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If I May

May I detach from that that does not serve me.

May I detach from he who does not serve me.

May I be bold in my endeavors and smile as I rise with bloody lips, palms and knees when I fall.

May I spit blood in the face of all the bullshit sent to break me.

                Let the blood be the revelation that I bend, buckle, and shatter only to come back better like Kintsugi.

May I leave my mark.

May my words, spoken or written, leave an imprint like that of colliding tectonic plates.

                May they shake your world.

May love continue to spill from my eyes into the heart of every man, woman and child I experience.

May I continue to push against my fears to breakthrough and reach you.

May I continue to be great, authentically.

Self Care Everyday Tee

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Trust the Process

For a while, “trust the process” was my motto. I was saying it for every situation as a means of reminding myself that God’s plan is perfect and that everything will work out in due time. I had been repeating the phrase during meditation, in the shower, as I exhaled in a difficult yoga pose-all that. I felt so strongly about the phrase that I was telling other people to keep calm and trust the process, too. It all seemed so simple and so soothing until one day when it wasn’t.

I don’t remember the exact situation, I just remember how it made me feel. I remember the bitter taste in my mouth, the tears that filled my eyes, the heat that rushed over my body, and the uncontrollable urge to lash out and let loose on the first person I saw. Luckily, nobody was there. It’s no secret that I have trouble expressing and managing my emotions, it’s one of the many things that I’m unpacking and working through right now, but on this day my emotions seemed like a burden I didn’t want to carry. I remember sitting on my yoga mat in front of my crystals and just crying. Normally, this is when I would take deep breaths and repeat “trust the process” until I calmed down but that wasn’t an option.

I went from feeling everything to feeling nothing, numb with confusion. Trust the process…what process?! I sat there on my mat with Bob Marley on repeat wondering what my granddaddy would do. What about grandma? What about Grip? Bob Marley? Jesus? Anybody?! How would anybody else climb out of this depressive state? I couldn’t come up with anything, which just made me more frustrated. I cried hard until my head ached and I got up, showered and went to work like nothing had even happened.

Fast forward a few weeks to when I was having a conversation with one of the most amazing people in my life and everything clicked: you don’t just trust the process, you have to learn to trust the process. Trusting the process is a process in itself! It’s not always pretty and it doesn’t always make sense because sometimes it isn’t what you expect or think you need it to be. I remember hanging up the phone and going straight to the shower. I stood under the hot water thinking about why I quit “trusting the process”. Why the sudden shift? After much deliberation and critical self-talk, I realized that I put too much emphasis on the idea of trusting the process and not enough emphasis on trusting God and myself.

Reflection helped me realize that in every situation where I thought things were at their worst and there was no way out, something beautiful happened. I had to get through the storm to enjoy the rainbow and that’s how my life has always been. The storm was God giving me the strength I needed to pull through because He has an amazing life for me, but I’ll have to work for it. I had forgotten that, though. I was screaming “trust the process” and not using any of the skills or knowledge I had been blessed with.

When you want something, you must work for it. All those cliché quotes about nothing worth having being easy to attain are true. Are you trusting the idea of trusting the process or are you truly trusting God and yourself? What does it look like for you to trust the process? Take some time to really think about it, because when things get hard and you want to quit or don’t understand why it all has to be so hard, you’ll need to circle back to your answers. On the road to be great, you are an ever-evolving artist and your life is your artistic expression. Open your mind and your heart to growth and trust that along the way, you’ll learn all that you need to get to where you want to be.

Trust the process. Trust God. Trust yourself.

Quiet Moment

Whether you give up on all your goals or pursue them with everything you have, the world around you keeps going. It seems like everyone is doing everything everywhere. It seems like everywhere I turn someone is getting married, having children, or reaching their career goals. It’s so easy to get lost in what everyone else is doing because it looks so…nice. In March, I fell off track. I wasn’t getting the results that I wanted from exercise, writing or anything else so I dropped everything. I just completely stopped.

After a mediocre work day, I was scrolling through Instagram when my friend’s post came up. The photo and caption are both so simple, but they hit so hard. Though his post focused more on perseverance and growth, it made me consider the importance of being quiet. I’m a talker. I hate small talk because I’m awkward, but I love to talk. Regardless of whether it’s about stars, food, or cracks in the concrete, I love to talk. When I’m having a hard time with certain things I prefer to talk through them regardless of whether I’m talking to someone else or seeking expert advice from myself, I talk. The day I saw that photo I received a rejection email from a job I’d recently interviewed for. I wanted to cry and talk but I was at work so I opted out of the convo and crying session. Instead, I blinked a billion times and turned up my “Dreamville” playlist until I couldn’t hear myself think about the sting of another rejection. In that moment with J. Cole’s Friday Night Lights mixtape intro playing in my ears, I was quiet. Aside from the few words coming through my earbuds, my mind was completely quiet for about thirty seconds. It was like I’d pressed a reset button and was allowing myself to process more than just that moment.

That thirty seconds and this photo made me realize how powerful silence can be. It helped me bring my focus back to what truly matters to me and not what looks good on other people. The fact is, I needed to be honest with myself. What was I doing to make me see the results of my exercise? (Side note: I was overeating during meals and rewarding myself with snack cakes/candy bars when I’d complete a mediocre workout so there’s that…) Why was I being so critical of everything I wrote, instead of enjoying the therapeutic feeling of clearing my mind of things that I couldn’t talk about? What made me ready for the job that I wanted so bad? Did I even truly want the job or did I just want the job because of how it would look? If it wasn’t for silence, I would probably still be pouting over the fact that things aren’t going the way that I expected them to go.

I’m finally out of that slump! The first step was honesty; the second step was action. Don’t make the action more difficult than it has to be by telling yourself that you can’t do it or focusing on your previous failures. When it came time for me to act, I allowed all types of negative thoughts to keep me from doing what I knew I needed to do for months! Ultimately, I learned that I had to take a moment to be quiet every once in a while. In my quiet moment, I brag to myself about my accomplishments, forgive myself for the mistakes that I’ve made that I can’t seem to let go of, write down two things that I’m grateful for, and take a final moment to breathe because the best is yet to come.

“Real, sustainable change doesn’t happen in a moment. It’s a process.”

-John C. Maxwell,  Today Matters