by Joey | May 11, 2016 | Throwback
I don’t know exactly where this mindset came from, I’m sure I’ll find out after spending a 100 hours on a therapist’s couch, but I grew up with this mindset that I’d already lost.
I would see people doing things and think to myself I can’t ever do that. It wasn’t a matter of confidence or self-doubt, it was just a simple fact that I accepted. A voice inside my head reminding me that I’m me and they’re them. And the theys got to do things. The mes did not.
That didn’t stop me from graduating with a degree in writing, a specialty that had a very low success rate. But in a lot of ways, it was fitting. I went to class every day and listened to a professor remind us over and over that we probably wouldn’t make it. That’s okay, I’d think. I wasn’t going to make it anyway.
But as I rapidly approach thirty (holy cow how is it only four weeks away), I’ve started to challenge those thoughts, the I can’t do that assumptions. I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s taken me this long in life to realize that I actually can do what I want because I’m capable and willing to put in the work.
And with that realization comes the confidence. I may not know how to do everything, but I have the capacity and the desire to learn.
I am confident that I can because I am sure I will do everything in my power to figure out how. It’s not always about your innate ability, it’s about how badly you want something and how far you’ll go to get it.
It might have taken me a long time to realize these things about myself and to find my confidence, but it didn’t take long at all for me to learn that nothing comes easy. I’ll admit that I skated my way through schooling, never taking it quite as seriously as I should have. But that doesn’t mean it came easy, it means I put in exactly enough work to just get by.
And unfortunately, I subscribed to that theory much of my adult life. I wasn’t striving for greatness, I was striving for good enough. And maybe you can relate to that. And if you can, let’s change it. Ask yourself what it is you want, what it’ll take to get it, and make a promise to commit.
Because the reality is you can and you will as long as you just keep putting in the work.
by Joey | May 10, 2016 | Throwback
At a complete loss on how to deal with a situation, I spent a lot of time with myself, inside my head. I pulled out the adult coloring book I promised myself I’d color in weekly that hadn’t been touched in months, pulled out the colored pencils, and dove in.
I was instantly faced with decisions. The big picture was overwhelming; I couldn’t figure out where to start. I sat for far too long staring, debating putting the book back in my drawer and losing myself in Netflix instead.
But I picked up a pencil and just started coloring, picking out patterns as I went along, only focusing on one thing at a time. As I continued, I trusted that the important pieces would become more obvious and that I’d know what to do when they did.
I colored the entire afternoon, making one tiny decision after another,
hoping for clarity.
My vision for how it would all turn out in the end kept shifting with every tiny pattern I added color to. And the ones I thought I made mistakes with just added to the beauty of the big picture in the end.
We all do this in life. We let ourselves get so overwhelmed by the big picture that we convince ourselves to quit before we’ve even started. We get hung up on our mistakes, thinking we’ve messed everything up for good when in the end, they just add to the beauty of our lives.
All we have to do is make one tiny decision after another. You have to trust your gut and pick out the parts that you think are important to focus on. Add your color and create your own image.
by Joey | May 5, 2016 | Throwback
When I was in high school, a girl I was only kind of friends with was diagnosed with a rare condition that affected her kidneys. It was a situation that might land her in need of a transplant.
I spent the afternoon talking with her on AIM, well, mostly listening. She let out her worries, her concerns, her hopes, fears, everything. And I sat on the other end with tears streaming down my face. It scared me that something so awful could happen to someone so young, someone who seemed so healthy. Someone not much different from me.
A few days later, I told my mom that I wanted to get tested to see if I would be a match. I’d done some research and had a basic understanding of how the transplant process went, and if I could save her life, I wanted to.
It never came to that. I can’t remember now exactly what happened, but I do know that she went on to live a happy and relatively healthy life. I can’t even remember her last name.
I used to be the kind of person who empathized so much that it was bordered on a flaw. I used to be the kind of person who would do literally anything for another human being if it made their life even just a little bit easier.
It didn’t matter if we were friends. It didn’t matter if you were the worst person to me ever. If I had the opportunity to do something nice for you, I did it.
In fact, I had an arch enemy in high school. I don’t know what I ever did to that girl, but she was absolutely awful to me every chance she got. It didn’t matter that I was two years older. It didn’t matter that I was friends with these people first. She took every opportunity to make my life a living hell.
