This week I’m making some special posts sharing what I’m grateful for over the past year. I’ve written this in September, but the days are getting shorter and to be honest this feels like the right time to look back and really focus on lessons learned or whatever.⠀
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No, I’m not pivoting to be a life coach! I just want to be honest and vulnerable for a minute because it feels good to do that sometime and to let you all know what’s going on under the surface of what I post here.
Awesome thing #1 that I’m grateful for this year: reframing my life’s story by prioritizing my mental health.⠀
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Some of you know I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. Fewer of you may know that by measure of cult expert Steven Hassan’s BITE Model of high control groups, this is a cult. Even coming to terms even with the term “cult” was a challenging first step that made my heart race. Me? Raised in a cult? Can that be right?
Last year I had a thought enter my mind seemingly out of nowhere–“Living alone is nice, it’s good that you decided to move out of mom & dad’s”–which, like, is THE WEIRDEST thing for an adult to think? But it revealed how deep the beliefs of dependency, helplessness, victimhood, and powerlessness were lodged in my subconscious. I didn’t want to live another minute with someone else’s beliefs and moral code stymying my potential, my goals, and my desires. ⠀
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I started doing something that, though I had been out of the cult for idk about 15 years, and AM ACTUALLY A SCHOLAR LOL, I had never done: research them. It still felt wrong! That’s when I knew for sure that there was a lot of beliefs to untangle, unlearn, and deprogram. ⠀
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Among other things, I started looking for someone who had experience helping former Jehovah’s Witnesses. Having someone who understands the particularities, power structure, and terminology has been a HUGE benefit.⠀
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I started with Lisa in January and started feeling different immediately. Normal. Something I had never felt.⠀
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This has been a revelatory process in so many ways and honestly there are still some we have yet to excise and rebuild. But I’ve found a soul sister and cheerleader in Lisa and I’m so grateful I was led to her.
So there’s a reason that I am drawn to helping people connect with their generational story through my business and it’s because I’m trying to do the same for myself. High control groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses isolate individuals from their larger family history and I combat that by helping everyone (including myself!) strengthen their connection to their intergenerational story.
Awesome thing #2 that I’m grateful for this year: learning that telling people things I want to do often results in them happening!⠀
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As a jw, the easiest way to make sure to have something you like taken away from you was to tell people that you were interested in it! Any interest in things outside of the cult was worldly, dangerous, and a threat. ⠀
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I guess I had internalized that to a degree that I expected anything I asked for to be answered with “no,” so the best way to get something I really wanted was to wait a long time, see if anyone asked me directly to do it (lol), or work behind the scenes to make it happen.⠀
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Over the past year, I’ve been trying to put myself out there more in terms of actually telling people I want to do something. It started with making a new position for myself on the board I serve on, and more recently resulted in me being offered a class that I never would’ve been the first in line for.⠀
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Learning that most people actually want to help you achieve or accomplish something that excites you has been new for me! When I get excited about something and get to share that excitement and plan with others, it almost always results in a yes and that’s when the magic happens. ⠀
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I’ll keep working on this by proposing new classes, continuing to be creative about new ways I can help people protect their photo memories through my business, and in general paying attention to my ideas instead of feeling like they’ll be taken from me.
Thing #3 I’m really grateful for: my little garden through which I have learned that everything is gardening. ⠀
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If you want a mature plant (project, whatever), plant the seedling now. The sooner you plant the sooner you’ll have a mature plant. Some processes can’t be rushed and happen on a timeline that doesn’t correspond to yours. If you pay attention to a plant (or project) it will thrive. If you don’t pay attention, you can miss signals that something is wrong. Roots need to be strong for strong stalks, leaves, fruit, and hopefully baby plants. Sometimes cutting back the leaves is the way to ensure the roots survive. Conditions have to be right for success and you only have so much control over those conditions. Just because something looks good on Instagram (semi-hydro) doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your garden or lifestyle lol.⠀
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Gardens require sustained attention (one of my plants in this picture is 21 years old!). A lot of my projects, current, and those planned in the future, require sustained attention and I think it’s finally sunk in for me that for any project or endeavor to succeed, it requires the same attention as a garden.
I took a day off from all computers/phones/internet yesterday. So here is my final gratitude post for this round! It’s about ~learning when to pull back~ lol⠀
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Above I wrote about getting so excited about something and letting that impulse drive sometimes. But it’s even more important that I’m learning that just *because* something excites me doesn’t mean I should pursue it. Anything exciting and new has the potential to take attention from my metaphorical garden (I’m talking about my business here) to my own detriment.⠀
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I’m a born problem solver and I love to help when I can. But this year I had to learn that just because I can help doesn’t mean it’s in my best interests to. Early in the year I volunteered for something in the moment and I convinced myself that it might actually be *good* for business even though it had literally nothing to do with my work. I had a reality check just in time to apologetically back out. I hated to do it! But it was necessary to be able to accomplish some of the other things I did this year.
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I’m slowly learning that just because I don’t go into an office for 8 hours a day doesn’t mean that my time is unoccupied or infinitely available. And I have the added bonus of knowing now that I am truly minding (like tending) my own business.
