Birthdays & Life Seasons

*Originally written on December 27, 2019 at the beginning of my Dazzling 37th Year Journey*

So my birthday just passed. I don’t start with this intending to solicit belated birthday wishes or gifts (though both are welcome 🤣), I say this because when my birthday approaches I find myself taking stock of my years lived, like I assume a lot of people do. Unlike some women though, I don’t care who knows my age, each day I have lived has added value & experience, carefully crafting me into the person God made me to be. Ten days before Christmas this year I turned 37. Before I go forward though, let’s go back…

30 didn’t scare me. I arrived at my 30th birthday in good spirits with my life.

After a different start to my 20’s than I had anticipated for myself as a child, I had pleasantly managed to end up closing out my 20’s in a far more whole & happy version of myself than I would have guessed possible. Especially with the trajectory I had set myself on entering life as an adult.

God’s grace can be a beautiful surprise & much needed blessing for sure. When I turned the page in my life volumes and entered my 30’s, I was in, what I thought to be, a great place.

– My love story was in the best place it had ever been, and continually growing & strengthening.

-Though finances always made for unexpected challenges, we were getting by better and God was providing where we came up short.

-My family was growing, thriving & happy, plus we had navigated into being outnumbered by 3 daughters while still surviving. We were embracing the chaos & joy of it with God in our family’s driver seat.

-I was making a better effort, for the 1st real time since becoming a mother, to make time for me & my spiritual journey too.

All in all entering my 30’s felt like the best & brightest new page to turn. It was the easiest new volume to start in my life thus far, and I did so excited, focused on a new direction, exploring my goals & searching for my personal purpose again. I wasn’t just drowning as a mother & wife, by God’s grace, I was actually swimming.

Now the writer in me types this and immediately feels a little silly for not seeing it coming. The plot always twists when the story seems like it hits a happy place before the story is actually over. If my life were a novel series and we were in the middle of the sequel to my origination story, book #2 per say, it would be at the very moment that the lead character felt they had achieved success & contentment in life when the music would change and the plot would thicken. The villain would enter (or re-enter as it may be) to try to mess things up one more time. Evil never truly gives up after all and my story isn’t over yet.

Anyways. I feel like I should have expected it. I feel like I should have seen it coming and been better at preparing an action plan to prevent it, but I didn’t. Just as soon as I was getting a little comfortable in the “Season of Bliss”, tragedy struck, and then it struck again, too soon. I started to stumble as the ground around me started to feel more unstable every single minute. We walked through loss after loss, pain, grief, we just outright hurt. There were blessings mixed in absolutely, but the blows just didn’t stop coming, for 3 years, we just took hit after hit from life… each one feeling more devastating as the pain piled up.

Now I wasn’t completely foolish in my “Season of Bliss” and had made intentional choices, but even though I had equipped myself with tools to prevent complete annihilation of self when things got hard again, slowly, one by one these tools started to break, disappear or simply not do the trick anymore. During these three years, as things got harder, I got weak, then things continued to get hard. New losses. New trials. It just kept coming. By the time I reached the halfway point in this decade of thirty, I was completely broken again. I knew this.

-I knew I was failing myself & my family.

-I knew I was failing in maintaining myself.

-I knew I was failing in my faith & my purpose.

I knew I was failing God too, BUT then I remembered I was exactly where He wanted me, because He put me here and He doesn’t measure my success like I do.

-I knew everything that was still in my life was there because He put it there.

-I knew those that we lost, went as part of His plan, as painful as some of the losses were, it was still His plan.

-I knew that even though I was broken, He was whole.

-I knew even though I was weak, He was strong enough to carry us all.

-I knew that when I got paralyzed needing the details, He knew the details and was always ready for a prayer conference where He would share what I needed, not what I wanted.

-I knew that though things had been hard, I had never once doubted that He was good or stopped clinging to His promises.

This reminded me of His unending love, and the last one alone, reminded me that I was still growing even in the pain, because a younger me turned away from Him when life got hard, and Satan kept me away for much of my teens & twenties before I found my way back to my Savior. This 35 year old me, may have cried, screamed, and been angry with Him, but I turned it all to Him instead of turning away.

And that my Dazzling Dolls is a Spiritual Progress… A Success…

It was at that point when I realized that even though I had entered my 30’s ready to go and excited about life, I needed to do a better job taking care of the basics for me. You see at my lowest points in the daily grind, I let go of me, like so many people, especially women. The better job I do with the basics of self care, the more equipped I am to battle the enemy. The enemy goes for the weakest spots in us. My weakest spot is my brain, my mental illness, my head injury trauma, my life traumas & my prewired by God personality traits that all combined make me somewhat easily susceptible to attacks if I am not proactive. Like VERY proactive. Sadly so much of this I didn’t understand as I entered my 30’s bright eyed & bushy tailed.

