voice sounds and the smell of roses

Photo by Ylanite Koppens: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-desk-with-black-wristwatch-and-roses-2014692/

Today, my voice is going to be out in the world for all to hear. Not just my written voice that is found here or on socials. My real life actual honest to goodness spoken voice. One of my dear friends asked me to be a guest on her personal growth podcast. Sounds terrifying, right?! I mean, the personal growth journey can be vicious and brutal at times, and now I have to get raw, knowing that strangers will hear all of the details. Not just the pretty, edited down version that I choose to share on my own platforms. Theoretically, this should be a breeze. Just spend an hour talking to your friend about things you’ve talked about a million times before. Requested topic: tell your story about what made you decide to pack up all your shit and move across the country. Talk about what gave me the push, what steps did I take to make it happen, what are the things that could have caused me to pause and really ask myself what in the fuck did I think I was doing. But I couldn’t shake the feeling of discomfort that was setting in. Terror. Sweating. Elevated heart rate. If there is one thing that will undeniably make me uncomfortable, it’s hearing my own voice. Speaking back to me. Through noise canceling AirPods. Directly into my earholes. Funny what we’re really scared of at the end of the day. And how it’s usually not the big shit.

Our scheduled time came and I logged onto Zoom to start the excavating of my soul. And it was just as easy as I thought it would be. So easy in fact, that I ended the call and immediately wanted to do it all over again. To keep talking. To keep telling my story. There’s a fact that I’ve held true since my suicidal state: hearing other people’s stories saved me, so if telling my story can help save just one person, I’ve done my part. Which is why when I saw that red flashing dot appear in the upper left hand corner of the screen appear and I knew we were recording, the word vomit happened. I just started talking. About everything. Anything. Added complexity: layer in my ADHD thinking where I thought jump from one thing to the next and don’t always explain the connections to others, so what makes sense to me in my head doesn’t always translate to others listening. But I knew I didn’t want the conversation to be structured and scripted (because the best conversations happen organically without any intended destination), so I didn’t prepare any talking points and the result was that we talked about A LOT. Not just my decision to haul my pup and I across the country. Because to understand that decision, there’s so much more history that needs to be told and unpacked to fully comprehend my thought process and decision making. So we talked about it all, but just hitting the highlight reel. The problem with trying to cover so much area in just an hour, you get the iceberg effect: you’re only able to scratch the surface without being able to see the bulk and weight of it all since it is hidden in the depths.

There’s one other thing that you should know about me to understand what happened right after we ended the call: I’m an Enneagram 6. Those familiar with the Enneagram will understand immediately, but for those that aren’t, here’s the gist… Enneagram 6s are described as The Loyalist, but oftentimes as The Skeptic Loyalist. We aren’t easy to trust people and it takes some time to develop that sense of loyalty, but then we become the people that will go down in flames defending those people we love and trust. We are generally considered Type A personalities because of our rigorous need to plan things. But not for the sake of planning. Because we always expect the worst case scenario, so we create Plans A through Z to consider and prepare for every single thing that we think can go wrong, no matter the absurdity of it all. Because we overthink and overanalyze everything. We overanalyze the fact that we are overanalyzing things. It can be quite exhausting at times. And that’s exactly what happened as we ended the call… the overanalyzing started.

I should have been more cohesive and organized and not so all over the place. 

I shouldn’t have dropped in fact bombs without giving context to those stories, like coming out or the shit with my sister. 

I should have this.

I should have that. 

I quickly realized I was having a case of the shoulds. And then something magical happened: I recognized that my brain immediately started looking at it from the other perspective once I realized I was having the shoulds. It started the reframing process before I could even ask it to do so. As if it had become a reflex so natural as you trying to kick the doctor when they hit your knee with that rubber hammer contraption. All of the work that I’ve had to intentionally sit down and do over the past several years to help reinforce the concept that life isn’t happening to me, but for me, became evident that it’s now an ingrained way of thinking and a habit. Not something that needs to be intentionally done 100% of the time. In a matter of seconds, my thought process above turned and looked something like this.

I said what needed to be heard. Not by me, but by others. Random strangers. The universe. 

That wasn’t incohesive. It was like one of those chocolate sampler boxes and was offering a small taste of what is yet to come. A smorgasbord if you will. 

I essentially pulled a TED on that whole discussion. I knew going into it what the intended topic was, but the best TED talks are never based on the intended topic. It’s about the tangents you went on while preparing for that intended topic. 

Basically, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

We spend so much time in the thick of it. Doing the work. Pushing further. Digging further. Finding those roots and examining which are supplying us nourishment and life and those that are slowly trying to kill the entire plant. Placing the boundaries needed to cut off the sources of rot. Clearing away the weeds. Continuing the growth. The further we dig, the more risk we have for cave-ins that will block all sources of oxygen and light, so we have to balance that work with the feel-good activities that give us life and renewed sources of energy. Tending the garden of our life is rigorous and grueling work and we’re always in the midst of it and it consumes all of our resources: money, energy, brainpower, and time.

We can get so busy doing the work that we forget to stop and take a look at what we’ve done. Look around, not back. Nothing back there serves us anymore. Those are the weeds that we’ve already cleared away. But around. Look around. Stop and smell the growth and progress. Look at your life garden that you’ve meticulously been tending. Give yourself credit and love and appreciation and a giant fucking pat on the back that you made it here. To this point. That you can see that the habits of Past You have evolved and that you can now reframe all of those old thought patterns into things of grace and gratitude. And growth. And life. Just stop and smell the fucking roses for crying out loud.

xo