So, a lot of my thoughts are really personal and I need to issue a disclaimer here that I might be a little too transparent at times.  I feel like I need to let myself be transparent right now.  It is part of my journey, and it scares the heck out of me!

A lot of the thoughts and experiences I have had over the past year or so have gone through my mind so many times that I feel like I have already shared them.  A lot of them I still don't really know if I have or haven't shared... so if I repeat myself, I am sorry.  They must still be there for me to express and figure out for myself.  I also feel like I have had so many thoughts and ideas that have needed to be put into words that they may come out all confused and twisted and random, and I am sure that my point will often be lost or that it will switch from one idea to another without warning.  That being said, today my thoughts are these:

I used to by highly motivated by having way too many equally important things to do. It was an addiction, I realize now, and just like any addiction, it often requires a crash at "rock bottom" and then a detox before you realize that it is not the best way to live.

I am pretty sure that this addiction started as a kid when I first became disenchanted with my physical self but learned that my intellectual self and that a constant movement toward achievement made me worth something. Instead of being teased for my size or my clothes or my lack of grace at a dance recital, I found praise and admiration and top marks and scholarships and... I know now that some of this stuff was real and some was total made up in my own head, but every personal reality is real to that person who lives or believes it, and this was very real to me!

I crashed after a series of hard life events...I don't want to elaborate now...but I knew I had crashed because the stress pile that had always pushed me to "Go hard or Go home" every single day began to confuse me. Instead of a massive plan of action and a rush, I felt like digging a hole and climbing inside because my head was spinning; I could form no clear thoughts. It scared me because without my daily "fix" of victory over the stress, self-induced or otherwise, I didn't know who I was! Putting this into words sounds silly now, but it was so real!!

But now I am finally learning to enjoy quiet moments. This has been quite a long and pain-staking process, bringing me to tears more than once! I didn't know how to just enjoy BEING because without the stress, I wasn't important, my life didn't matter. I lost all of my passions--I didn't know what my purpose was.  I looked everywhere for my purpose, and so many people (some who I knew and loved, and some who I didn't know) began to tell me that I would find my answer or my weight loss or my purpose or my happiness in learning to love myself.  How abstract and totally absurd was that?? Everywhere I went, the theme of the moment seemed to be "Learn to BE instead of to DO." You know how exposure to some new concept makes it seem to pop out at you all over the place? Yeah, that was happening. I didn't really understand it, but I was so desperate to "find myself" again that I just went with it.  Conferences, books, audios, trips (Good to Great in Belize, for example, was HUGE and deserves its own blog post on another day)... everything carried the same theme.

I remember a late night drive when I was talking to Dave, trying to explain this to him. I was explaining that I felt like I was going in a good direction and that I was finding a sense of personal peace, but I still did not know what my PURPOSE was, and it was bothering me because I felt like I was being selfish, doing all these things that I wanted to do (school, voice lessons, etc etc) but I was just floating instead of progressing.  He stopped me and told me of a quote he had read or heard from Bob Proctor about the plateaus in life and that even those plateaus have a purpose.  He then told me that he felt that my purpose in life at this moment was just to learn to be happy. I had worked and pushed and struggled at such a fiercely high level for so long, and now it was my time to just BE and learn to be happy with being ME.  Such a comment was typically something for me to fight against, but right then it hit something deep within and I felt like what he was telling me was true. And I was OK with it!  I was almost elated by it! It was ok to spend time on me and the things I enjoy, even if the only accomplishments from doing so were invisible ones.

So that is where I am right now. I know it won't last forever and that eventually I will find my "purpose," my life's mission for making this world "better because I was in it," but how can I really make a difference--whose life can I possibly touch--if my passion, purpose, and enthusiasm are lost in the mere mechanics of it all?

I still have moments when there too many equally important things that need to be done right now, and I have yet to find the exhilaration in the challenge of getting it all done right now. I still have to sit down and regroup and figure out which one thing I CAN do right now. Some days the only thing I can do is file those thoughts away and let my mind go nowhere for awhile. But I am finding joy in the journey, and things (amazingly) are still being accomplished. It's a lesson that is hard to share with anyone else, because if "anyone else" is anything like me, it has to be experienced before it can be understood. All I know is that I am glad that I have finally begun this important learning process, because God loves me (and all of us) for who I am and not for what I can do.