Do You?

Do you practice what you preach? Do you own yourself entirely? By that I mean do you own both the positive and negative parts of you. Everything in life has a balance so negatives are just as important as the positives. So many of us strive to be perfect, without fault, never making any mistakes. Mistakes are perfectly brilliant lessons of life. Without them we couldn’t learn anything. We don’t have to be perfectly perfect 100% of the time. We are allowed to have bad days. Sad emotions. Too much chocolate. An extra glass..ok two glasses of wine. We need to embrace the good and the bad. Being able to embrace the bad allows us to relax and enjoy the good too. I am guilty of this myself. Recently I was feeling a little lost, which led to me feeling unmotivated and stressed out. Every time someone asked me how I was feeling I would reply ‘I’m great thanks’. Now, I pride myself on being honest, always, but this was not an honest answer. Ok so I don’t need to tell every Tom, Dick and Harry my deep emotional feelings, but when my close friends are asking I should be able to express how I feel. On top of that, when my friends are feeling down I will lecture them on the importance of feeling their pain and sharing it with someone. Why do I not practice what I preach? I thought about this and realised I didn’t want to fail at being the ‘happy’ one, the ‘stable’ one. If I was feeling lost then everyone would think I was a fraud and that all my advice would be null and void because I wasn’t living proof of the perfect happiness. I found this so interesting. I took the opportunity to learn from this. Being human is hard work, we will always be tested. It is important to acknowledge your feelings and not get distracted with everyone else’s problems when you need to face your own. It is ok to feel lost. It is ok to get stressed out, to breakdown and cry sometimes. Can you recognise your behaviour? Can you take responsibility for it? That is the real challenge. Next time I am in that situation I will be sure to be honest about how I am really feeling and not be so quick to judge myself or judge how others will view me. I will do what I advise others to do.