I went from being a daughter to raising a daughter and that had not left me much time to figure out what worked for just little old me. I didn’t really know who I was, I didn’t really know what I wanted and I had never really realized I needed to figure that out, before I was responsible for another life.

I decided that the halfway point of my 30’s was as good a time as any to begin really devoting time to getting to know me. I had been a daughter, I had become a mother and wife, I had been a sister, I had been a friend to others countless times, but I had never just been me. Every season of my life up to that point I had been what other people needed me to be & I had never prioritized myself before any of these titles.

For the last 2 years I have been making a concerted effort to prioritize myself first, for the benefit of myself and my family. I began by stripping away the titles and labels the world has placed on me. I may be all those titles, but before I was any of them I was the baby God knit me to be, and I had no real idea who that was or what He may have knit me together to become.

I am happy to say that after almost 2 years of dedicated focus & devoted energy spent studying me, I am finally beginning to feel a little bit confident in who I am again, behind all the titles. At my core. In my heart & with an optimistic spirit. I am beginning to understand my talents, my skills, my hobbies, my personality & my purpose beyond daughter, wife, and mother. I still proudly carry all of those titles but now I know that I deserve to wear those titles, those titles don’t wear me.

As I soar into my “Power Year” or my Dazzling Power Year as I am calling it, I am beyond excited to see what God has on the horizon for me & my family! The time is now! His plan is piece by piece being revealed and I am devoted to walk in faith, without fear, owning my story, for HIS glory!

Stay Strong in your Faith my Dazzling Dolls!

~Rebecca

Consistency a 2020 Intention

As I started this year, God had laid a single word on my heart. Consistency. I had closed 2019 leaving behind a long, painful season of living, growing, fighting & surviving; feeling for the first time fully aware of how very little I prioritized my Self-Care & wellbeing. With a new philosophy about scrapping New Year’s Resolutions and instead replacing them with a single word New Year Intention, I headed in to the New Year with my focus fully on this word.

Through the prayer journey I took to recieve this word as my 2020 Intention, I was focused on that word in one specific area of life, my fitness. In 2019 God had begun a fitness mission/journey in my life to help me get healthy & active again. I was excited and well meaning but by spring of 2019 I was losing consistency in that journey. As I lost consistency, I also noticed I lost some of my positive progress, more than I had even realized. I had fallen back into my typical life patterns of putting myself & my needs on the back burner of life completely by fall, and by the end of the year, I was desperately trying to hide how desperate I was again.

See, for the first 30 years of my life I was sorry, always, & I put myself last. I did this, not even knowing it was happening, simply trying to be kind, gracious, polite, concerned for the comfort & happiness of those around me. I tried not to be an overreacting or easily offended person. Never wanting to be someone accused of exaggerating or offending others. In general, my overthinking nature was ALWAYS processing life through a filter of everyone else first. Though trying to constantly please, I was not always agreeable, and when set off, I’ve always been a firecracker, but I hated the drastic shifts in my mood, that increased. The older I got the harder it became to be a healthy me, while putting everyone else’s needs & comfort first.
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6 years ago I stopped doing this, not entirely, not all at once, and NOT always graciously, but I was entering a season of literal survival. One where I had to literally beg daily for the desire to still live, where I had zero value in my own eyes. One where I was alone entirely, but still in a busy world of people always around me. Without God teaching me my deeds & concern for others didn’t fill my most basic survival needs, and NOBODY else was worrying about me as much as I worried about others, I would have quit. He wanted me to be better in this season. I didn’t know how to be. It was hard, 6 years of hard, 6 years of pain, and I played a lot of tug of war with Him during this process.
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It was this time last year I heard Him tell me to listen to HIM & stop playing tug of war with Him in this….so I threw my hands in the air and surrendered. I thought, it couldn’t get worse right? I thought, I’m already as lonely & desperate & invisible & exhausted as one could get, what was there to lose? So enter 2020….

I started the year focused on the role consistency needed to play in my fitness journey. I told just a very few of the closest people in my life, then I set out on my plan to CONSISTENTLY workout, every single day, for the entire year. All 366 days of this leap year. I committed to the Intention to choose myself & my health & well being for at least 10 minutes everyday. I headed to the gym every single day this year, and I watched myself grow.

Grow in strength.

Grow in confidence.

Grow in peace.

Grow more comfortable in my own skin & my own body.

Grow calmer in my heart.

Grow more courageous in this journey.

