I Am Where I Am

Often times I have found myself feeling guilt and shame when I think I am supposed to be a certain way or should have achieved certain things. I share my thoughts about how I've held myself to a societal standard of a dream that wasn't my dream and learning how to love myself more. Each of us has our own individuality, values, and what matters to us as an individual and it's up to me to live my own dream. I am proud of myself for simply existing today and honoring what it took to get here. My priority is to love and take care of myself in all the ways I need and that is what matters to me.

Transcript

Hey everyone,

This is Alyssa.

Today I wanted to share my thoughts about something I was thinking about recently,

About accepting myself where I am.

And I would like to call this I am where I am.

So basically,

Sometimes I have these thoughts about,

I felt like I should have been more financially stable at this point in my life.

I should have been more well off or all these different things.

And I feel like when we're born here,

We have all of these influences around us that put this pressure on us that we should have this by a certain age.

We should have a career and a house and a family and really put that pressure on,

I guess you could say this dream that we need to achieve.

And I feel like I've always put a lot of pressure on myself about achieving this dream.

And I know that personally for myself,

My mental and emotional health has gotten in the way a lot of me keeping a stable job,

Being able to be the person that I want to be.

And there's been a lot of guilt and shame in my life surrounding these things that I haven't accomplished yet,

For example,

Like a career or,

You know,

What anyone said that I was supposed to do or be.

And I feel like at this point in my life,

I realized that I'm doing the best I can with what I've been given and the circumstances that I've had in my life.

And it isn't healthy for me to try to fulfill some sort of standard that any random person has set that is not myself because every person is different.

Every person has different challenges and situations in their life.

And this life isn't a one dream fits all kind of thing.

There are many different directions that we can take.

We're each an individual.

And I think that I have been too hard on myself of thinking that I should have attained this at this point by the age I'm at now,

Or I should have done this or been like this.

And when I think about my prior decisions that I've made in my life,

I know that that was the best choice I made for myself in that time with my own personal experience that I've been having.

I know that I used my reasoning to make the decisions that I've made for whatever that reasoning is.

I don't even necessarily have to know the reasoning of every decision I made.

I just know that that's where my life took me.

That's my journey.

That's my path.

And right now in my life,

I would like to start accepting myself more of where I'm at in my life,

No matter what I have or haven't accomplished.

And let go of the guilt and shame that has been surrounding the idea of me not measuring up to this standard or that standard that either,

You know,

Was set by family or society or any influence really outside of myself.

Because I don't think that it really makes sense to think that one person can know what's best for every individual here on this earth.

It doesn't really make sense as far as this one dream to achieve that's been handed to us that was set before us.

And I feel like,

Yeah,

When I was born,

You know,

The dream was set before me,

Either the foundation,

You know,

Built upon family values,

Traditions,

History,

Things like that.

And I feel like because I've always fell short of meeting those accomplishments for that dream,

That's built up a lot of guilt and shame.

And I don't believe that that's a good thing to feel guilt and shame about what somebody else thought I should be or should be doing or should achieve.

Because life isn't one straight line.

It's not,

You know,

Step one through four,

And then you're just going to get there.

There's a lot of things that happen in between,

And that's valid,

And we're all doing the best that we can.

So at this point in my life,

I would like to accept myself where I am and be like,

This is where I'm at.

You know,

Maybe I'm not as financially stable as I wanted to be.

Maybe I tried three or four different things before now that I thought were going to set me up for success and didn't.

And some of those things are from,

You know,

The outside influences that said,

This is what you need to do to have success and went down that route,

And it didn't work out for me.

And,

You know,

I went this direction and that direction.

And what I've learned of all of these different directions that I've taken and,

You know,

Falling down to rock bottom and realizing how come I just can't get it right and these kinds of things is that every time that's happened,

It's pointed me in this direction of I need to love myself and take care of myself.

That's what's actually important.

And it's not necessarily like anyone else is going to know what that means for me or what I need for me in the sense of taking care of myself and loving myself.

