Part of my personal growth has to do with enabling a life of peace rather than a life of piecing together missing aspects or ideas. It’s been exhausting because the step prior to that was specifically focused on healing—which has and continues to require both discipline and kindness as a grow.
That growth has led me to the next stage, without necessarily “finishing” the prior endeavors.
Any training, building, or creating needs a place to start: a want to do something, a method to learn and explore it; then to lay down a foundation, or begin with a wheelbase, or assemble a canvas. That thing envisioned, is not complete. With time and application, though, that thing takes form.
Progress can be slow. Sometimes it gets put aside; an approach or error can hinder it. Our solid start does not disappear. It doesn’t need to be reset, it’s still there—even if one gets distracted and sidetracked. Perhaps merely some cleaning or restoring is all that’s needed before we continue.
We have to choose that destruction and, like building something, follow that course for it to be destructive. That destruction takes MORE effort once we get to a certain point in our growth while building. Sometimes doing nothing, no building or taking steps, is progress because we are choosing NOT to directly destroy or reset what we built.
This can be up to and including not allowing, or at least minimizing the intentional or unintentional destruction and chaos of those in one’s life. It’s worth asking at times, “…are they helping, hindering, or actively sabotaging—do I want more or less of that around?”
I have always wanted love. Family, friends, and romance. It has been a marker of some kind of success that has, for better or worse, etched itself into my mind. In reality, it’s because I was severely missing or robbed of these things both in the distant and recent past.
I was born into an environment of pain, so I sought that familiarity and chaos. My definitions were miswired. My brain, along with many of my life surroundings, is also miswired. More accurately, it was wired differently.
When I realized a life of piecing together these (and other) missing aspects were not giving me peace, I began noticing the one person who could provide that was…and yes, it’s a cliche:
Me.