Category: strength

Choose for yourself!

So often when anxiety is active I feel like I don’t have a choice about what happens in my life.  It feels as if all of the sudden I am sucked into this horrible feeling of panic and despair and there isn’t a thing I can do it stop what is happening or to change it.

 

Last week I was in the middle of a panic attack and I was feeling so horrible about myself that I was falling back into something I thought I had more control over.  Not only did I have to deal with the panic but I also was dealing with horrible feelings about who I am as a person.   I begin to have such horrible self talk that the spiral that began with the panic becomes worse.  I am my own worst enemy.  This time though something stopped me from sliding to the bottom of this well known slide.

 

I realized that I had a choice.  The panic is going to come, I don’t always have control over that, but I do have control over my choices.  When I was a child and would fight with a sibling I would tell my mom that they made me so mad! She would say they didn’t make you made you choose to be mad.  I hated that because it just didn’t seem true (plus they didn’t get in trouble).  Now I understand, I can’t control what others do or how anxiety will come into my life.  But I do have control of my choices.

 

I can start to feel horrible and tell myself what a weak person I am because I am having ANOTHER panic attack when I should be stronger than this.  Or I can be gentle with myself and acknowledge that anxiety will probably be a part of my life for the rest of my life.  I can choose to be loving to myself and let the anxiety pass.  I can understand that having anxiety doesn’t define what type of person I am, I do that.  I can acknowledge the anxiety as something passing through my body it does not define who I am.  I get to choose who I am, what type of friend, mother, wife, sister or daughter I want to be.  I get to decide that from my choices.

 

And the really good part???  So do you!  Whatever challenge you are facing right now is not who you are.  It is part of your story but you get to write how it will turn out.  You get to decide if you will let it define how you react to life or if you will choose a different path.  It is all up to you!  And me!  For that I will always be grateful; I get to choose!

Keep being brave!

Yesterday I did something super brave.

Next month we are running the Wasatch Ragnar and I have not been training.  I haven’t really worked out all winter.  Ragnar is a relay race of about 182 miles over the Wasatch mountains.  You have teams of 12 people, 6 in 2 vans and you take turns running.  Each person runs 3 “legs” of varying distance and difficulty. Even before looking at the legs I knew that I would be having a hard time because I haven’t been training.

Then I looked at what we would be running and really started to stress!  Not only do we deal with the ups and downs of the mountains but we have to handle the elevation.  The starting elevation is 4525 ft.  Here in Idaho where I live the elevation is only 2730 ft.  Then I looked at the distances and difficulty of the legs.  It looked like everything was hard!

I told my awesome husband last night that I new physically I was the weak link on our team.  It was awesome because my kids were there and they totally disagreed!  Yay for kids that have your back no matter what.  Anyway I told him that I should probably take the first leg which consists of 2 easy legs and a moderate leg.  I said that it wasn’t fair to give that to someone else that had been training just to make me feel better.

The reason that this was so hard for me to say is because I always want people to think the best of me.  I want to be seen as perfect and never making a mistake.  Yes you have read about that before.  I am working really hard to be honest with myself and with others about what I can and can’t do.  So even though I really want to be seen as super strong and able to handle anything I had to be honest in what I can do this time.

Besides it has been freeing to be honest.  To not pretend that I am something that I am not right now. Being honest allows so many more good things into life. There is room to learn and grow when you let go and be yourself!

Of course, this just made me want to work harder to be in shape for the Hood to Coast relay race we are running in August!