The Freedom of Disappointment

I was on my yoga mat yesterday (doing yoga...) feeling really connected to myself, having a blank mind and an open heart and this message fell into my heart:

"Write about how being a disappointment to others frees you up to be yourself."

I love inspired moments like that. It's been 15 hours since that idea was planted and my fear-mind has taken over saying "being a disappointment isn't a good thing, don't write about that, people will come out of the woodwork and tell you how wrong you are."

But there is some truth in the idea.

If you're like me, you care a lot about what people think about you, to the point of almost forgoing what you think about yourself. I've worked most of my life to make sure people like me and that my friends love me. I've wasted A LOT of energy trying to keep people in my life.

Anytime I lost a friendship, it was devastating to me, naturally. I took it very much to heart and blamed myself for not being the kind of friend they needed me to be. Again, energy waster, all in the hopes of keeping people happy. If someone hated me, it felt like I didn't deserve to be alive. It was a hole of dispair I could never crawl out of and I did everything to never be in that hole.

In the past 3 years I've lost three friends because I stood up for myself, or created a boundary, or chose myself over them. I got a lot of negativity thrown in my face, naturally. It hurt deeply.
Sometimes you have to disappoint other people in order to get back to yourself. It's crucial. I never wanted to lose friendships, but I had to in order to keep myself.

I am just now learning to experience the freedom of disappointing people. And there is a freedom in it, it means fully embracing who I really am and being that person full-out regardless of whether people agree with it or not. It is so freeing to be myself and to have compassion for all that I am! I almost look forward to those moments when someone is disappointed in me because it means I've kept true to myself rather than to what other people want me to be. There's so much more energy available when I am true to myself. Coming from someone who's been a people pleaser for a long time, it is liberating and scary to come into my own.

While I'm not going to go out of my way to make people dislike me, and it will still sting when someone doesn't agree with my choices, I'm going to continue to honor myself first and live free rather than keep the peace and slowly lose who I am.

It's a risky process, y'all!

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