2012: The Year of Happy. Join me. – The Sisterhood of the Shrinking Jeans LLC

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I know Saturdays are mostly for reviews here on The Sisterhood, but I don’t have anything to review right now. So, if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to step away from the Saturday Review today and talk about something else.

Recently, we’ve reviewed our 2012 letters to ourselves and written 2013 letters to ourselves and we’ve also re-visited loving ourselves. This reflection of “self” is a very important part of our life journeys.

Not so long ago (in a galaxy not so far away), I was on a dark and dangerous path. I didn’t like who I had become. I was so very sad and depressed and I was ashamed to admit that. I was too afraid to look within myself to fix what was broken. I was determined to live my life the way I thought others would want me to live, not how I wanted to live.

My happy was so deeply hidden within myself that I had become very overweight. It’s funny, isn’t it? How so closely related our physical beings can be connected with our mental beings. (I say can be because sometimes we can be very happy and yet for reasons not completely in our control, we may gain weight.) I didn’t realize this until I was well within my journey. I realized that while I was happy with how my body was changing, I was not happy. Something was missing.

It wasn’t until I was sobbing over my grilled chicken salad while watching The Biggest Loser one night that I realized what was missing. My insides needed fixing, too.

Working on your happy takes so much longer than losing weight. Losing weight is easy. Loving yourself is hard.

Why is that? Why is loving yourself so hard?

I choose to think it’s because it forces you to look at the things  you don’t like about yourself. It forces you to fix those things or sometimes let go of things.

One of the most important things that I have learned recently is that I hold onto the past too much. Our pasts can have a very big effect on us. Our pasts partly shape who we are today. But if we hold on to our pasts, it’s possible we fail to progress and grow in our presents, and that’s where we can become stuck. It’s so easy to say, “Well I am like this because of how I was raised,” or, “I’m this way because this happened.” Then using our pasts becomes our excuse. I’m guilty of that.

Here’s the thing, I don’t want to become stuck again. Forgiving and letting my past go is something I need to do for me and me alone. It’s something I need to do so that I can be the best person I can be. I am in control of what happens to me in the now. I am in control of my own actions. So, this year, I’m going to work as hard as I can to forigve my past and to let go of it, so that I can continue to be the happy person that I am today. So I can be even better in my future.

Does this sound like you? If so, know that you’re not alone. If something else has made you sad, then you’re still not alone. The thing I love most about our Sisterhood is that you can always find someone who can relate to you and most importantly, you have amazing support here. I’m determined that this year will be the Year of Happy. Find your happy. It’s there, all you have to do is set it free.

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