Kendra's Favorite Things

It's a sad thing that our society tends to look down upon people that appear to be suffering or grieving about something. Therapy is often times looked at as a sign of weakness. Well, not in my household! Granted, I may be a little bit too open about my struggles but it is therapeutic for me, and if it helps just one other person feel better about something they are going through, or less alone, than I'm winning in my book.

The truth is, we are all struggling, we are all suffering, and we are all grieving about one thing or another. Life is difficult right now, just look at what's going on in the world. Sadly, you won't have to look too far to see someone in a worse condition than you are. I often think about the parents and community of Sandy Hook, the families of Boston Marathon participants, or the homeless people I see on the street every single day. Their pain is so real, so fresh and so deep. And quite possibly the saddest part of all is that most people don't know how to be receptive of their pain, or "deal" with it. Most people just bury it away for it to haunt them in the future.

If I haven't talked about Sami yet, I definitely SHOULD have. She deserves a month of blog posts all on her own for the amount that she has been able to help me in the year I've been seeing her. If you can't tell by recent blog posts I'm going through a very difficult time right now. But the beautiful part about THIS pain is that I am actually learning how to sit with it, recognize it and learn from it so I can actually move on from it. I wouldn't have been able to do this without the work that I've done with Sami. She has taught me how to recognize and rise above the learned patterns I've fallen into throughout my life, that nobody else is responsible for my own "stuff" but me, and that what other people are going through has nothing to do with me. What a freeing feeling she has been able to help me recognize within myself. Don't get me wrong, I slip up and fall into my old ways from time to time.. but I handle those situations differently and I'm able to recover from them faster.

The "light-bulb" with all of this is that the only person that was holding me back from moving into this sort of growth over the years was really... ME. And nobody else, but me. I could waste time and be mad at myself and hold a grudge, but instead I've decided to take this new found responsibility and "kick it into high gear" (that's another Kendra-ism). Love yourself, love your life.

"The person in life that you will always be with the most, is yourself. Because even when you are with others, you are still with yourself, too! When you wake up in the morning, you are with yourself, laying in bed at night you are with yourself, walking down the street in the sunlight you are with yourself.What kind of person do you want to walk down the street with? What kind of person do you want to wake up in the morning with? What kind of person do you want to see at the end of the day before you fall asleep? Because that person is yourself, and it's your responsibility to be that person you want to be with. I know I want to spend my life with a person who knows how to let things go, who's not full of hate, who's able to smile and be carefree. So that's who I have to be." 
— C. JoyBell C.