Who Are You...Who Do You Want to be?

I LOVE modern technology that affords me the ability to connect with beloved family and friends all around the globe!  Sometimes I post my less than stellar personal moments on Facebook.  Afterwards I think, now why would I share that part of me that is flawed?  An easy answer; the affirmations that come flooding in help me feel appreciated, loved, and understood.

One of my friends put it rather humorously to me in my struggling teen years.  "If you quit telling people that you're ugly, maybe they wouldn't notice!"  Do you notice though that she didn't AFFIRM that I WAS ugly.  She affirmed that I BELIEVED that I was ugly.

What kind of things do you project in your life in your daily interaction with others?  Do you feel weak, unable to live up to the standards that you desire?  Do you feel ugly, or fat?  Do you feel hopeless, that there simply is no way to attain what you would like to?

I believe that all of us have felt all of those things at some point in our lives.  If you haven't CONGRATULATIONS...and please tell me how you managed to dodge all of those miserable bullets!

Recently I re-connected with a beloved friend from my childhood.  I haven't seen her in THIRTY years.  I was stunned when I looked at her because she's only a few inches taller than me.  That makes her about five foot eightISH.  The reason that stunned me was because of the memory I had of her.  My memory made her a GIANT!  Tall, skinny, and coltish.

Now she's not all that tall, nicely built, and very gracious and poised.  So, was my memory wrong?  Had my perception of her been completely skewed?  (One of my favorite things about being 57 is perception.  That 3-D ability to view the present with lessons from the past.)  The answer is NO...my memory was that she and I were two of the tallest girls in the class for a very long time.  That was because, in fact, we were.  I was five foot five by the age of twelve, and she was five foot seven or eight by the age of twelve.  We then had to wait a very, VERY long time for the other children around us to get their growth spurts and catch up to us.  They DID catch up, and now we are both just a tiny bit above average height.  Yet in my memory she still is incredibly tall!

Why do I use this little analogy?  Before I explain I wish to use another example.  A lovely girl that I know is not any fun to shop with.  The reason?  She does NOT see what is actually looking back at her from the mirror.  She sees all the negative ideas and perceptions of herself that she has developed over a very short life span.  It doesn't matter if an outfit makes her look beautiful to everyone else.  There are almost NO outfits that make her look beautiful to herself.

WHY?  Why do so many of us carry around wounds from the past in our hearts and souls?  Wouldn't it be easier, and happier to see ourselves as beautiful, with all kinds of potential and possibilities?

Back to MY youth again.  I learned a song that changed much of my negative thought patterns.  It was called "Please Pass the Possibles to Me."  The ideas of the song encouraged the value of positive possibilities for each one of us.  WHAT?  There could be a time in my life that I felt wanted, loved, beautiful?  There could be a time when I would believe enough in my gifts and talents to write novels, or positive attitude ideas to share with the world?

I adored a little movie that came out a while back.  The title was unfortunate to my way of thinking.  It was something like, "What the BLEEP Are You Doing?"  I just paraphrased that title as close to the original as I could remember.  The title did NOT do the movie justice.  The movie was about the idea that REALITY is fluid.  It IS NOT, solid, and completely unable to flex or change.  It promoted that idea that we can in fact create our very own reality!  WHAT?

So...today, what is your reality?  Do you enjoy your own reality?  Is there anything within it that you can change?  Are you limited by your own perspectives?  Or are you limited by necessity (little things like feeding your family).  Can you create your own reality?  Sometimes, at points in your life that may be impossible...but just for a measured time.  So, if you are stuck for awhile, find ways and means to make that reality more positive.

I worked at a job that I HATED!  The work was mostly about numbers and statistics, while I'm a people sort of a person.  I HAD to keep the job.  It gave our family health insurance, AND it paid for my husband's Law School (at $15,000.00 a year that's a pretty real motivation).  So, I found ways and means to make the job work for me.  I did my best to strengthen the weaker part of me, dealing with math and statistics.  I focused on the people part of my job, and used that enjoyment to tide me over on long stretches of the things that I did NOT want to do.

Oh it didn't make my reality suddenly magical.  Yet it did a lot to make my reality MORE magical.  Viktor Frankl found ways to make living (and living with the possibility of death) in a Concentration Camp more positive.  Oh please, he didn't start skipping and singing happy songs.  That isn't called reality, that's called Psychosis, or the inability to recognize reality.  He did rise to a higher level of reality where he could bear his limited, horrendous existence.

Can you create your own reality?  The answer is YES...no equivocations.  It WILL involve some work inside yourself.  Take a journal, find a quiet corner and investigate.  List all the things you do like about your current reality, it may be small places where you can focus like, I love my parents, or I love my children, and the possibilities I see within each of them.  Or you may realize that YOU are your own Dam...the kind that stops water, not the other kind (see, I shifted reality for a moment, and you can too...hee hee).  You may be the one stopping or damning the incredible possibilities that lie within YOU!

Most importantly, BELIEVE!  YOU CAN CHANGE...YOU CAN BELIEVE IN YOUR OWN POTENTIAL!  Class dismissed!