Get a Life!

No, that's not necessarily directed at you, personally.  Actually, I directed this statement to myself a few months ago.

Yes, my "shadow days" are over....but that doesn't mean that life doesn't suck sometimes. It does.

Over these past few years, my resolve and determination have been tested, my relationship has been tested, my sanity has been tested. And my vision of the life I want to have has been tested. It has altered so much that sometimes I don't recognize myself in it.

Something had to change.  So I started working with a life coach. Now, now, don't make fun - hear me out. Because it's the best thing I've done for myself in a long time, and, if you want, you can do it too. Our email address is mylifewithpie@gmail.com, in case you want it. After I tell you all about coaching....you just might.

My coach is also a mother of a child at the day care that Anna attends. We were chatting about a year ago at a weekend event when she described her career to me. I was instantly interested, but didn't really know exactly what coaching would entail and besides, I was already in therapy. As you may know, I'm no stranger to that!

But lately I had been rethinking my therapy. I wasn't really getting as much out of it as I wanted to be. And it's really expensive. Now that I'm on happy pills, the issues for which I sought therapy have changed somewhat. I realized that what I need now isn't to work on my anxiety and depression, as those are pretty well controlled these days.

Instead, what I needed was really to get a life.

I thought about this a lot a couple of months ago. I've been going through a lot of stress in recent years, and especially in recent months. One day, I just stood in my living room and thought, wow, my life sucks. My stress and occasional discontent have negatively impacted my family, my relationship with my partner, my sense of purpose in life, my level of patience with Anna, my health, you name it - it's been affected.

All of this has changed my ideas about who I am and what my goals in life may be.  When you're a parent, it's easy to lose yourself. That has happened to me. My identity as Anna's parent is the joy of my life, the most important thing in the whole world to me. But I do need to remember who I am aside from that. I know who I am and I love who I am as "Mama T" - but who is this mysterious Courtney?  I realized that I didn't really know anymore.

As I thought about what I didn't like about my life, I flashed back to that conversation about life coaching. And I immediately knew things needed to change. Because there's a lot that I do like about my life. And why can't it all be like that? Can't the good swallow the bad, instead of the other way around? Doesn't my family deserve the best me I can be? Don't I deserve happiness?

ABSOLUTELY.

So I called my now-coach and set up an initial meeting. We had coffee at Starbucks and I came away from our meeting feeling better and more positive than I had in a long time. My father was always our family's optimist and encourager when I was younger. And I inherited those personality traits. I have always been an optimist and felt a sense of the positive in almost everything. I have, without even thinking, naturally tried to play the role of encourager in my own family.

Which left me wondering, where the hell did that person go?

Please tune in tomorrow to find out more!