photo by Carey Bailey
You are not who you were yesterday,
You are not who you will be tomorrow.
You’re in the middle of the beautiful process of becoming.
We fight that as women, don’t we? We tell ourselves we have to be it all, do it all, know it all now. We deny ourselves permission to learn. And when we can’t learn, we can’t grow.
I thought about this recently as I stood in the curtain section of TJ Maxx saying these words over and over to myself: You’re learning to decorate your house. You’re learning to decorate your house.
Doesn’t that sound silly? But it was much better than what I said over and over last time: You can’t decorate your house. What’s the matter with you?
I thought, somehow, that being born a woman should automatically give me the ability to know if the sheer or heavy curtains would look better, which color they should be, and how every shade of light would look coming through them. And when I didn’t, I felt like a failure. I’ve had similar experiences in the photo frame aisle of target, in the bedding section of a department store, in the cutest little home decor shop you’ve ever seen.
I share this example because it’s amazing how small a crack shame needs to slip through in our lives. When did we decide to judge ourselves on everything from our ability to pick curtains to how good a parent we are compared to the mom next to us and what can we do about it?