I went to the gym for the first 75 days of this year and worked on myself consistently, until the country shut down and gyms closed in the middle of March, then I panicked.

I didn’t meltdown completely. I didn’t  quit, but I sure panicked. In my panic, I cried out to Him, confused & scared. Not sure how I had heard Him correctly If these were my circumstances, or if I had misinterpreted His will for my direction in 2020. Then He calmed my spirit, and I regained my focus. God intended me to live in 2020 with the INTENTION to CONSISTENTLY show up for myself & my fitness. I put the gym requirement in the fine print. I found ways to overcomplicate His plan inside my head. With my heart focused on His plan again, I recommitted. Then I got creative.

I found ways to sub in workouts from home. I began so settle for 10-15 minutes of intense physical activity like I had initially set out to do, instead of the 30-90 minute workouts I had grown used to. And by day 97, April 6th, I decided I need to get out & start incorporating some running into the mix. My kids were all 4 “trauma schooling” from home to finish out their preschool, 4th grade, 6th grade & Sr. Years. Nothing felt normal, but I was surviving because I was still choosing me. I went out for that first run not sure how it would go. I ran around our block twice, about 3/4 of a mile roughly, and I mostly jogged, with intermittent spurts of walking to catch my breath. I had an internal dialogue going on with God the entire time. I thought I may have a heart attack, but I didn’t.

Fast forward a month and my kids were finishing up school. My oldest was graduating in the weirdest version of a shot gun commencement I could ever dream up, on the day my baby turned five, and I was emotional, and anxious, but I was surviving. I was surviving & actually thriving, and all because I was choosing me for at least 10 minutes a day. Time after time though, 10 turned into 15 or more again. By day 162 I had managed my first mile without stopping.

My workouts became very largely running based most of the week for awhile, and by the middle of summer I looked forward to putting on my running shoes and sneaking out for at least a mile everyday. I even left at 10:00 on the night of my daughters socially distanced grad party to get my run in. Less than two weeks later after delivering her to her dorm and saying goodbye for my first full season away from her, the first week of August, I put on my running shoes and headed out for another mile. Somewhere along that road, it turned into an endurance test, and God carried me through my first 5K. I was beaming with pride in the accomplishments.

As it got chilly and wet and snowy, my runs cut back and I was getting creative for inside workouts more often than not, but I was still looking for opportunities to run. The Monday before Christmas, I ran my 5th 5K this year. Before this year I wouldn’t have even thought of attempting it, I only ever thought about how nice it would be, someday, maybe, to start trying. I always wanted to be able to, and I always admired the women I knew who did. I aspired to someday be brave enough to try with a few of those women, one specifically who I lost the chance to ever try with after she passed away of cancer far too soon. Her passing was the inspiration for my first real interest in trying to get fit again in the first place. This year, however, I didn’t just think about maybe starting to try someday. This year I started, and I kept trying, until I did it. Then I did it 4 more times just because I knew I could. I did it, for her, for me, and for God, and I know we were all proud of me.

See somewhere at the very beginning of this journey, I realized that I met God in that time. Every single time. Before gyms closed, as soon as I hit the mat to begin stretching, I was in His presence. Once gyms closed, He met me wherever I took my workouts, because in His presence was the only place I could be to get through this journey. Especially in the beginning. Literally praying for the strength to do basics. Praying for the power to push myself. Praying for myself, over and over, for probably the first time in my conscious mind. I was choosing time for me, & in doing so I was choosing time for Him, and He gave me everything I needed to keep showing up. For 366 days! I will have my official weigh in this afternoon when my husband gets home from work. I with get my new measurements and I will be posting the official results via my social media, but the real results can’t be measured with a measuring tape or a scale. The real results are way more than that.

Along this journey I learned so many things. So many more than my Intention word was ever “supposed” to teach me.

I learned there was a whole lot still to lose. In 2020 He taught me how to take my life back, and put myself as the priority that He wanted me, to learn to be. I learned there was guilt to lose. I learned there was shame & regret to lose. I learned there was a whole lotta fear to lose. I learned there were also a lot of “friends” & family to lose, unhealthy relationships. I lost a little more weight on the scale too (though most of my excess pounds were shed at the start of 2019) and I lost inches, but the heaviest weight I lost, wasn’t from the things the scale could measure.

I also learned that if I trusted God in losing all of that….. I would not lose ME to myself. Instead, He saw to it that I grew and I shrank at the exact same time. I gained so much as this year did it’s best to throw me off and knock me down. I gained confidence, and lost pant sizes. I gained the ability to celebrate me, and lost my overwhelming need to criticize myself all the time. I gained a new hobby and I lost my fear of the gym. I gained peace and I lost pain. I gained muscle and I lost my will to quit. For me 2020 was a positive & life changing year. Hard as Hell, scary as shit, and fully overwhelming, but positive without a doubt!

