Experiences I Love

“I want to be in the arena. I want to be brave with my life. And when we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked. We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.”

Brené Brown

Song: A Letter To My Younger Self by Quinn XCII

Article: Encouragement and Reassurance by Seth Godin

Thought: I’m starting a series based on my Soundtracks. The first one is: In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you. The experiences I’m prone to “hate” fall in three categories: Romantic, Religion and Career.

I’ve been single, dated, married, divorced, and in and out of love. Those experiences are filled from edge to edge of the emotional spectrum: despair to elation. I’ve chose to reframe what success means – growth, connection, and empathy. As much agony as I’ve gone through in romance, I can have regret without hating what I’ve experienced. I remain friends with my exes, often close ones, because it’s about how they’ve made me better and not how I’ve been hurt.

In religion, I’ve passed through traditional to undefined. These days, I follow where the Universe takes me. Traditional religion was filled with judgement, shame and self denials. I remain in therapy working through my past but one thing is true: many of my best friends were found through religion. I’m grateful for them and their impact in my life everyday. So with all the religious shame I battle, I can’t deny religion’s impact in the friendships I have today. The Universe connected us how it saw fit to. My relationship with religion can be messy without hating the friends I made along the journey.

My career has had its ups and downs; I’ve fortunate to say mostly ups. I’ve taken roles that weren’t well suited for me. I worked for bosses I didn’t feel valued or respected by. I’ve worked several places through countless re-orgs. What have I learned? The grass is green where it’s watered. Every job has its lawn and, frankly, they are all pretty similar. What’s different are the greener parts. I learned more from the brown spots than the green patches. Regret has changed my approach to be a better teammate, supervisor and leader. Without some of those regretful roles, I wouldn’t know who to show up better for me and others.

So where I’ve been in romance, religion and my career, instead of choosing guilt, shame, hatred, I choose to love who I am.