You Are Never Trapped by Today's Decisions!

I have a decision to make and it is stressing me out. I’d like to share the process with you all so that you can hopefully learn from it.

I want to continue being on the dance team at my dance studio. I want to exercise, to learn multiple dances, to be a part of a group, and to perform. Dance makes me feel good and helps keep me fit.

I don’t want to have dance practice at the time it is scheduled every week. After a long stressful week, I need that time to relax, get extra sleep and recharge. I need to NOT HAVE A SCHEDULE OR TO-DO LIST HANGING OVER ME. That’s how I relieve stress – by NOT having something I have to do at an inconvenient time that affects everything else I do and interferes with the time I need to take care of myself. Not to mention it is going to be a pain in the butt getting there. I also want to make sure I don’t lock myself into never branching out and doing other things on that day. I NEED to meet new people. I NEED to get out there and do more things. I love the people at dance, but they are too busy and too far away to be day-to-day really intimate friends of mine. I really want friends where if I wanted to I could hang out with them right after work, or get lunch with them, or whatever normal people with friends do. I’ve always wanted that and I’m doing nothing about it right now. The weekend is the perfect time to branch out and do that – and here I am signing it away never to be used for that purpose. My schedule would be taken up by it and everything required pre- and post-class. It would take multiple hours to clean up and dry my hair and everything, and I’d feel rushed and stressed if I tried to do something afterwards. And I don’t want to “party”. I don’t want to do late-night stuff. That’s not the type of fun or mingling I want to do. Even if I wanted to, I don’t really have the energy to be out late anymore.

So how do I make peace with a decision here? I don’t want to say yes and then resent it; I don’t want to say no and then feel like I’m missing out and get back into a funk of no activity.

Basically I need to say YES but I need to make peace with that decision.

Okay, so I’ve acknowledged the good and the bad here. Let’s see how I can resolve this.

I will do dance team. However, I will not let that stop me from going to events on the weekend if they come up. Rarely have there been many events that I wanted to join. I will not let dance guilt-trip me out of living my life. It won’t be that often that I have to miss practice. But I OWE it to myself to get out there and do other things, too. I will take it day by day. I may have to make some tough choices, but I will do those on a case-by-case basis, not an overarching decision based on a “What if?” It will be okay. If I’m really stressed out one day, I can miss practice. I have permission to take care of myself. I’m not saying I’d do it every week, I’m just telling myself that it is an OPTION so that I don’t stress out about feeling trapped and obligated. If I need it, that option is there. I am not locking myself away. Let’s just take it day by day, week by week. It will be okay. It’s not even starting back up right away, anyway. It will be fine. I take responsibilities way too seriously and I take the fun out of my fun activities by turning them into obligations. I don’t need to do that. I am not trapped. I am free. Enjoy it.

See, this is one of those cases where different people need different advice. I feel like I can hear some readers saying, “You’ve made a commitment, what do you mean you don’t have to go every week??” But that’s the thing. Some people who are flaky need to have the severity of their commitments engrained into them. They need to hear, “You made a COMMITMENT. You HAVE to go. That’s that!” However, I was raised that way to the point where I get all stressed out and think it is the end of the world if I don’t do it, and I feel guilty, and I feel trapped, and I get all bent out of shape. So it’s not that I’m not going to go every week, it’s just that I have to allow myself the OPTION of not going. The FREEDOM to not go if I have a good reason. The OPTION alone will help me to calm down and probably have fewer issues and reasons to not go. If Friday nights I start getting all stressed out that I HAVE to go to bed early and I HAVE to go dance in the morning, I may likely stress myself out to the point where I can’t sleep and I then decide to not go. I’ll CREATE MORE absences. In fact, that happened a couple times last season. By giving myself PERMISSION to miss practice, I take away the stress. I bring back the joy. So my reasons for missing practice will be good ones, not just every week that I get stressed out about having to go to dance in the morning.

I know, most people tell me this is all a bunch of crap. And that’s fine if you feel that way. But this is a very real concern for me, and I have to take it seriously. It affects my health. A lot. It is part of the reason I’m even on this journey in the first place. Things bother me too much and it affects my health and everything else. But with all these tools that I’m learning, by opening myself up to viewing life in a different way and by removing judgment and bringing in Love and Light, I’m able to make these steps and heal myself. Bit by bit. I have come a LONG way. I am handling stress SO much better. And that’s exactly what I want to share with you all.

I feel incredibly vulnerable doing this. I share a lot in this blog, and a lot of the voices in my head are telling me I shouldn’t. A lot of the voices in my head are telling me this will turn around and bite me in the future. But I think this is important. It’s important to see a journey like this first-hand. That’s why I think this blog is different from any others that I have seen – you get to see in real-time, almost day-by-day the changes that are taking place. You get to see the tiny, tiny progressions that end up getting from Point A to Point B. You get to see that ANYONE can do it if you just open yourself up, take the first step and believe in yourself. You see that all the changes don’t happen overnight, and you see how the changes fit into day-to-day life. You see first-hand how every experience is an opportunity for growth if you choose for it to be. I feel like this blog is very powerful, and hopefully anyone who reads it sees it in this way. That’s what it was intended for. To see a person with real struggles and real breakthroughs with personal growth. To know that YOU CAN DO IT. To see yourself in these posts. To see how I’ve taken lessons from books and other blogs and I’ve applied it to my own unique circumstances.

Anyways, the lesson here is to not stress yourself out unnecessarily. Take things one step at a time and give yourself permission to make adjustments as necessary. As long as you know the importance of your obligations, you can trust yourself to only make adjustments when they are really important. Trust yourself!