Relish 12: Your Mountain & New Beginnings

I started writing today as if I was writing two separate posts, but quickly realized these two things go together. For me, they are are one and the same which is why I have combined them into one.

Relish12 Day One: Your Mountain
We all face challenges during the year; some we meet, some we don’t. What was your mountain to climb this year? Did you reach the top?

Relish12 Day Nine: New Beginnings…
The only constant in this life is change. That’s it. Change can come in all forms; some brilliant, some downright painful. We grow each and every time we navigate change, exposing more strength, wisdom, and courage the deeper we let it do it’s work within us. Some change comes as an ending, some as a fresh start to something totally different. What was one new thing that started for you this year? What was one new beginning in your life?

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I didn't really start the year off with any "goals" in mind or anything I wanted to "work on". I have a huge fear of commitment thus am not big of making New Year Resolutions (although I did make a list of suggestions for myself this year). Besides, coming into 2012 I was pretty happy with where things were  at with my life and where things were going.  Why change it if it's not broken, right?

But as they do, things changed.

Through a series of life events, stumbling across a number of amazing bloggers and their strength and words (knowing, even if you've never met them, that someone somewhere is feeling or has felt the same way as you are feeling can be a powerful force), something inside of me started churning. I began to realize something anything needed to give. Because if I was really being honest with myself, I was miserable. I didn't like the person I had become. Something needed to change or I would always feel like I was waiting for the "other shoe to drop". I would continue to carry this intense sense of unease around with me everywhere I went and with everything I did. I had grown so accustom to it being there, to feeling that heavy weight with me all the time, I started to forget about it. Forget that it was there. Forget that it didn't need to be there and coming to that realization scared me.

I started to really pay attention to how I reacted (or didn't react) to things going on around me. How I dealt with friends, family, work, relationships, etc. I started to really pay attention to the life I was living and working towards living the life I wanted to live. I began working on figuring out why and what it was that kept me from moving forward.

I've always jokingly said I was my own worst enemy and the more I looked at things from a fresh perspective, the more I began to realize that it wasn't a joke and that this immense wall of "protection" I had thrown up around myself was doing anything but protecting me. It was in fact doing just the opposite. What I thought had been put in place to keep out the "bad", the things I couldn't control, was in fact keeping out everything.

It is easier to simply step aside than to take a step forward. It is easier to simply act like it doesn't exist than having to admit that you are afraid.

But easy isn't always better and making a conscious decision to start facing the mountain fears head on has, for a lack of a better term been excruciating. I've started peeling away layers I've built to hide demons from the past. I have listened to my instincts and distanced myself and/or ended relationships with friends that didn't serve me in a positive way. I started a new journey of self-acceptance and truth that others have found difficult to understand and accept, but know that even at what seems to be an age where I should have figured "it" out already, that it's not about when you started, but that you did start.