Transparency

I am not perfect. I work hard at personal growth and development but occasionally (ok-more often than I would like to admit) I fall off the wagon. I let everything go. I get lazy. This whole summer has been a train run off its tracks. It started with going on vacation. I have all these superior ideas about how I will go out on the deck and meditate every morning. I will do my yoga practice as the sun comes up. Then I am too tired and want to sleep, or everyone is up and around and I no longer feel like it. I want my coffee. I want to go for a walk. I want to go sit on the beach. I did read a lot, but I didn’t write at all. As my blog followers can see, I haven’t written anything for months. I just let it all go, and not in a good way. I felt paralyzed. By the things I wanted to do but just couldn’t bring myself to do. The less I did, the less I felt like I could do. I knew this feeling. When I get paralyzed by life. It is the first signs that I’ve got a case of the blues. I have little anxiety attacks. I feel tired and unmotivated. I know myself enough to know I need to take action the second it starts to happen, but often it’s easier to say “It’s summer. I can deal with this in the Fall. For now I will eat, drink, sleep, and do everything else later.” Now I am 15 lbs overweight, tired, out of shape, and scared to try to put it all back in order.

I had stopped eating properly, stopped going to the gym, stopped taking my vitamins, and stopped taking Epsom salt baths and doing other self-care routines that I know are so helpful. I just stopped caring about taking care of me. It is really hard to right the train when it is that far off the tracks. But it will happen by taking one step at t time. The first step was to write out a food plan and I gave myself a start date-day after Labor Day. On Monday I prepped the food for the week so there were no excuses. In writing out my food calendar I also wrote in time for meditation and going to the gym (I didn't actually get there yet but...). If they are not written into the agenda, I know they won’t happen. I have all the time in the world to meditate when I get home from work and often I wake up way earlier in the morning than I need to and could do it then. I let myself get wrapped up in the phone or TV and just don’t do it. A written plan helps. Transparency helps. It makes you accountable to the people you tell your plan to.

I have been working on the food part of the plan for a few days now. It’s not easy but it is a start. One step at a time. I write this because it is my truth. It is real. It is transparent. I think too often we put ourselves out into the world as an idealized version of ourselves. But the truth is we all fall down and make mistakes. Without acknowledging these things about ourselves, how can we expect to grow and change and learn?  Every personal battle I conquer is leading me to handle the next one better. With time, maybe I’ll have fewer personal issues to battle because I will have learned from the previous ones or maybe they will just be completely different ones because I have different stuff to learn. Anyway, I am a warrior and I am going to war with these demons that are currently haunting me. To be cliché – I WILL SURVIVE.