You can only read about it for so long.
Books about writing. Books about dating. Books about making something. Books about organizing.
Books about dreaming.
Books about loving yourself.
Eventually you just have to get your hands dirty and dig in.
Everything until now. Everything right now. All that will be.
The full spectrum of your life is here for the loving, from gleam to dream and everything in between.
Don’t pick and choose which parts are more deserving. Your past is not more golden. Your past has not already written the future. Ask who you are becoming – this question meets you right here, and invites your hope to stir. When you ask who you are becoming, you acknowledge the strength you have been building, the healing you’ve been welcoming, and the dreams you’ve been hearing. Everything you are becoming is here. It is growing now. It is lovable now.
You don’t deserve love. You don’t earn love. You are love.
What does “late bloomer” even mean? That you used to have a limiting idea about acceptable timelines for your own unique brilliance? Where did you get that idea?
There are SO many places where we get that idea.
Just because you can get an idea, doesn’t mean you have to keep it.
You are not a “late” bloomer if you trust that you are on your own path, and everything is unfolding as it needs to.
You are not a “late” bloomer – you are simply, a bloomer.
You are no less intelligent than a cherry blossom tree.
Maybe we can drop the judgment and expectations of timing. Maybe we can stop comparing our cherry blossoms to dahlias and our dahlias to lilacs.
Because it’s nobody’s business.
You’ll bloom when it’s time for you to bloom. Every time. Again and again.
You are not late.
You are in season.
Oh give yourself this. Even five minutes. Give yourself the listening. Give yourself the floor – before anyone else takes over.
I know what it’s like to roll over and open my phone, still half asleep, half in the webs of unfinished dreams.
It’s such a vulnerable, lovely state.
I know what it’s like to hand the mic to others – even random others – first thing in the morning. And then mentally begin forming responses, weighing my opinions, reacting to the tone set by whatever won the algorithm lottery that day.
And I know what it’s like to wake with quiet. With my hand reaching not for my phone, but a pen. My heart. Or reaching for my keys and getting outside with my own sense of the day, before it unfolds.
You don’t have to have a morning routine or write morning pages or meditate for 30 minutes – though these things can of course be wonderful nourishing practices.
Just be the first. Just give a tiny moment of space. One breath. See how you even are, before you decide how you will react. Calibrate yourself before weighing in.
Take a beat, before you open the door.
Yours is the most important voice.
Think of January as a nice, wide, on-ramp.
You can take it easy. Lean into the turn. Accelerate gently and deliberately, giving yourself lots of room to arrive on that smooth highway of 2021.
You are not slow. You are not late.
If you aren’t already doing a 30-day challenge, or have your word of the year picked out, that’s fine. Don’t panic about not being “on it” yet.
You’re getting on it.
Take time to deliberately align with what you really want from the year ahead. I know it can be alluring to dash into action the moment the calendar page flips over.
Trust me. A slow start is much more effective.
You’ve probably read about how New Year Resolutions fail, and why they fail. You’ve seen for yourself what happens every January (with exception this year) in gyms. Maybe you’ve been one of those people, and now resolutions feel like a trap to make you feel bad.
It’s not your fault. You know this, right?
The truth is, you CAN change. It is possible to change your habits, your beliefs, your whole life. You can be celebrating next year feeling proud and grateful for the ways you lovingly chose a new direction.
It will take action, yes.
Persistent, repeated action.
And, you have to want it.
And feel why it matters.
If you already know the January knee-jerk doesn’t work, you have nothing to lose. Let yourself take this month as a nice, wide turn. Give yourself a slow, deliberate arrival to 2021.
How do you want this year to feel?
Do you have a sense of who you are becoming?
I know you are capable of beautiful things. I know your heart has the answers that sometimes can only speak in a whisper. What if, this month, you allowed yourself to quiet down enough to hear them?
That alone could make a world of difference for your December 2021 – which puts you, and your slow wide turn into January, ahead of the game.