Dear Daughters,
I would love to write to you about how the world has lost its damn mind, or my thoughts on guns in schools, or how our current president is a glorified toddler, but I simply don’t have it in me right now. I am still collecting my thoughts after another mass shooting in a U.S. school, managing my anger, and processing all of my feelings as both a mother and a concerned citizen. So, more on that later.
What I DO want to write to you about today is self-limiting emotions and beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you are 13 or 103, we all have something (or many somethings) that we have been carrying around far too long: anger, prejudice, guilt, hatred, self-loathing, jealousy, judgment. Some of those emotions and beliefs weren’t even ours to begin with—they were passed on to us from other people and we accepted them as our own. We buy into stereotypes, we become disciples of fear, we don’t do our due diligence and ask deliberate questions.
What we have to start doing is asking ourselves, “Is this true and accurate?”
- Are those words true and accurate?
- Is the way I feel about myself/others true and accurate?
- Is the way people feel about me true and accurate?
- Is the emotion I feel about this situation true and accurate?
We have to dig deep and get in touch with the truth. View it as time well spent.
The time is now to simply and deliberately let some of that shit go. All those thoughts of not being enough, not fitting in, not being able to figure it out—don’t carry them with you for another mile. All that extra baggage and all those untrue beliefs—they weigh you down. They dull your sparkle. They make you average—a part of the very lackluster pack.
Seek the truth. Stand out from the pack. Don’t put yourself down, or let other people do it for you. Don’t take on others’ opinions as your own. Be deliberate. Be bold. Be brave. Form your own conclusions and stand boldly in your truth. Don’t weigh yourselves down with the unnecessary and the untruthful…it makes it really hard to soar.
I love you both!
Pack light and fly high,
Mom