And then one night, I noticed that her away message was a little off. (Keep in mind here that I usually only checked her away messages to be sure they weren’t more attacks on me…which happened often). Whatever was written concerned me, so I reached out to her. When she replied I could tell she was upset. She was fighting with her boyfriend, a friend of mine, and he wasn’t answering her anymore. She ended the message with “whatever, I’m just going to walk over there.”
It was 10PM. They lived 5 miles apart in a shady part of town. I told her to stay where she was, I ran downstairs, grabbed my keys, told my mom where I was going, and I was off. It didn’t matter that she was an awful human being. It didn’t matter that I had a 103 fever. She was a person and she needed help.
I brought her to her boyfriend’s house and sat in the car while they sorted their shit out.
The next morning at school, she initiated a whole new war rampage on me for absolutely no reason at all.
I say all of this now because I’m wondering whatever happened. I think that goodness is still inside of me somewhere, but I haven’t seen it much lately. I used to be the girl who would go hang out with the boy standing alone at the dance. I befriended people because they were people. I didn’t judge. I didn’t wonder what they could do for me, people were people.
I’ve lost that somewhere along the way. I’ve become an angry person, disappointed by people time and time again.
I used to put kindness above all else, and it seems I’ve forgotten about kindness altogether. And maybe you have, too. And if you have, let’s make it our mission to bring it back. What do you say?
by Joey | May 4, 2016 | Throwback
I believe in purpose. I believe in seasons. I also believe that many of us stay loyal to things that are no longer serving us (or that we are no longer serving) because we feel an emotional connection to it because it once served a purpose.
But seasons are just that, seasons. Passing. We all have things that we throw ourselves into for a period of time. And while at some point that’s exactly what we were meant to be doing, it’s also important to recognize when the season is over and it’s time to move on.
It’s never an easy decision to make, especially because at one point or another, that thing you’re moving on from probably saved you. Or maybe you saved it. Or it’s a combination of both.
We stay loyal because service is what flows through our veins. But there are symptoms that can’t be ignored. When a friendship no longer feels healthy, when a marriage becomes toxic, or a job drains more than it gives, it’s important to listen to your gut and seek guidance.
We all live in fear of making a mistake. A bold generalization, sure, but true none the less. Whether it’s choosing the wrong person to marry, taking the wrong job, or simply taking on a credit card that’ll steal your soul, these mistakes we’re so afraid of making dictate too much of our lives.
We sit, marinating in the fear for so long that we end up paralyzed. Never making bold choices. Never demanding what we feel is right out of loyalty to a season that’s long since ended.
When is it ever the right time to start serving yourself first? If you’re waiting for things to settle, stop. If you’re waiting for security, stop. If you’re waiting for someone else to tell you when it’ll be the right time, stop.
Only you, yes you, can diagnose the end of a season. And only you can make the bold choice to recognize that the purpose has been served and it’s okay to move on.
by Joey | May 4, 2016 | Throwback
I am not hardcore. I feel things. I feel everything.
I used to argue with my husband when he’d tell me that I’m too emotional that it was a necessary quality in a writer. In a good writer, anyway. But where it’s not a good quality? In life. In life, being emotional makes you unpredictable. Weak. Sometimes insufferable.
Everything I ever do, I do based on feeling. I used to be the most cheerful person on the planet, insufferably cheerful even. So basing everything on emotion was perfectly fine because I gave the world the benefit of the doubt, blissfully unaware of the dark side of people. But life has weathered me, leaving me bitter and lately…angry. Leaving life up to emotion when you feel angry 90% of the time is dangerous. Irresponsible. Toxic.
I have a lot to sort out; my head is a jumbled mess of thoughts and worries. Things I never knew bothered me are bubbling to the surface, and I don’t know how to make sense of it all. I’m becoming uncomfortably intimate with my imperfections.
I’ve mentioned my struggle with authenticity vs. approval. While I don’t think any of us should trade our authenticity for approval, we do need to remember that sometimes our authentic selves are struggling great loss, and that authenticity is intimate, better kept behind closed doors.
I’m not good at faking it. I spent a lot of my life faking everything, praying to fit in and find approval. I swore off that drug, only to find that in some situations it’s necessary. Grin and bear it, they say. Something I’ll have to re-learn.
I’ve let my authentic self hang out all over the place lately. This angry, blubbering mess of a girl, confused about everything, has been stomping around taking everyone in my path down with me.
I am an imperfect, emotional person. But I am also a grown woman. And somehow blending those two has been more difficult than I ever imagined.
