The KNOWing

 

Hello Invisible Audience,

 

My therapist said something to me that stuck with me during one of our recent sessions. I’m paraphrasing, but basically she said,

 

“All that anyone else ever says—your doctors, your chiropractor, your friends, me—is only their opinion. It’s your job to choose whether or not to use it, or even take it in, for that matter.”

 

This is not new. The last post I wrote to you was basically the same thing. Hell, if you’ve been following me for a while now, you know that I struggle with this TO THE N^th DEGREE. But when she said it, it made me realize something that I never had before.

 

I thought I had to find someone to validate how I felt before I could let myself feel it.

 

Do you ever have one of those moments, Invisible Audience, where you feel like you’ve logically known something for a long time, but suddenly it feels like a huge vault door twists itself through its combination and suddenly unlocks? Like maybe you knew something before, but now you KNOW it with all the cells in your body, not just your puny little mind?

 

Well, that’s what happened.

 

I have always known that I was supposed to be able to take what I like and leave the rest. What I never realized was that I would just pivot from one person to the next. If someone’s opinion of the situation wasn’t true for me, I would look somewhere else to find someone else to hold onto who did agree with me. I never stopped and worked on figuring out if I KNEW the thing for myself.

 

There was a second part of the discussion with my therapist that I think made all the difference, Invisible Audience, It’s a larger theme, too; one she and I talk about a lot but is really new to me.

 

When I say I KNOW something, I don’t mean that I am 100 percent sure. I mean that I KNOW, in my bones, that I am going to do the best that I can with what I have. I do not have to be 100 percent sure that I KNOW in order to make a decision that’s best for me. All I have to KNOW is that I am doing the best that I can with what I have. I am ultimately the one in charge of my life, and sometimes my choices are going to be the ones I make between a rock and a hard place.

 

I have never differentiated it that way before, Invisible Audience. I never realized that I needed to separate myself out from others and not just borrow someone else’s support of my decision. To borrow their belief that I am making the right choice. That I could actually just live in the gray space and say, “Here’s all the information I have. Here’s how all of this makes me feel. Here’s what I’m going to decide to do. Here’s my confidence that I’m doing the best I can, and if I need to make a change later, I’m allowed to do that.”

 

This feels HUGE.

 

I still don’t know what’s coming next, but it’s become clear that I’m the one who needs to decide. It may not be what I ultimately need. It may be that I need something else. But I don’t need to have it all figured out. I just need to KNOW that I’m doing the best I can with the information that I have.

 

Love and KNOWing kisses,

Morgan

 

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