I’ve lost myself from time to time.
This isn’t the first time.
It’s one of many.
I can remember those moments very well. Those moments shook me. They made me feel like I was breaking. They challenged everything I thought I was about. Even though they are long gone, going back and remembering what happened and how I felt isn’t a far stretch.
I learned from those moments as tough as they were.
Recently, I was shaken again. I’m not proud of it. In fact, I didn’t even know I was capable of reverting back to a way that I used to show up almost 10 years ago. But I did. My gut was in pieces. My heart a mess. To be honest, I felt ashamed. Ashamed of how I had acted. Ashamed of who I was being in that moment. And despite carrying on, I’ve really had some upfront and personal conversations with myself about how this behavior was absolutely unacceptable.
Cowardice…spineless…moment.
Doesn’t matter the reason why it happened. Doesn’t matter the details or what else might have been going on. The fact of the matter is…is that it did happen and that’s not who I am. I’m not that person anymore. It just goes to show you that we are all capable of backtracking from time to time.
This isn’t a post about ripping myself to pieces.
This is about what to do after that.
I’ve always been hard on myself. It used to not show up in the healthiest of ways, but now, I understand that demanding nature more. I spent a lot of time developing some pretty bad habits throughout my life that I wasn’t really proud of. I needed to break those. But in order to break those, I had to demand more out of myself that I was capable of at that time.
It took a sense of fearless compassion to force myself into breaking old ways and becoming the person who I want to become.
I know that I still have a lot of work to do.
I know that there’s a lot for me to learn.
But the point is, I’m learning. As much as I write about and speak about things that are happening in my life, I also slip up. I strike out looking with the bases loaded from time to time.
That used to be the way it was quite frequently. But now I really try to take my best shot at things and if I go down…well at least I went down swinging.
Strikeouts are part of the game.
And boy did I strikeout.
I know better. I demand better. It’s not that I’m not willing to forgive myself for this mistake, but it’s that I don’t want to ever put anyone else or myself in that position again. Have I understood why it happened on a personal level?
Absolutely.
I’ve spent hours upon hours with it figuring out why I would drastically shift in such a way that was completely contradictory to who I am 99.9% of the time. So I get that.
So now what?
All there is to do is continue on. Continue trying to fix it. Continue trying to make it right. Continue to learn.
There’s no sense in firing arrows into yourself after the first arrow has hit. That’s just a recipe for constant pain. Deal with arrow 1. Understand everything you can about why it happened. Then go forward.
Do what you can to make it right.
Love as much as you can after it.
But also move forward.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project