27/01/2024
It was no longer working. Instead, it was beating you down, grating against the bones of your soul, slowly over time, eroding your strength and hollowing out your protective shell. You knew it was time to look at it at close range. What was it? An addiction, a relationship, a job, or a way of seeing something you thought you really needed?
It takes a certain brand of courage to be honest about your reality without sinking into the quicksand of toxic shame. To look at the personal struggle baring its honest face, and this time not turn away. To listen to childhood pain crying out to be heard, but muffled underneath a cycle of addiction. To override your fear of being stranded all by yourself and walk away from whatever has been misaligning with your conditions to live in peace.
To affirm a new day and pronounce a fresh way of moving through it. To meet destructive patterns head-on and break away from negative drama and excitement, controlling dynamics or harmful self-talk.
To self-determine and make choices for your well-being and seek connections and routines, values and beliefs, boundaries and real friendships that can offer deeper meaning.
It’s been a work in progress creating good habits, meeting the demands of the day and getting real about what you’re built to handle. Each time you made a quiet choice to say No to something barring you from responding from the heart of your truth, you were saying a big, bold holy Yes to living the kind of life you’re meant to inhabit.
Because you know the strong walls of this battle. It feels like no one really understands how long and hard you’ve been fighting, or how written on those walls are the testaments of your endurance. Because every time you held your ground and every day you fell into despair and every hour you cried out to whoever might be listening and every time you carved your name into an honest admission, you were blazing a trail of courage.
Because in the dirt of all your human trying, all your trial-and-erring, and all your resets and do-overs, there is a valiant story to be told.
So now, look around and see them glistening there, like stars on the ground. It is the resounding glow of your quiet courage... (-caption and quote written by Susan Frybort. Her life-changing book, ‘Look to the Clearing’, is available on Amazon at… https://www.amazon.com/Look-Clearing-Encourage-Susan-Frybort/dp/1988648076/ )