I’ve spent the last few years thinking about how I don’t show up for myself, how I don’t make myself a priority. I always choose me last. As if I am not worthy of being put first. 

No one has told me I am not deserving of being a priority but I have placed myself in that position. As a recovering people pleaser, it is imperative that I set boundaries on how I make myself available to others in comparison to myself. But how to establish that boundary is where my problem lies. 

I always feel like I am betraying myself. 

I make promises to myself and fail to meet them. Promises I can very well keep, but I decide it’s too hard and I don’t need to be hard on myself. But I certainly do need to be hard on myself. Not in a demeaning way. But in a way, where I can hold myself accountable. 

I always say, it is absolutely nothing for me to wake up at 5:00AM to pick a friend up from the airport, but to wake-up at 5:00AM to work on myself, goals, and dreams, forget about it. I always think that time awaits me. I live like time is not passing by. I live like I will eventually get to me after I have attended everything and everyone else first. I live like I control time.

What is about hating something and not being able to change it. Is it that you don’t hate it enough or it has become a comfort zone? A familiarity that says, the devil you know is better than the angel you don’t know? 

Sometimes I look at my life, and I miss the girl that hustled for her dreams. I miss the girl that was disciplined and put her words to action. I miss the girl who didn’t make lame excuses to justify her laziness. 

It is painful knowing the problem, knowing the solution, and not doing anything about it.

The Problem: I am not taking my life, goals, and dreams seriously.

The Solution: love and care about yourself more. Know what you want. Know Whose you are. Take your vitamins. Be brave. Create. Write. 

I hate for you to read this and the take away be that, I want to be selfish. I know people claim that being selfish is important to getting anything done for yourself, but I am not of that thought. I think I can leave a selfless, service forward life and still take care of myself, and look out for myself. It is not an “or,” I want to live in the “and.” I can be this AND that. 

I have come to realize how tomorrow is not promised. So I need to do things now, build the habits now. My desire, when I am dead, is that my children will know that I was there for them and myself. That I died happy. I want to be at peace with death because I lived a life that I loved, and now I am okay to leave it behind. I don’t want to live scared that if I died today, I would not have accomplished anything.