Inside Out Challenge – Day 9

Your hardest fight

I’m going to start off with an apology to you all… I am so sorry I haven’t been faithful to this challenge or this blog lately. I will try to do better but I make no promises because it is so hard for me to write when I’m just not feeling it.

As for my hardest fight, after thinking long and hard, I think I would have to say that “finding & loving myself” has been my hardest fight ever. Why? Because it involved work and change and digging up old hurts and being honest and so much more. I hated me. If it could have been possible, I would have left myself in the dust and found someone else to hang out with day in and day out. I was uncomfortable in my own skin as they say and boy, was that the truth!

They also say, “the truth hurts” and, “Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” This, my dear friends, is even a bigger truth.

Do you know how hard it is to try and figure our who you are when you are in your 40’s? All the crap, the secrets, the lies, the unmet expectations, the broken dreams, and everything else that you shove deep down inside, will eventually catch up and start to bubble over, wreaking havoc in all areas of your life, at the most inopportune times. Sure you can try to sponge it up and squeeze it back into the pot but for how long?

So, I took that first tiny step into a meeting. I continued taking tiny steps for months until I was ready and able to take a bigger step and open up to someone. Not just anyone but with someone who I had taken the time to get to know and trust. Someone who could identify with my struggles and understood where I was at.  Someone who allowed me to be honest and did not judge me, but directed me in the next steps of what to do, after I verbally vomitted all over her with my garbage. Someone who had walked the path before me and helped guide me in a new direction with new thought processes, new tools and new hope.

It was not an easy journey by any stretch of the imagination but it was life-changing. One that I have learned from and grown from. One that taught me how to fight for me and one that taught me that I was worth fighting for.