Weighted scales

Luck

/lʌk/

noun

success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.

Last year was a very hard year for me. Yes, it was full of laughter, opportunities, and memories I'll never forget. But it was a year of shedding old scabbed parts of me off so I could grow into the person I am today.

People saw how the scars were wearing me down. So they tried to break me out of the calcified years of bad habits.

But it was hard to let go of who I was because I had lived with her my whole life. I wasn't completely happy with her, but I loved her.

So anytime someone told me I had to let her go, I felt attacked.

Forced to wake up at 6 am to bike across the island, forced to interrupt my evenings at 7 pm to do an hour of jiu-jitsu, forced to pay bills, forced to clean, forced to write a blog.

I hated it all because I wanted to stay still.

I didn't want to move.

But eventually, I couldn't move. Telling myself I was the victim and that everyone was trying to hurt me allowed my skin to engulf me in its grasp. It crippled and wore me thin until I was nothing but calluses.

So when people told me I gained weight, and that I needed to lose weight, I took it as “oh my god I’m fat” and I got mad at myself for letting my weight get out of hand.

Ironically enough, I turned to food to handle this stress, which just drove me deeper into a pit of self-pity and hatred.

Instead of letting their words push me forward, I laid beneath them and let them crush me.

But after MANY shed tears and long conversations, I learned that it was really hard to hear people talk about my insecurities so openly. I knew they wanted the best for me, but I only absorbed the words, and not the intention behind them.

I had to learn on my own time that sometimes in order for new things to grow, you have to let old things go.

I did my best to let go of the person I was in order to become the person I have the potential to be.

Once I had done that, I realized how lucky I was to have these people. To help me see the pain I had become numb to.

With me kicking and screaming, I was held down and had my calloused skin scraped off. They took off just enough so I could see the mountain of habit piled up beside me. Once I became aware of it, they handed me the shaver and I scraped the rest of myself.

Learning to love and let go of the old me closed an old door and opened a new one.

As I stepped through that new door, everything was the same. But I felt different. I was grateful for everything and everyone around me. I realized how lucky I truly am. How everything flows around me in a perfect symphony, exposing me to things that are meant to be, for me.

If you had asked me if I was lucky last year, I would have said "no." Because I didn't know how to appreciate all that was given to me. Simply because it was all given to me.

With the luck I've had, not everything is going to plan.

But as I weigh the scales of my life, the negative I scraped away has allowed me to see that the good outweighs the bad, and that it always has.