Easing into 49

Tomorrow I will be celebrating turning 49, and celebratory is truly the best word I can use to describe how I am feeling about many things lately.  I look at my life through the lens that I have honed over the past year and I realize just how far I have come in a relatively short amount of time.  

It feels like for the majority of my life I have lived as a triangular peg that was trying so very hard to fit into a circular hole.  I was never comfortable with the shape I held naturally and tried so many different ways to try and change it in order to become closer to the image in my head.  So much energy spent on trying to diminish who I was in order to take up less space and slide into a version of myself that I thought would be more acceptable, more likeable, and ultimately would live happily ever after.

What I discovered, often to my dismay, is that the parts of me that I tried so hard to change were the parts that make me who I really am.  Not necessarily the image that I held onto so tightly as my ideal, but the one that I could just not shake or make go away.  It has taken a lot of time and I suppose wisdom with age to finally get to a place where I can appreciate the qualities that used to feel awkward and messy.  And I can also accept that the image I held so dear was truly unattainable and in many ways not one that I would have wanted to attain even if it were possible.  It was not the gateway to some fairy tale life that I had imagined.

Instead what has happened is that I have learned to live with ease and to look to the future with this sense of living with ease.  No more trying to force this triangle into a circle...instead celebrating the shape and space I hold and learning to truly be at peace with that.  To say that I am learning to live my life with ease does not mean that I feel like my life is becoming easy.  There are still plenty of hard things that I am facing and will face in the future, and I feel peace with that fact as well.  Hard things come and I know that I not only have done hard things in my past, I can do them in my present and you better believe that I will continue to face them and do them in my future.  Discomfort brings with it growth and I have no intention to stop growing and evolving.

So as I face my 49th birthday I do so with a smile on my face and in my heart.  I am surrounded by family and friends who love me and who I love dearly and I feel more truly and authentically myself than I ever have before.  And those are the best birthday gifts that a girl can have. 

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