So what I've learned is that I have to love myself for who I am,

What I've went through and accept and love myself now for doing the best that I can,

No matter what that looks like,

No matter what that looks like on paper,

What it looks like to anyone else.

It doesn't really matter because I know it took a lot to get to where I am today.

And that means something to me,

The journey that I've been on to get to where I am today.

And this is just something that I wanted to talk about because I feel like oftentimes I'll be sitting in this place where I'm putting myself down because of where I'm at in my life.

And I think a lot of that comes from this,

You know,

Dream that was set before me and me not achieving those things.

And I think each individual has things that,

Like,

Different values and different things that matter to them.

And I don't think that there's one thing that matters that everyone's supposed to go for that's from one person's idea.

I think we're each our own individual and that we each have things that value and matter to us.

And what I value and what matters to me may not be what the next person values or matters to them.

And that's absolutely fine.

So I think that at this point in my life,

I'm redefining what success means to me and what success means to me is loving myself and taking care of myself and all the ways that I need and exploring that and learning that and learning more about myself because I think I depended on everyone else to guide me in the right direction of what was best for me and what I needed.

And I realized that I never really had those set of tools growing up to love and take care of myself and the ways that I needed.

And I think that's what I needed all along because this life is going to be full of challenges and ups and downs.

And knowing that that is a constant variable,

That we will always have challenges and ups and downs in life,

That the one thing we can depend on is how are we going to love and take care of ourselves through our journey of life.

That's something that we can depend on that helps us stabilize and neutralize different things that we go through and help,

You know,

Return us back to our center.

So this is what matters to me in my life is finding out how to love and take care of myself.

And that can mean so many different things.

It can mean,

You know,

Saying that you need space whenever you need space without worrying about hurting someone else's feelings or,

You know,

Changing jobs if you feel like you need to change jobs or,

You know,

There's so many different things,

You know,

Taking time for yourself and,

You know,

Saying good affirmations to yourself.

There's so many different ways,

You know,

That self-love and self-care can show up in our lives and it's different for each person.

So I'm learning more about how to speak up for myself.

And there's a lot of times where it is hard for me to speak up for myself,

But,

You know,

I know the reasons for that and I'm doing my best to work through and recover from things that I've went through and I am where I am.

And this comes back to I am where I am.

I have to accept myself for where I am.

Be like I have really done the best that I can to survive and get through situations.

And now I am taking the time and space for me to figure things out more and realize what's true and what matters to me and what is my truth and separate that from the influences around me and really start to figure out what's best for me.

How do I want to feel in my life?

Do I deserve to beat myself up every time I'm not where I think I should be?

And I feel like everything happens for each individual and divine timing and there's just not such a cookie cutter way of what's supposed to be achieved and when it's supposed to be achieved.

Anyway,

So that's why I'm redefining what matters to me and loving myself and taking care of myself is the priority in my life right now.

And I'm going to do my best to be able to tune into myself and understand,

You know,

Do I feel bad for a reason that makes sense?

Or do I feel bad just because I'm not measuring up to the pressures of society or the influences around me and that I realize it's not my pressure.

It's just pressure that I took on because the influence,

You know,

Projected that on to me.

And now I'm realizing that I can make choices that are best for me in my life and that doesn't depend on what someone else thinks is best for me.

It depends on what I know is best for me.

Learning more about myself and taking care of myself.

So this is something that I wanted to share today about I am where I am and I'm learning to accept myself where I am and just let go.

Let go of all of the,

Let go of all the influences or pressures that I have taken on and just realize what's best for me.

So I can start living the life that I truly want to live and not live a life that others want me to live and then feel bad about it if I fall short of someone else's standard.

I just realized I've lived like that for a long time and that's not healthy for me.

So that's something that I'm working on right now and I'm just going to continue to focus on self-love and self-care and treat myself better than I've been able to in the past.

So thank you all so much for listening.

I really appreciate you being here today and thank you so much.