Owning My Life…Making It Mine

We all come with baggage, with a past, accomplishments, and perhaps even with things we wish we wouldn’t have done.  Too often we give away the ownership of our lives to the habits of thinking, to our past mistakes or the patterns of others.  We listen to those we were reared by, people whom we give power over us, and too often in my own life, people who simply were not qualified to define who or what I am capable of accomplishing.

My father, upon reflection fifty years after graduating  medical school, realized that a professor who told him he would never make it as a doctor, wasn’t accurate .  He realized the professor was not capable of knowing who or what a student he had only seen a few hours in a lab…but how many such statements to our spirits ARE heard, are accepted as true, and cost us each as individuals when we do not own our life. Some silly woman had told him as a youth that he was borderline retarded and should not plan to go to college much less medical school.  He went on to not only go to college at Tulane, but to be accepted into med school in his third year of college, graduating as he obtained both his BS and his MD. What if he had believed their gloomy predictions?  What we take into our hearts and minds matter. What we tell ourselves matter.  Owning your life and making it yours means taking ownership of what is said to you and what you say to yourself too.

My sense of self in young adulthood was so colored by everyone who raised me. The youngest child and grandchild and I was the only girl.  I simply willingly gave up the freedom to choose my young adult life paths. I believed what I was told with very few questions of “does that work for me?”  My influencers were not a motley group, all had advanced degrees, some success in their professional lives, families and marriages at least on the outside, that functioned.  Problem was, I wasn’t them.  My gifts and talents work differently than those of my family and small town peers, I am a Creative from a rural town where straight-laced and analytical was the only “safe” way to be. If that wasn’t hard enough, I had parents who did their best to do what was their belief of right by us, but for me, it just wasn’t a “fit”.  I was too weak to recognize, or perhaps too Southern bred to rebel, even when it was obvious their choice of life for me to try on simply didn’t fit. I tried my best to make me into their version of  me for many years …it worked, but not very well and the joy quotient was about zero for many years. Funny how when we try to be someone we aren’t doesn’t lead to very much happiness.

When I was a little girl I remember taking sugar bears cereal and making collages with the pieces and using my brothers cereal to create the other colors from the dry cereal we were often allowed to snack on.  I remember taking piano from an ancient lady in our small town and how she would end our lessons early after she saw me add shading to her paint by number project in a way that she had not accomplished as an adult. I was five. My mother appreciated my creative nature, she could use patterns and sewing machines to create clothing if directions were clearly stated, but she feared for my creative soul. She equated that freedom of artistic spirit to be a potential danger, perhaps an emotional weakness if encouraged, never allowing art classes in school or college- they were thought to be “soft” training, not career or professional opportunities. It  might not provide me a stable future. Somehow it seems ironic that my artistic nature has what has provided the greatest income, not my formal education, and I know Mom would be proud of that too, just as she was of my earning the use of sales cars.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that this life is the only one I have and I have in fact the choice to own my world or to allow someone else to control it and live with the results. Our happily ever afters aren’t build on a fairy tale, they are built upon our understanding that we are our own fairy godmothers….and the only mice doing the dishes look a lot like us, and sometimes we can be our own worst enemy. To live joyfully, to be content, to have peace in your life I believe it takes owning your heart and your mind. It takes knowing who you are and what you stand for in life.

This category (Making it Mine) is about sharing the lessons of choosing to own my own life and how that has so changed, and broadened my life existence. Often I’ll be sharing the silly and the serious parts of making my life mine.  The real ME.  I’ll invite you to do the same some weeks on Thursdays, to discuss how you’ve learned to own your own life and make it yours.  What makes up your ideas of who you are? What do you accept as truth that may or may not be your current truth? What in your past or future will be affected by what you choose not to own in your own life?

Pssst…. coming soon…so start thinking on it, Rule #1 I learned is below…has it been true in your life as you began to own  your own life?