Thursday, January 5, 2017

Dear Younger Me...

A while back, a friend asked me to create this blog entry about what I would tell to the younger version of myself.  I thought long and hard and had a really hard time coming up with just the right words, worth reading.  I guess that was the first mistake I made…overthinking it.  I tend to spend far too much time worrying about how people will “take things” before I just express what I’m truly thinking or feeling.  Maybe that’s why my blog entries are so few and far between.  I talk myself out of 70% of them.  Truth is, the spirit of God speaks to the hearts of man, and each person receives what I share in a way that speaks specifically to them, so my fear is unfounded, as fear often is.  But I digressed – back to me! 

I spent a lot of time after law school fantasizing about what it would be like to go back to undergrad with the knowledge of the world that I have at the present.  I wondered which guys I would’ve avoided, and which ones I would’ve entertained.  I wondered what I would’ve “majored” and “minored” in, both literally and metaphorically.  I wondered what I would’ve done after college, instead, and how that would’ve shaped who I have become, versus the path that I actually took.  This way of thinking often leads to regrets and unrealistically fantasies of how much better my life would’ve been if I made better choices – mostly better financial decisions!  But while moping down “what if” lane, I’m often snapped back into the reality that is present, and I think about how truly blessed I am in every way imaginable. 

I think about how I am heavy-laden with graduate school debt, and yet there isn’t a single day that I go without my basic needs met, while still acquiring a lot of my luxurious “wants.”  I think about how amazing my work culture is, and how I would not know how to appreciate it the way I do, without all of my less than favorable work environments in the past.   I think about how my daughter is my life-line and makes me a better person every single day, as I revel in the joy of being her mom.  What really gets my praise party started is when I think about the absolutely, amazing man and father that is my husband.  It is like God handcrafted him just for me, and there is no way I would be able to actually appreciate that without all of the mismatched relationships of my past.  Talk about a paradigm shift!