, to surround myself with people who believe in the same positive message that I am trying to pass on – that you and you alone have control over the choices you make at each of the crossroads you come to in life. You can choose to move forwards and pursue your happiness, or stay static choosing the happiness of others over your own. Sounds like a pretty common sense message doesn’t it? You see, I believe that the things that happen to us are not what make us special, they do not define who we are. Instead, it is the choices we make at each of our crossroads and how we choose to handle what life throws at us that defines who we are. Everyone has gone through something terrible in their lives and trying to compare your awful to theirs is a defeating exercise that will only result in hurt egos and feelings. We need to come together and realize that we are all stumbling through this playbook called life as blindly as our neighbors and could probably use a little help along the way.

Those verbal knives that cut me so deep were not only delivered by outside voices. My own inner voice was one of the most destructive knives in the bunch. I could link every negative thing that happened in my life to being somehow caused by my actions, to the point where I lost all trust in myself. I learned early on that by keeping my choices to myself and following the choices of everyone else, I could have control over what happened. My life has been dedicated to believing that I had to have the answer to everything, know how every scenario was going to play out. I spent my life putting others happiness before my own to the point that I created an image of myself that I put on display to everyone while simultaneously burying my real true self. This was so self destructive that I was causing a critical piece of who I was to slowly die and I didn’t even realize it. I chose things at the crossroads of my life that made the people around me, my family and friends, happy. Why you ask? Perhaps you should turn that question around on yourself my friends. Have you ever put someone else’s happiness before your own? If so, why? What was the reason for putting your choices on the back burner and allowing someone else to decide your path down that crossroads? Take a moment and comment below. Tell me your story, share the decisions you have made at your crossroads. Who knows, maybe you will see a new direction, a new road, that you never knew existed that just might be the path you were meant to walk on.