The Starting Line

Well my 365 day deadline has come and gone and I’m sure you were expecting to hear from me on 11.11.11.  The real truth is that it’s taken me a few days to evaluate myself and make some other critical decisions regarding this whole thing.  So in reflection on this journey I’ve been on, here goes…

 At the beginning of this blog, I wanted to see if you truly pushed yourself for 365 days, could you make one year really count and can it ultimately change you.  I started this blog to keep myself on the path towards taking back control of my own life and ultimately hold myself to doing the things I wanted to.   I realized that I wasn’t happy with how my life was going and only I had the power to change that. 

There were several reasons for my unhappiness but it pretty much came down to these few things.  First off, I was holding on to an idea or plan that wasn’t working out for me and instead of amending that plan or embracing all the things that were happening for me, I was wallowing in the failure of my original life timeline.  Secondly, I felt like I was just going through the basic motions of living rather than really experiencing life and I didn’t want to let the time slip away while I collected coulda, woulda, shoulda’s.  Finally, I wasn’t really living my life for me.  I felt like I was always living based on someone else’s rules and not really writing any of my own.

So that’s where I started.  I decided that I had to strive for changes in three different areas if I really wanted to make the most out of my year.  In order to enjoy the life I was living instead of mourning the one I thought I would have, I had to let go of the things that I was holding on.  The biggest of those things was my original plan.  It’s nice to think that you can predict what you want out of life and when it is going to happen but if it doesn’t go that way, are you a failure?  The truth is that you are not.  When I looked at my life, I could clearly see that I was not where I thought would be at this stage of it but that didn’t mean what I had wasn’t amazing in its own way.  I was blaming myself for things not working out how I had hoped but all I had to do was change my point of view to see the bigger picture.  As I looked at what I did have a little deeper, I started to realize that I wouldn’t have had all these things if my original plan had taken shape.  Now I’m not saying that I’ve given up wanting certain things but I’m choosing to enjoy every day of my life as it is rather than wishing it could be some other way. 

In regards to gaining more experience in my life, I wanted to stop letting all the reasons why not keep me from doing this and start embracing the reasons why to go for it.  There will always be reasons not to do things but if we let them define out whole lives, we will miss out on truly living.  So I set out on a quest for unexpected adventures.  Instead of just talking about doing things, I started doing them.  I’ve equated it time and time again to jumping off a cliff and this year, I jumped and enjoyed the fall.

Finally, in order to write my own rules, I had to grow into the person I wanted to be.  I had to stop seeing myself in the eyes of others and start seeing me clearly in my own reflection.  For so long, I let the opinions of the people in my life define me.  Whether it was boyfriends who weighed in on my appearance or choose to point out my inadequacies, friends or family who provided me with specific ideas on how I should be living, or others around me who managed to get in my head, I was allowing too many people to impact who I was becoming.  I needed to change that in hope of figuring out my life and my own role in this world.  I had to release the hold that some of these people had on me that kept me to thinking that I was falling short of their expectations.   I had to make sure I knew that the only opinion that mattered was mine and I had to start focusing and competing only with myself.   By doing all this, I was able to see that maybe I was looking at a lot of people and situations with rose colored glasses.  I was giving them a lot of power by taking their opinions and comments to heart when really it was never a case of me coming up short but rather just different people wanting different things.   No one is going to live this life for me so why did I want to live it according to someone else?

So there you have it.  I guess you could call it the why or the beginning or the foundation but I’m going to say this was simply the starting line…

"Thought I had it all figured out, turns out I was only starting over.  Back to one, take two, on the count of three I'm starting over." - Starting Over by Tony Lucca