My kitchen door groans under the weight of everything that I’ve posted to my affirmation / inspiration board in the last 18 months.
I’m going to let the photos speak for themselves. When you see — you will know why I can’t complain about any lack of cheerleading as I continue on my journey!
02 June 2015: What affirms/inspires me grows every day as my tribe — far and wide — send their love and support.
My inspiration board when I first made it.
I realize that I have squandered much of my life in fear of being judged to be inadequate. Worse: I tiptoe around the admission that I myself believe that I am inadequate. I am astonished when goodness finds me because I don’t expect that it will and I accept the impossibility. Conversely the lack of goodness in my life does not surprise me. I don’t feel that I deserve anything.
When people express the depth of their disgust for me, the disappointments that I have visited upon them, I accept responsibility. I have no trouble believing the accusations of my treachery and betrayal. Am I not defective? Am I not too short, too fat, too thin, too weak, too grey, too narrow-minded, too bossy, too lame? Yes, all of that in turns; and I bow my head and let the coals rain down, paying no heed to the smoldering embers falling around me.
But having Jessica and Jenny in my life has given me pause; and so, too have I been prompted to re-evaluate my worth by Vivian, Pat, and Jane, and Brenda; and others: Jenna, my cousin Theresa, Kati in the country, Penny and Katrina, and even that brat Miranda! And those ladies at World’s Window, who held me one day last summer when I sobbed, even though they do not know me. Them, too.
These women do embrace me; they do praise me. They accept that I make mistakes but they celebrate my complex being. Never before have I had a tribe, a group of women who form a circle with me, around me, under me, a gossamer rippling blanket into which I can fall when I am weary.
It sounds corny, I suppose, but these women have drawn me to open my eyes — wide, then wider, first with the shock of recognition and then with the wild crazy wonder of that semi-hysterical moment just before you throw all caution to the wind and go for Mimosas at noon or Baileys and coffee over Tuesday breakfast. My eyes have been wide but now they are open even wider and I think the light which comes into them shines from the circle of this, my tribe, the women who sustain me.