You are your own timeline.
My loves, I am not quite sure how this is possible but we have arrived at day 31 of our Dry January Journaling series.
Here is today’s prompt:
”Have you ever had a timeline for your life? Has it been helpful or limiting? Has it ever felt like things were taking too long for you?"
When we live in a world surrounded by other people’s highlight reel via the constant scrolling of social media, it can be easy to feel like there is something wrong with our life because it doesn’t look like someone else’s.
We are also given this formula for happiness. If we will only do the relationship thing and the career thing and the babies thing, it will all work out.
But what if you do all of the things and it doesn’t work out?
What if you find yourself married, with a good job, and a baby and you are still wildly depressed while also trying to function in the middle of a pandemic.
What if after all of those achievements, you still had depression and anxiety and anger and so much other shit that you didn't know what to deal with?
If you are anything like me, you will drink to oblivion every night and then wake up in the morning and try to make a life you love living.
It took therapy (that I started 6 weeks postpartum) to wake me up to how separated I was from my actual life. I had spent so long on my supposed “timeline” that I just didn’t understand how I could possibly be unhappy when I had checked all of the boxes.
I really started to ask myself if I actually enjoyed the life I was living if I was escaping every single night. I had to give up my pride around the “perfect” life I had created and be honest about what I was going through and what I needed.
As I allowed myself to veer away from the timeline and the goals and the ideas of perfection, I was able to wander into the world of self-discovery and radical self-acceptance.
Glennon Doyle Wambach always talks about how it‘s not our lives that are the problem, it’s the way we believe our lives SHOULD be that causes us so much pain.
”I should be richer by now“
”I should be happier with this”
”I should be a better mother/partner/friend”
We drown ourselves in expectations about what we think our lives should look like and we get so far down the hole of shame that it’s pretty impossible to dig our way out. If we are both obsessed with healing the “quickest” and “best” - we will miss the actual work.
The work of accepting your life just the way it is. In the exact timeline and speed that it is going.
You cannot be late for your own life and you cannot miss what is meant for you.
Sometimes that means we have to wake up after a lot of time asleep. Sometimes the realization that we’ve been going through the motions instead of living is too painful to look in the eye but once we do that, we are able to break out of those painful patterns.
It took four months of therapy for me to want to do Dry January back in 2021. My therapist did not suggest it and had never even asked me to drink less.
I was able to get to this decision through radical self acceptance of my timeline and my life. I started to look at my life through the lens of understanding and once I did that, I was able to accept my journey fully.
I had spent so much of my life shaming myself for the way my life looked instead of just letting myself embrace my life just as it was. Had I given myself the freedom to do that, I think I would have been able to not only be more present for my life but actually enjoy it.
I finally believe that the things I want will come to me when they are meant to and that what is going to happen in my life cannot pass me by. I do not worry about them not coming quickly enough because I know they are coming.
Before I got sober, I had been struggling to consistently write blogs for YEARS. I would go on tangents of having consistent posts on old blogs or instagram but I would always stop. I would always run out of inspiration.
But 6 months after I got sober, I started posting on TikTok about my sobriety. And what do you know, some other people were interested in this topic too. And now there’s over 80 thousand people following along on this journey that is filled with all sorts of things that I love.
Had I let shame win back in 2020, I would never be writing these words to you. I would never have gotten the chance to share my stories with you and TikTok and whoever else sees them. Had I believed that I was late and that my life was behind me, I would have never have found you all.
How lucky are we to have our own timelines? To trust that we cannot be late for our lives and all that is meant for us will find us.
This month has been an absolute fucking honor. You beautiful people have come along with me as I have written and talked and shared about what I’m learning and you’ve done the same with me. Whether or not you are continuing dry January, I hope you’ll reach out - dry January lead to my sobriety and I will always have a special place in my heart for all of you people.
I am so proud of the work that all of you have done this month. I hope you will find yourself moving toward self-compassion for yourself and your decisions. I hope that you will not find shame when you stumble or make mistakes in this life - as they are not problems to be solved but lessons to be learned. I hope you will let yourself rest in love instead of shame and that you will let your vulnerability guide you even when your ego is very loud.
I am in your corner endlessly and I feel lucky to have you in mine. Wherever you are reading this from, I hope you know that I’m so glad you’re here and thank you so much for being a part of this series with me.
If you enjoyed my writing, please come back every Wednesday for weekly blog posts! I can’t promise I will have journal prompts but if I think of any, I’ll always post them :) Also feel free to join as a member and you will get an email every time I post.
I have many more exciting things coming this year and I am hope you’ll come along with me!