I had another post planned for today but am going to share something a little more personal instead in hopes that maybe someone out there can relate to it.  I have a confession.  I can be really, really hard on myself.  Most of the time I expect complete and utter perfection in everything I do and anything short of that tends to leave me anxious and distressed.  Suffice it to say that if I treated others in my life the way I treat myself, I would undoubtedly be living a very lonely life.

I have been this way for as long as I can remember and am trying to be mindful of not nitpicking every single thing I see as “wrong” or as “failure” but have not been doing a great job at it lately.  When I am stressed out (there has been a lot of that lately) or in an uncomfortable position (there have also been a lot of those…) I turn those feelings inwards on myself as a way to feel some sense of control.  I may not be able to control external aspects of my life, but I can surely control every single thing about myself, right?  Wrong.

While self-awareness is an excellent quality to possess on some levels, when taken to this next level it becomes destructive.  You can be left feeling paralyzed in a reality where all you see is what you’re doing wrong.  You run through and over-analyze past “mistakes” in your head to the point where you’re practically reliving and re-experiencing the situations, often times traumatizing yourself all over again.  What good does this do you?  None at all.  You’re stuck running in circles, unable to move forward and enact the changes in your life that you so desperately want to.

I’ve learned from being with my fiance who is both incredibly self-aware and also very kind to himself that unless you have experienced these feelings firsthand you really can’t relate.  You just continually question why and how somebody would make life more challenging for themselves.  I wish I had the right words to explain it, but it seems like it is simply the way some of us are wired from the start.  That is not to say that we can’t re-wire ourselves to function differently.  We can learn from those in our lives who, like my fiance, find this behavior a completely foreign waste of energy.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m putting this out there because I’m not a big sharer when it comes to more personal and internal things.  I’m guessing I will likely delete this post in the very near future.  But today, and maybe just for today, I feel the need to share because the truth is, I want to be held accountable by someone other than myself to changing  this behavioral pattern.  I don’t like what I’m doing to myself more and more each day and I especially don’t like the impact that it has on those around me.  I haven’t fully lived and embraced so many amazing, monumental moments in the past, particularly in the last four months, and the thought that I could continue on like that deeply saddens me.

I’m getting married in two and a half months to the most amazingly perfect-for-me man I could ever dream up and I want to be able to be completely enveloped in that moment.  This life I have somehow created despite all my self-destructive tendencies is basically, down to every detail, exactly what I always dreamed of having but never believed I would.  That is something to celebrate and enjoy.  Every.  Single.  Day.  So maybe, just maybe, knowing that even one person out there is reading this (other than my mom, hi mom) will help me get out of my head and make the changes I need to make in order to truly embrace life and more fully express gratitude for all my blessings.