Nope, not a typo. Some things were meant to not work, and we should stop busting on ourselves for not being able to fix them.
I was debating what to write about this week (with last week being off due to a long weekend), and on the way back from my trip, an idea started to form - the idea of brokenness and it’s effects on us as people. Then, this came across my twitter feed from Fr Sichko (@JimSichko) yesterday:
Giving up doesn't always mean you're weak. Sometimes it means you are strong and smart enough to let go and move on.
That’s so true. I only wish I understood this 10+ years ago.
2016 was a sucky year for me. One in which I had no idea where my life was headed. I had suffered a major life adjustment at the end of ’15 and wasn’t sure how to deal with it. I had this blank canvass in front of me with no idea where to even find paint.
At the beginning of 2015, I had my life planned. I knew who I was, what I was doing, the whole shebang. What I didn’t know is that I was living in an alternate reality with absolutely no concept of what was really going on. (Ok, maybe that isn’t completely true, there were signs, I just didn’t want to see them.)
That alternate reality bubble burst by the end of the year. All the ideas, thoughts, and plans I had dissipated like those little soapy spheres. Reality set in.
The reality was, my life was broke. Well, not just broke, it was broked. I had cocooned myself into a relationship that wasn’t working. I was fighting in a job that wasn’t working (and hadn’t been for a while). I was spending the majority of my time being what I thought everyone else around me needed. I was trying to fix everything, make everyone happy, and get the job done no matter what it took. No matter the personal toll.
I’m a problem solver. I fix things. It’s what I do. I’m the person who will continually ram into a brick wall until I get knocked out with a concussion. Again, it’s my personality. I'm a bulldog. I’ve never learned when to walk away. Giving up was always “loser” talk.
Once everything went south, I had a hard time adjusting at first. I remember New Year’s Day 2016 thinking, “Wow, this is the first year in a very long time that I don’t have anything planned. I have no idea what’s going to happen.” Well, not much did happen, other than gaining weight and spending a great deal of time trying to figure out what went wrong (again, trying to dissect and understand root cause.. aka first step to “fix things”).
It was about the end of 2016 that I finally figured it out. I’d spent so much of my time these past few years (not just 2015), trying to fix things, trying to fix people, trying to make things work that honestly weren’t meant to work. I wasn’t strong enough to let go. Wasn’t wise enough to really see what the impact on my life and what it was costing me.
That little light bulb finally went off in my head at the end of last year. I realized I’d given up something very important. Lost something very important. I’d lost me. I realized I didn’t know who I was as a person anymore. I had been so focused on “taking care of business”, I wasn’t taking care of me. My identity had morphed into a robot whose sole purpose was to keep everyone happy, and ended up making no one happy (least of all, me). (I made some mention of this back in Identity Management)
The good news is, 2017 is turning into a much better year. I’m taking on some new projects to rediscover the person that is me (this blog being one). I’m learning to enjoy things again for the sole purpose of enjoyment. Not because it makes someone else happy, but it makes me happy. I'm also learning to not give a rats @$$ about other people's opinion of me. Ok, I still give some level of rats @$$, but I'm much more careful about who is on the "opinions I care about list". That list is certainly much, much shorter these days.
I’ve learned that if something isn’t working, it’s ok to let it go. I’m not a failure if it doesn’t work. I’m not failure if people are pissed at me. I’m not a failure based on someone else’s life or opinion. I'm enough. I'm ok as long as I "do me".
I’m only a failure if try to live a life that wasn’t meant for me.
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