Journey to Living an Authentic Life…

In my 20’s I was searching for understanding and unconditional love.  In my 30’s I found love and was searching for balance.  In my 40’s I’ve found the girl that had gotten lost in my 20’s and 30’s.

This past year has truly been a year of excitement and discovery for me.  Over the last 7-10 years a constant theme of conversation with those that are closest to me has been about me searching for something…a new job, a new project, or a new passion.  ALWAYS searching!  For the first time in my life I don’t feel like I am searching for anything.  What I believe has happened is that I’ve stopped searching for outside entities to fill empty spaces on the inside.  I am simply living and embracing every day, every experience, every connection, and every relationship with new energy and new lenses.

This year there were some major occurrences that forced me to look at my life, my relationships, and myself without rose colored glasses.  This sent me on a roller-coaster of a journey with extreme highs and very scary lows.  The lows forced me to go to a place of discovery into who I am, what I want, and learning to live for myself for the first time ever. That sounds very selfish I know!  However, when I started to really evaluate myself, I realized I’ve been living much of my life on eggshells fearful of disappointing anyone in anyway, or disrupting the beautiful pictures of my life.  Because if so, then what?  The “then what” is I would be left with myself and what I realized recently is that “myself had gotten lost”.  I lived much of my life with the voices of other’s expectations that I placed on myself…Crazy right?  My fear of emotional abandonment, led me to a place where I tried to be “perfect” and be what people needed and wanted me to be, even if that meant sacrificing my own needs or desires…what’s worse is that I didn’t even recognize or acknowledge that I had my own needs or desires, because they were secondary to assuring my “role” or “importance” to everyone else.  This is not “everyone else’s fault”; it was my own insecurity in those relationships and sadly in myself.

So now I am getting to know myself in many ways for the first time.  It’s kind of exciting I must admit.  I am not as critical and I am actually allowing myself to live and even make mistakes without condemning myself to hell.  I am surprisingly much more fun than I ever imagined.  I feel free!  I am trying new things, traveling the country, discovering likes and dislikes, and learning to quiet the voices in my head that have paralyzed me in the past.  I recently reached out to someone in my life whose opinion of me has always been of great importance.  I shared my heart and where I am and made myself completely transparent and raw, not knowing how it would be received. I knew what my heart wanted, but wasn’t sure what the response would be.  Here is a piece of the response that still brings tears to my eyes, “Know that I am very proud of you, I am excited at where you are going and growing in life, do your thing honey, the world has been waiting for you, you’re long overdue!”.

That response summed it up for me…The love of my family and friends will always be there whether I am “perfect” or not, whether I “always do or say the right thing or not”, and more than anything, when it’s all said and done, it is not the opinion of others that I live for anymore, it is the acceptance, opinion and love that I have found within that will sustain me.  It makes me a better mother, wife, friend, sister, niece, aunt, and a better person!  The journey continues…