Everything I know about courage
Everything I know about courage, I learned from completely messing up my life.
(And, upon realizing I’d messed up something, deciding to learn from that).
Courage isn’t something you’re born with; it’s a habit. It’s a practice that you create and cultivate over time.
Again: everything I know about courage, I learned from completely messing up my life.
Losing friends.
Sleeping with the wrong guy(s). Ahem.
Expending effort trying to get the wrong people to like me.
Wasting time on better looking, more impressive titles, thinking that it would give me something, somehow.
Questioning every obvious sign the Universe threw me.
Doubting the support and love of people who truly cared.
Throwing a Molotov cocktail of anger at people who didn’t deserve it.
Hesitating.
Doubting.
Judging.
Self-righteousness.
Complete and utter lack of boundaries.
Alienation and isolation.
Holding back.
Not being myself.
Not telling the truth-truth-truth.
What I Know Now
What I understand now is something that informs the backbone of all the work that I do: understanding that courage ain’t precious. It’s shadowy and difficult and open not to the perfect and heroic, but instead to the everyday person who has done her share of messing something up.
In other words: if I could change the things that weren’t working, so can you.
What I know now is that the most courageous thing anyone ever does is tell the whole truth about all of who they are.
What I know now is that it’s painful to be pretending you’ve healed your inner critic stuff, more than you actually have. (Psst! Whole lotta life coaches out there are in some pain).
What I know now is that I don’t have anyone else’s answers, but that having walked through the spaces where I didn’t like myself very much is what gives me the capacity and the container to hold space for someone else while they do the same.
What I know now is that courage is about truth, not confidence.
What I know now is that I hold very loose concepts around “what I know.”
I put more faith in groundlessness than I do in holding ground, and that’s just for starters where I get into the Buddhist wisdom that has prompted me to sit on zafus, breathing in, breathing out.
What I know now is that it’s because I have gotten more comfortable with not obsessively needing “the ground underneath my feet” that I can stand a little taller, be a little less swayed by discontent, square my shoulders, and speak the words that feel like coming home.