33 !!!
I turned 33 in September of 2020, I was going through a trivial time in my life and for the first time I gave myself a pass. You see 7 years ago, I made a promise to myself that every year on 12/09 I would take inventory of the previous year and so I made it a point to ensure that my older self would review whether or not I had evolved and grown physically, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually based on my experiences.
Even tho giving myself a pass felt like I had failed, I also learnt a valuable lesson. I learnt that it is ok to fail and to embrace failure with grace. You see growing up in a world that had a checklist on how you should approach everything, sometimes it was impossible to breath and allow myself be ok with failing at something. Very suffocating in many ways.
We often talk of cultural and social chains, but many times it’s closer home. Growing up I was the 9th born to my dad and the second born to my mum. My mum had three children and I was the middle child. Her first being a boy that automatically made me the oldest, if you know what I mean. At a young age I knew I had to work harder, be smarter, neater, more responsible etc to set an example for the rest. As I grew older, I had to have my grades better, then I had to have a job, get married, have children, get a car and then there was the “have you built a house? Perhaps if you do your siblings will too.”
Pressure! That meant, I went through life constantly thinking about what I needed to accomplish next not to fail my siblings.
What a way to live!
What about what I wanted to accomplish? Was that a question I often asked myself? You bet I did! Maybe I could have accomplished way more than they thought, I often imagined. But no sir! I could not afford to allow myself to think like that too long. I never gave myself permission to envision living my ideal future life lest my tamed self gave room for me to go off script.
You see growing up it was important that I kept the promises I made to my parents but never myself. Every decision, milestone was made to work towards their, community, my siblings happiness and never my own.
Until it was not!
And the lord said let there be the 30s. Oh yes! There is something remarkable about growing old people. Forget the cheesy quotes about aging like fine wine, it actually is incredible coming into your own.
Finally life was different, something snapped and it felt like waking up from a long dream. I looked in the mirror and I finally saw me. I saw my flaws and I saw my light. There she was. This incredible woman I barely knew. A soul so beautiful l could hardly look away. For hours I would talk to myself, even record some of those conversations. I made some serious edits to the rules of engagement. They became I, being the most important of them all. I learnt to ask, what does Isabelle want?
Every day, I made a promise to myself to put me first and actually kept the promise. Here is the thing that I quickly learnt tho, keeping that promise was way harder and much more challenging than I ever thought. Suddenly if I failed it was not Mum and dad’s fault. There was no siblings or any other external forces to blame. It took more than a minute to reset and unlearn a lot of things.
I was now on a journey that was both exciting and scary. One of the things I had to face head on first, was my reaction to failure. I recall this one experience when I was fired for the very first time. Here I was yes doing the job in a profession I chose and love but getting fired less than three weeks in. Around the same time I was ending a long term relationship, you know the kind that the parents would not necessarily approve of?! I had followed my checklist. Yes all me. Nothing had prepared me for the overwhelming sense of failure and self defeat I felt. There were not enough tears or words to describe the pain. It made sense to me, especially intensity of the feeling of letting myself down. For awhile I battled depression after that unfortunate ordeal.
And that was my ahhhh moment. I was simply not equipped to handle facing failing myself.
So when I think of 2020, and I think of the biggest lessons for me… it has been learning to embrace my flaws, failure and pain just as well as I embrace my strength, success and happiness. But most importantly pass that on to my children.
There is no greater lesson!