Picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2022
I’ve never been good at choosing myself.
I’ve never been good at saying yes to myself.
I’ve recently come to realize that because I’m going through this intense transformation in my life, where I’m looking at everything that’s come before and I’m seeing all the patterns that have influenced my choices, whether those choices have been relationships, or jobs or anything else I’ve done and what I’ve come to recognize is how much the choices I’ve made have been about saying yes to other people and no to myself. And pretty much everything I’m saying yes to are old patterns that have kept replicating themselves with new masks, but underneath it all is the same narrative, the same giving away of personal autonomy and sovereignty and the person doing that isn’t anyone else other than me.
I’m doing this exercise right now where I’m observing myself, specifically the behaviors that I tolerate and allow even though I don’t really care for them. I’m seeing how the toleration of those behaviors has created this sabotage of my sense of inner value. What you allow dictates the experience you have and the way you treat yourself.
I’m doing this exercise from a place of self-love, with no judgment toward myself or anyone else. It’s not about judgment. It’s about realization. I’m realizing I have tolerated and allowed behavior that I should have spoken up about and said no to and I allowed it because I was a doormat. What have I allowed:
Dirty dishes and cleaning up those dishes for someone else.
Changing my stated opinion about something because someone else disagreed.
Sabotaging myself when I have started to succeed at something.
Making life decisions based around what I thought would make other people happy.
I could go on, because there’s easily more realizations I’ve had around this work I’m doing, but what matters is that I’m realizing that so many of the choices I’ve made have been made from a place of patterns, of narratives that haven’t served me in a very long time, if they ever did. Getting along to go along doesn’t work out in the end if you give away your essential self in the process and when I examine all of this I realize I need to make changes, take charge of my life and my choices in a way that goes against the patterns and narratives I’ve lived with.
I’ve got to choose myself.
I don’t know what that is ultimately going to look like, although I’m starting to get some ideas. Fortunately I’m not working alone in this work and while no one else can do this work for me or save me, I know I can figure it out by choosing myself and in the choosing also making the choice to be bold and go in a different direction than I’ve previously gone.
It’s scary, I’ll admit, because it seems so much easier to choose someone else or hope that someone will come along and save me, but there’s no one else who can do that for me. I can share what I’m doing, but I still have to do it and trust that the doing of it will actually get me somewhere…and it likely will. I won’t be where I’m at now, just as I‘m not now where I was a week ago.
Choosing myself is really about learning to value myself, love myself and say yes to myself. It’s recognizing the co-dependent behaviors that haven’t helped me and saying no to them and also saying no to everyone else while I learn how to say yes to myself. What we allow defines us, until we start defining ourselves and making choices from an informed place of awareness and sovereignty.
