See Yourself Like Someone Who Loves You...

Last September I turned 34 years old. On my birthday I had the honor of presenting at a Central Maine Social Media Breakfast where I also launched this new blog that was to chronicle my experience and stories about fighting Alzheimer's disease in Maine through the 2019 Walk Season and beyond. My birthday was on a Friday (the 13th...) and the Saturday that followed kicked off walk season that ran for about 8 weeks straight. Long days. Fast weekends. Sooo much purple...

At the end of September, I had shared the introduction to why this work is important to me in the first post and then followed it up with a "review" of IT: Chapter 2 that I felt was such a fitting way to describe how Alzheimer's is the most devious villain of all time. By the first week in October, I was exhausted, drained, burning out and doing the best I could to keep all of my plates in the air and despite my best intentions and efforts I still found myself surrounded by broken plates that had crashed to the ground and was wholly uninspired to write about and share that experience in this blog that I had hoped would be an uplifting thing for me and anyone else who might find their way to reading it.

October quickly melted into November, the holidays melted into a long winter and then came Coronapocalypse 2020. Now it is almost May 1st and there has not be a single story shared on this blog the way I had intended.

What a complete and epic failure right?!

I used to think so...

The answer to that question really has given me some significant insight that has inspired me to start writing and sharing again.

I have spent a lot of time from September until now feeling like a complete and epic failure. I have felt like nothing I did would ever be good enough and no one cared about what I had to say or what I was doing. I felt like writing this blog was a way to hide behind narratives I spin even though I'm not authentically feeling the hope and energy that my inner muppet has made me known for. I thrive on being a positive influence and writing has always helped me to do that but over the last 8 months I haven't been able to muster that thing it takes for me to show up like that.

This post is really hard for me to write because I am showing up without my muppet suit. This is the first thing I have ever written and intend to make "public" that is a raw and open window into who I really am. It's scary because I really value my privacy and alone time so to talk about how the last several months have been for me is not easy and I'm already feeling the vulnerability hangover and I haven't even finished the damn post yet.

I anticipate that I'm not alone in feeling like Self-Quarantine is pushing me into a no-man's land of stir crazy that even the longest Maine winters haven't broached. When I feel like that I tend to retreat into a hole and I don't engage on social media, write, call friends, or do any of the things that I know are the ropes that will pull me out of the hole. It's suffocating sometimes and in those moments I don't love who I am and it makes me feel like I'm not really worthy of love or connection.

Obviously, I am a totally awesome human and absolutely worthy of love and connection. I know that. I have good people that remind me of that. But it's not always easy to remember when the stories you're telling yourself can't be reality checked when you're shutting everyone out to wallow in your own misery. I have come to learn that this feeling is shame.

The more I learned about shame the more I come to understand the hold it has on me and my decision-making. I can see how it has manifested throughout so many of my hardest moments and darkest days and how it has conditioned me to believe that certain values and expectations were mine to manage. All that I learned has helped me to become curious about how to alter my habits and practice shame resiliency so that I can find the validation I seek from inside myself rather from other people.

I had these habits before the Covid-19 outbreak changed the entire fabric of how we all operate. The world is a different place now and the one thing that is clear to me is that I am not the only one that is feeling the effects of the connection hustle. So many of my friends are feeling pressures from this in various ways and this prolonged sense of uncertainty is exacerbating the fear of scarcity we were all feeling before. It is a weird time to be human but it is an ideal time to embrace how vulnerability has the potential to transform our lives for the better.

So here I am again after 8 months to say that I am going to make a conscious effort to live differently. I am going to remove the armor that shame helped me to assemble and travel through this world with a strong back, soft front, and wild heart. To me, that is the heart of what truly makes me the Purpleville Renegade that I described in my introduction. Research has strongly supported the theory that you can't have courage without vulnerability and I identify so strongly with that. It's time to set aside who I think I'm supposed to be and just be who I am.

Am I going to screw this up again? Yep. Are there going to be days when I will still retreat and go off the grid into old habits? Absolutely. Does that make me an epic and complete failure? Nope. It makes me a real human person doing the best I can to make the most of this experience I've been given to be on this planet.

As I approach my next birthday I am going to make a commitment to myself to be authentically me and belong to just myself. I think my experiences have taught me a lot about the world and what makes myself tick and what makes other people tick. That knowing is worth a lot and I'm going to start trusting it and giving it the weight it deserves. This brain of mine is worth fighting for and I deserve to let it shine for as long as it can without locking it into a cage of shame, self-consciousness, and the expectations of others.

I think this might even be fun. I know I feel like I can finally breathe again and that in itself is a remarkable improvement over where I have been since I turned 34. If you identify with this in any way, I hope you'll join me on this mission to wholehearted living.

Special thanks to Dr. Brene Brown for her work and research into shame and vulnerability. I have found Dr. Brown's findings highly relatable and her presentation of the findings has had a significant impact on my ability to make sense of myself and others in a way that has translated into a daily practice that continues to improve my life in many ways.

If you connected with this post and you like Podcasts I would highly recommend Unlocking Us