In our society we have normalized the idea of hustle and grind culture, where people brag about how little sleep they get and talk about how hard they work. While there is genuinely a segment of the population who has no choice but to work 80+ hours a week just to make ends meet, working a ton has become this thing we idolize. We see people who followed this mindset and were able to reach their goals and we think that is the model we should be following. Personally, travel has become a much-needed part of my time off. As someone who works from home and owns their own business, being at home makes it far too easy to compromise and allow myself to work “just a little bit”. That means I am not getting the full effect of taking time off and I am not sufficiently recharged. So, I will travel. It does not have to be far and it to this point has all been domestic trips more or less. The importance is getting away and breaking away from my routine and my schedule I normally adhere to.

As a starting point, there is often a point that we have to agree upon before we move forward. That point is that every child is deserving of unconditional love and acceptance.

In honor of the anniversary of me becoming a parent for the first time, I wanted to explore a bit about what parenting looks like, and the ways I see choices as a parent impact kids. Often, the people I work with will grapple with having parents who loved them and provided for them, and who missed the mark in some way shape or form. As a parent, it is damn hard to know if what you are doing is right because there is no handbook, and it isn’t like kids can fill out a satisfaction survey to give you feedback on what you do great and where you can improve. Hell, for all they know, you DO have a handbook and are following it precisely. They have no frame of reference for you and your performance. So, you have to try and cobble together what parenting looks like from your own lived experience, your friends, your family, blog posts, books and tv shows as well as probably 15 other sources that will likely make you feel more like a failure than a success. Unless you are looking at a terrible parent, you will likely often struggle with feeling inadequate.

Recently I have had Killswitch Engage’s album “As Daylight Dies” album playing which has always been one that I loved. There is a track called “Unbroken” on that album which has the lines:

“Through adversity, there is redemption. With passion, fighting. I am, unbroken.” As well as; “The absence of fear is the renewal of our self.”

Following years in an abusive relationship I have gotten to a place where there is some level of appreciation of what I went through. I would never want to go through it again nor would I want someone else to endure it, but for me it was truly a transformative experience.

I wrote previously about the impact of imagery on all of us when it comes to actors and magazine covers and how it creates these impossible standards that most of us are simply incapable of reaching. The problem with this is that often companies and publications will market these images to us in a way that makes them seem attainable if we work hard enough, dedicate ourselves seriously enough, or take the right supplement or vitamin. Hell, we often see our action hero leads as almost an every-man at the start of a film, and then we see them rise to become a hero. This subtly tells us that even a guy who works a job that takes up most of his day and energy, and who raises his kids can have this ultra-impressive physique with rippling abs and bulging biceps even though he eats trash. Magazines and ads for fitness equipment tell us all we need is 20 minutes a day a few times a week to follow this training protocol. But all these conveniently leave out all the factors that go into having this exact physical appearance.

For many of us the journey started with simply not liking our body and how it looked, and the goal was to get our outward appearance more in line with what we thought we should look like. For some people, that goal was “I need to gain mass and size” and for others it was “I need to really lean out and both build more muscle but also show more muscle”. The boards all were united in being unhappy with our individual appearance, and wanting to change it, and being willing to make significant alterations to our daily lives to get there.

The fact is that when we are true to ourselves, and when we stay within what makes us uniquely ourselves, we can find our audience. It may take a good bit of patience because finding our audience can take time, especially if we are starting from zero. That is not to say that we may not have a stroke of luck, but we cannot bet on luck, only ourselves and who we really are.

This is where love becomes something that is painful and where sadly as adults it may take us years to really figure out if we made the right choice. Even following the end of an abusive relationship, where we have been harmed over and over, we may question why we were not enough, or if we had worked a little harder, maybe they would have loved us more. But in the end, when it comes to romantic love, the hardest part is losing the person we loved. Whether we genuinely lose them, or whether we lose our connection to them, loss is loss, and it hurts like hell.