Ohhh, balance… the crazy thing about you is, a life spent obsessing about you is so… out of balance. Welcome to my life! After recovering from an eating disorder this was the goal. Everywhere I went, everything I thought, what my being strived for was balance, balance, and more balance.
The only problem was it felt impossible- leaving me feeling like a failure day in, and day out. It was ridiculous… here I am finally in a good mental state and got my ‘ish’ under control, and I am now the ‘Balance Police’ giving myself violations left and right. I was a mess and filled with so much failure, guilt, and shame. It’s not suppose to be like this…
Then one day it clicked. First of all, I had not been striving for balance; I was striving for perfection- hello impossible much? I am as close to perfection as pretty much anyone else, so I was only able to live this out for what maybe four days a year? Those are pretty sucky stats and do not work for this psycho-control girl.
So, I went back to the drawing board and recreated everything I thought to be true. I am a visual person and literally have diagrams for everything…like in a weird way, its ok to judge. They are written down and floating around in my head on a daily basis, like 10 of them. It’s how I break down everything and make sense of this crazy world.
So below you will find the first diagram. Here is what I thought to be true. ‘Starvation’ is on one end and ‘binging’ is on the other side. Most of us don’t want to live on either one of those ends, so we strive for the middle- AKA balance. The only problem is, we rarely successfully live this out.
Queue second diagram- so my master genius mind thought, “Huh, what if we bring out the parameters of balance a little bit and give some wiggle room?” What a balanced idea! (See what I did there 😉 ) This alleviates those feelings of guilt and shame and keeps us from bouncing back and fourth between the two- score!
I seriously live my life this way now and am such a better wife, sister, daughter, friend, dog mom, fill in the blank because of it. Talk about an anxiety reliever. They are super thankful, too! Hi mom!
So, when it came to creating the name of my business, I wanted to use the very word that left me feeling like not enough, to become the very source that gave me momentum to catapult me into a better life in every sense.
The Balance Culture is about creating a place where people can come from any stage in their wellness journey and feel like they have a platform. It gets crazier… balance for me looks completely different from balance for another person, gasp!
So wherever you are at in this journey, I encourage you to widen your parameters of balance and cut yourself some slack because again we only have one life, lets think about greater things!
P.S. you can replace “starving” and “binging” with whatever your “thing” might be and the same could be true.
