Ok, admittedly, this 100-day challenge seems to be turning into a 100 every-other day challenge. This past week was a very tough week. Self-care (mainly sleep) had to come before anything else. I’ve faced memories I haven’t touched my whole life. Facing these memories meant facing me—aspects of me, that I’ve been least proud of. Life experiences that surface shame.
I’m thankful that for the past month I’ve been practicing embracing my whole journey, no moment left behind. My Sunday mountain climbs have helped. I like saying mountains, even if some were more hills than mountains, because of the fierce bravery that mountain conjures. Part of what I love about day-long hikes, is that walking that long forces me to pay attention to the journey. I’m usually fixated on results. Being an evaluator has fostered this obsession with results: for decades I’ve tried to fix myself and always paid attention to the next thing to work on. Every interaction, every event was an opportunity to set a new goal and push to achieving it. I rarely stopped to acknowledge how far I’d come.
In the past month, I’ve been instead focusing on honoring the whole journey: embracing all the places I’ve been good, bad, and ugly. What does it mean to revisit all of it? To embrace all of it as a part of me? No matter what the events at the time, these experiences have shaped me. Embracing myself unconditionally means embracing all that which has happened to me. I don’t have to like all of it, I just have to love me for facing it.