[forgiveness friday] the greatest gift this holiday season

It took me a while to face the discomfort I felt for not getting a handle on the messiness of my life’s unfoldment over the last few days, but alas, I’m here and that’s what counts.

Let’s lean into this though, because I know I’m not the only one who gets paralyzed by her own unmet expectations.

There’s a relentless overachiever driving me forward at all times. Scared to pieces of not getting life “perfectly,” convinced that there is a way to do life perfectly.

The problem with this relentless overachiever? She’s exhausted, because she’s constantly fueling this illusion of perfection, which leaves nothing untouched. NOTHING. She spends her energy constantly putting out fires — fires around what we create, how we move, how we look, what we do.

And there’s no doing right by her because with her attitude, perfection is completely unachievable. Even the infinite magnificence of the Universe gets dwarfed by her myopic need for control and personal will.

I bring this part of me up today because historically, we’ve had a strong love/hate relationship. I loved how she pushed me to artistic mastery and expression but hated how miserable I felt living with her criticism all the time.

And when I felt miserable, so then did the people around me because I stopped really seeing and appreciating them, and I projected onto them the relentless and unrealistic expectations that I had going on inside of me, too. (I’m actually shocked I had any friends growing up!)

Everything that exists in us has a purpose. Our shadows hide our light, but ultimately, when they’re welcomed back into the light, become the light themselves.

So what happens when my relentless overachiever grabs the reins, unchecked? I start viewing everything from the lens of suffering, of “never enough.”

The tricky part is that our wider society really subscribes to a lack mentality. We can’t ever get enough, particularly this time of year — wild, untethered consumerism threatens to put the masses into debt each holiday season just to show people they love them. Whether you subscribe to this particular manifestation or not, chances are you’ve absorbed the lack mentality of our culture somewhere.

What if, just for a moment, we reexamined our motivations behind our unconscious behaviors? Shone a bright light on what we’ve been doing for weeks, years, lifetimes, and really wondered what we’re doing it all for?

Have you ever heard of Nick Vujicic, the man without limbs? (He’s a scintillating motivational speaker you can find easily on YouTube.)

This is a man who was born literally without arms and legs. What I love about his story is that as he grew up, he never viewed himself as missing anything. His parents treated him as they would any other child and even assigned him household chores like vacuuming.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve still got all four of my limbs and many days it’s damned near impossible for me to not compare the right, unaffected side of my body with the left, and make the latter “wrong” for not doing things the way the other side does. Even unconsciously.

The point isn’t to compare myself with Nick; it’s to point out that his quality of life undoubtedly has been pulled forward by love and acceptance, as opposed to pushed by the sting of self-flagellation and -rejection, and regularly.

Your body believes everything you say about it. How many times have I heard stroke patients refer to their unaffected and affected sides as their “good” and “bad” sides? That was me, too.

Your relationship with your body is no different from a parent-child relationship. Unless you were blessed with kind, structured, emotionally and physically present parents who made zero parenting mistakes (whatever that would look like), it’s likely your relationship with your own body could benefit from some unconditional love.

If you feel constant resistance, like I did and still do in some areas, to doing what you know in your heart of hearts is the right thing, drop into your body and put a hand on your heart. Tune in. What does your resistance have to tell you?

Invariably, your resistance is trying to protect you from something. Mine is usually trying to protect me from the harshness of my relentless overachiever perfectionist (or that part in other people) and/or reminding me that this is where I often self-abandon for the sake of my image and reputation.

Whether that image is an identity (“a generous friend,” “a good writer,” “a stroke survivor,” “a competent student”) or a commitment I made to others, I can often lose myself to trying to prove whatever it is, and trying to hide from what I fear is my actual inadequacy:

• What if my friends don’t feel the love I have for them?
• What if the article I wrote is crap?
• What if I look too disabled/not disabled enough to fit in here?

(That last one is super fucked up, by the way. The result of not accepting the two worlds we occupy suspends us in a sort of limbo where we feel inadequate no matter which we’re exposed to. We’ll go into this in more depth another time, and PS. never call yourself disabled, please.)

So you can see why there’d be a constant part of me that’s perpetually exhausted. She’s so busy managing illusion at the cost of anything else that if she’s running the show, I’ll forget to nourish myself in the ways that really count.

In other words, it is my responsibility to provide myself whatever it is I really need. If I’m afraid the people I love don’t feel my love for them, I’m probably not feeling my own love.

This morning I finally returned to my mind-body-soul practice in my zen space — something that I do, non-negotiably, every morning, when I’m not tripping over my own stuff.

Unconditional love is a lost art. It’s always the answer. You must find a way to give it (and receive it!!) for yourself, to set yourself up to win, and everything will fall into place.

It is what will interrupt the chaos of a hectic mind. The tension of too-high expectations. It will heal you faster than doing 100 reps of any exercise would.

(Ever seen a fully able-bodied person hate imperceptible flaws on themselves? You might be convinced your supposed inadequacy is based on simply your abilities — but the measuring stick of lack is always, always longer.)

Through the lens of forgiveness and unconditional love, there is only the gift of life.

This holiday season, give yourself the gift of seeing and appreciating everything you do have going for you — the fact that you’re alive and able to read this post, for example.

Close your eyes. Flood your heart with these appreciations for five minutes, and see what that does to the voice of your own relentless overachiever.

And in the day to day, also, be willing to show up even if “it” doesn’t look the way you want.

It was never about that, anyway — it’s about loving what “it” already is, right here, right now.

It’s called presence for a reason. Love love love,

Pamela