The past didn’t turn out like I’d wanted it to, but now I’m super glad it didn’t.
Why?
It’s simple. I’ve discovered that the future holds more than what the past could ever give. Although I don’t know what lies there exactly, I am confident that it’s something extraordinary.
This time last year I was a broken mess. Even my wellness girly boozy Balinese getaway in the land of Gods didn’t help. As fun as it was, it wasn’t an Eat, Love, Pray scenario! Surfers, great food, sunbathing, and cocktails 24-7 were a treat, but it wasn’t enough to fix me!
I guess starting over is never easy. I’ve never had to do it before by force. In the past I’ve jumped from country to country with my career, but that was always starting anew by choice, on my own terms.
The end of a relationship, a career, unexpected moves…these are scenarios that sometimes we just aren’t prepared for, and as a result we buckle under the pressure. You’d have to be fucking strong to act like you didn’t give a shit at all…
In the past I was known to break down in an emotional mess – there’s only so much you can hold in. And to a certain point, that was fine, we shouldn’t ever try to hold onto such emotions. Letting it all out (as my aunt told me) was healthy…it was a way of processing what was going on. Masking everything and burying my head in the sand would’ve been very dangerous – doing that just ran the risk of it all manifesting and blowing up later on down the line.
This isn’t my preachy-preach blog about emotional processing – I’m over it. It’s about what I’m going to do now I know all of that crap is safely in the past.
I’m rewriting my script…but first, let’s look at the word ‘failure’.
I hate to fail. Hell, who doesn’t hate failure? I’m probably one of the most competitive and driven people I know, so embracing my faults and failures with gusto doesn’t really come second nature to me.
You might think I sound cocky, arrogant or over-confident, but how many times do you hear a person admit defeat with their hands up in the air so easily and say “Yeah, that happened – I screwed up!”?
Not often!
Even though some aspects of what I envisioned for my life failed, I’m not going to let it break me. Instead, I’m going to take the valuable knowledge I’ve gained from it all and move the hell on.
There are so many things that I recognise more clearly. There are way too many to list, but two things worth noting are the fact that I recognise my boundaries with more precision and I’m also more aware of my deeper needs that perhaps I’d previously overlooked or been blind to.
They’re lessons…shit happens, right? And as a teacher, I’m a massive advocator that all learning is positive, no matter the subject.
Not everything is forever – I’ve come to realise that. Whether this will actually soften the sting should it happen to me again, who knows. But I’m not even going to dwell on that, because thinking too much is also overrated. Like I said the other day, I’m seizing the present, the right now because I believe the best is still to come.
Metamorphosis is a magical process – just when the caterpillar thought that it’d all come to an abrupt end, it turned into a beautiful butterfly. But we’re different to caterpillars in the fact that we get to choose.
I’m learning to accept the fact that no one really has a hold on the future; I guess this is the amazing thing about it – and at the risk of sounding cliche, there are many blank pages left unwritten that I’m excited to fill.
Maybe I’ll fail to some degree again. Maybe things won’t be forever. Or maybe it’ll be my happily ever after…who knows.
But this is what I do know – the things and fears that were once holding me back no longer dictate me. I’ve grown, I’m the ‘old’ me pre-the-shit-period, but I’m also the new me. I’m engaged, passionate, loving, and inspiring…
Why be bitter when you can be better?
xxx
Couture & Vines 