Stubborn or Resilient?
Resilient.
This is not a word I would have ever used to describe myself…until a few short years ago.
I always thought of myself as stubborn, bitchy, even as a survivor. But never resilient.
On my “About” page I list several things that I’ve lived through, but even that list is a watered down version of the reality of my 4 decades on this earth. I note things like “single motherhood”, “depression”, and “losing both parents in different ways”. What I don’t tell you are the details.
I don’t tell you that I was a single mom because I was so messed up that I couldn’t stay in a relationship for longer than a few months at a time. I don’t mention that I was diagnosed with depression at 13 but was labeled as “crazy” because I refused to talk to any of the 11 therapists my mother dragged me to and when I finally did talk, it was to the one she really, really did not want me to like. I also don’t describe how I actually lost my father twice; once at the age of 4 and after finding him at age 23, losing him again just a few short years later, but this time for good. My mother I lost by choice.
Even that paragraph is just scraping the surface of my experiences. All of these things you’ll learn more about soon enough. The important thing to know is that I am not a victim of my circumstances, which would then also mean that I am not a survivor. I am stubborn, but that’s not why I’ve gone through these things and come out of them the way I have. It is because I am resilient.
Resiliency means that I have developed the coping skills and self-awareness to know which situations, places, and people will only keep me from living my best life. Being resilient means that I have the ability to take shitty circumstances and find the lesson in them, seeing the possibility of growth and evolution in all things good or bad. Practicing resiliency means that I bounce back from set backs much faster than I used to, with less destruction and chaos.
It has not always been this way. Unhealthy relationships left a toxic cloud over my entire life; family, friends, and partners had the ability to rock my entire world with one sentence, one look, one canceled plan. Something my mother always used to say was how she admired my love and dedication to my friends, which I always took pride in. Until I realized that being undeniably loyal to those who would turn their backs on me in a millisecond was keeping me in “the suck”, as I like to call it.
I struggled with money, relationships, making healthy and positive choices for myself, and quite honestly, with being a good parent. People around me would always tell me that they were impressed with how I handled everything, that I was such a good mom, and that I deserved happiness whenever I’d be excited about the newest relationship. While hearing their faith in me would give me a boost of self-confidence in the moment, it never lasted long enough to keep me from making the same dumbass decisions that kept me stuck in the first place.
And here’s why: because it wasn’t true.
They were being nice. Perhaps some of them even believed what they were saying was true. But it certainly wasn’t what I needed to hear.
What I needed was someone to tell me to quit doing the same dumb things over and over again, stop making excuses for why I was still stuck, and to strap up and DO SOMETHING, anything, to show that I was a willing participant in my own life.
Until I could hear this and understand the role I was playing in keeping myself stuck in the suck, nothing was going to change. I’d repeat the same relationships over and over again until I demanded more and better. Barely surviving on what I was making would be the story of the rest of my life until I became more resourceful and responsible. My children would continue to suffer if I did not show up to be the mother than I was capable of being and the one that they deserved.
How are you keeping yourself stuck? What patterns do you see yourself repeating over and over again? Relationships, money, parenting, food, health…the suck includes all of these (and more), and recognizing that there even is a pattern is the first step, so I implore you to keep going. Reach out for help with the next step(s).
livemorewithkerri.com/call
