I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my life experiences and how they have impacted me. If you’ve read my story then you know I married while still in high school, divorced and remarried before my 21st birthday. I didn’t go to college right after high school but joined the US Army instead. By 25, I was a home owner with a government job. By the time I reached 30, I felt pretty old!
Until around the age 30, I hadn’t given much thought to what I wanted my life to look like. I’d simply reacted to events in my life the best I knew how. I hadn’t been making decisions or even consciously making choices. The only goal I’d set for myself was to graduate from college and even then, I’d chosen a major from a list based on what was available to me during the hours I could attend. Despite having received my degree, I didn’t pursue a career in the field in which I’d majored.
But at around age 30, I “woke up” and looked around the life I was having and started making some decisions about what I wanted and, just as importantly, what I didn’t want. I had lived a lot of “defining moments” up until then. I could have focused on any one of them and then “lived” that limiting self created reality. There were any number of labels I could apply to myself:
- Teenage bride
- Divorcee
- Soldier
- Army veteran
- Government worker
- College graduate
While I am all of those things, I am not any single one of them. Without a doubt, my experiences have shaped me. But, there is no particular experience that defines who I am.
Sometimes people get stuck living their lives based on a particular experience, one defining moment. But you do not have to be that one experience. You can be a mother and still be an artist. You can be a child abuse survivor and still be a successful CEO. You can be a petty thief and still become a radio producer.
You are more than the sum of your experiences. People are not (typically) one dimensional yet they get caught in a trap of living as if they were. Sometimes people need a safe, non judgmental third party to help them stop seeing themselves in that very limiting light. If you are limiting yourself by allowing one moment to define you, contact me! Your 20 minute complimentary session with me in no way obligates you.
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