Tag: self reliance

The Long Road To Emotional Self Reliance

The Long Road To Emotional Self Reliance

I’ve been told I can be a bit extreme at times. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth over doing, right? It’s usually to my detriment, even if I know that going in. Yet here I go again, diving in deep.

I’ve never fully understood why.

It’s been a little over a week since I had my last sips of caffeine. Which is a huge deal for me, because I would inhale caffeine in the form of fresh brewed iced tea. Lots of iced tea. Most mornings caffeine was the BFF I couldn’t wait to hook up with. My habit was supported by the availability of fairly good iced tea I’d get a convenience store I would intentionally pass by each day. It’s cheap and easily accessible, the perfect breeding ground for me to over-indulge excessively.

As much as I enjoyed the first few of the several tall cups of my beverage each day, at some point it would start working against me. There is a diminishing return on the amount of caffeine I’d often consume. For a beverage which is supposed to perk me up, at the end of the day I’d be anything but perked. Yet tomorrow I would repeat the same process.

As I’ve made my way through the expected brutality of caffeine-withdrawal headaches, I began to look at my relationship with iced tea. Why do I drink so much? Why do I need to drink it at all?

This line of inner questioning was reminiscent to a conversation I had with myself 23 years earlier regarding my alcohol consumption. It was a relationship much like the one I had with iced tea. Why did I Continue reading “The Long Road To Emotional Self Reliance” →

Some Saviors Will Never Save You

Some Saviors Will Never Save You

So there was Rose, floating on top of a door as Jack remained submerged in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, hanging on until he could hang on no longer.

Titanic. The movie. Many survivors clinging in the darkness to whatever they could find to keep themselves above the freezing water, to keep themselves alive long enough to be rescued.

Survival Mode. Hanging on and hoping to be saved. 

It’s a great plan for a shipwreck. But it’s not a great way to live a life.

Life does at times unexpectedly throw us into the water and sometimes the only thing we can do is simply hold on and hope. It can be a matter of our survival, either physically or emotionally.

But how often in life do we continuously cling to uncomfortably familiar doors such as toxic situations, needed outcomes, outdated belief systems, and self-destructive habits, while waiting and hoping for someone or something to come and save us?

Sometimes we stay in survival mode for so long we accept it as part of our identity. And when we accept ourselves as survivalists we abandon our own innate capacity to heal as we find ourselves always in search of a new door, a new outcome, a new savior, someone or something to keep us afloat and to pull us out of the frigid waters of our limitations and fears. 

Yet the saviors we continue to attract tend not to be saviors at all. No matter how much we want them to be.

Because no one is coming to save us, to fix us, to keep us afloat.

Our emotional rescue? 

That is up to us.