This is one of those posts where I show up to write having no idea what I’m going to say. And yet, I can feel something there, see it like I would a shape in the fog, moving towards me but as yet unnameable.

Eric is walking Sam this morning, or rather running with him. It’s windy and cold, so Eric offered to take him, in part to be nice to me (Colorado wind is my least favorite weather, even worse than rain) but also because he knew if I went he’d have to walk and that would mean being cold. When they run, he doesn’t notice the weather so much — seems like a metaphor, doesn’t it?

The weather seems a perfect match to the card I pulled this morning, “a card of conflict” with the image of five scattered wands. The card warns that “Your energy moves outward in many directions, yet you are suffering inside.” I realized this morning that once again, I was trying to do too much. I was thinking specifically of all the things I’d signed up for leading up to the holidays, all good stuff, emails of wisdom and prompts for reflection and opportunities to connect, but maybe too much… okay, not maybe — too much.

I am working on a paradigm shift, and that’s hard. I am attempting to move from thinking I can’t be trusted, that I’m not allowed to want what I want, have what I want, that I have to work to earn acceptance and love, looking outward to external cues and messages, trying to do what others want, make them happy so they will in turn love and care for me, thinking that wisdom resides “out there,” that if I’m not getting it right it’s because I’m either stupid or an asshole, measuring my worth by how successfully I pleased others, some of whom are almost impossible to please, and rebelling or collapsing, self-destructing when it gets to be too much.

I can’t do it anymore. It doesn’t work. It will never work. If it did, I would have figured it out by now, but it’s a broken system. I am officially giving up. I am learning how to trust myself, to be myself. I am allowing myself to want what I want, to have what I want. I am moving from focused on what I have to offer to how I want my life to feel, the experience I want to have, what I’m truly hungry for, and no one else can tell me what that looks like, what that should be. I am the expert, only I can know.

For starters, “pancakes make me want to dance,” and I won’t be apologizing for that anymore.