Now, I share all this to encourage you to consider the New Years Intention approach. There’s a blog over at www.thedazzlingdistrict.com (if you aren’t already tired of reading lol) that further explains how I decided to give this new philosophy a try. I also share this to encourage you to choose you, even if for just 10 dedicated and focused minutes a day, doing something that challenges you but still brings you peace and joy. It doesn’t have to be fitness related. For my journey specifically, it was a neccessary piece of the process, but for you it may be something else. Your journey is yours, and it’s important, and it’s necessary. You ARE important, and you are necessary. We must value our selves enough to keep choosing ourselves & keep challenging ourselves to be healthier, more joy-filled versions of ourselves, everyday. When we do this, we allow ourselves to have more energy, joy & love to share.

I hope this finds you inspired by now, and I truly hope you have a safe, healthy & Happy New Year!

Stay Dazzling & as always, thanks for reading! ~Rebecca

Pit Climbing

Ok, so I am still here, still committed to this page, this calling to build consistency in my writing by blogging my way through this season of life. These last number of months I took a little hiatus from the blog, from the brand’s social media presence, from writing as a whole. I could easily say that it was simply that summer swept in and took hold of our family and between an increasing demand on my time juggling our obligations, home remodels and scarce moments of memory making, I simply didn’t have the time to fit any blogging or social media presence. That would not be untrue, life definately swept us up in a busier than usual season, and carried us right into fall, but it wouldn’t be entirely accurate. In an effort to be fully transparent in this process of building a blog, a writing presence and the beginning of a brand, I feel an obligation to delve a little deeper into why my Dazzling presence just fell off the map these last several months.

I have not been shy in past posts in sharing that I do personally deal with anxiety & depression among other “quirks”, my own personal blend of mental illness. I have never tried to steer clear of the awknowledgement that I deal with these things because I feel passionately that opening the conversation is the most important thing we can do to make strides in the solutions and healing. I have, however, done a fairly intentional job of glazing over my own personal battles, minimizing them to some degree to preserve a comfortable, easy, happy go lucky community. In some ways I feel like this is a little hypocritical of me, like saying yeah we should talk about it, but not too much & not to deep. Not really fair of me. So in an effort to display more transparency in this particular area I must also say that my Dazzling presence fell off the map these last few months because my Dazzling had been doused.

We started off summer strong and cleared May with solid stride towards a fun, memory filled summer season…………but then as June kicked off, I was starting to lose a little steam. Life, schedules and stresses just started to kick me arse. My cup was splashing it’s contents all over the place and the quicker life ran, the more sloppily the contents sloshed out of my cup until it ran completely dry right around The 4th of July. I was not in great shape, emotionally or mentally. Ironically, I was back in the best physical shape in a decade thanks to a Spring spent taking care of me, but when summer picked up, I let myself down. I had fallen quickly back into ALL. THE. BAD. CHOICES. Like all of them. No gym, no real fitness substitute. No planned or thoughtful food choices. No good sleep patterns. No dedicated time to focus on my faith journey. No intentional personal care. No showers, No good choices. I was drained in more ways than I could begin to explain, and due to a burst of home renovations scheduled across the summer & early fall, my comfort zone felt far from comfortable.

I was not Dazzling, I was in a rapid state of frazzling.

It was not a pretty sight.

I would love to say now that I recognized the signs, made the necessary changes to my situation and finished the summer strong.

I can’t though.

July pushed on and a little refresh to my cup came via a week of vbs volunteering, but by the end of the month, my cup was dry again. I’d be lying if I said my refresh stayed in the cup for long. It did not, it splashed right out as we barreled on. Just like that, August was here. The hustle & bustle of life swept me up like a tornado, preparing for back to school & my oldest daughter adding a new job to the schedule kept us stressed & busy! All exciting reasons to be stressed and busy, but difficult on our time all the same.

By September I had survived & managed to shuffle all my girls back to school for the first time. All four of my girls headed off to school, from preschool to Senior year, I maintained a thread of sanity as I emotionally dealt with the closing of a season and the opening of 4 more in it’s place. With each of my girls embarking on very different, yet impactful seasons in their own journey, I quickly realized I needed to get me back in gear. Maybe it was the silence in my house as I sipped my coffee every morning in this new found season of school, but I could finally hear my thoughts again clearly.

In doing so I was able to start straightening out those thoughts again. My cup needed filled, I knew that & I needed a better plan moving forward because these girls do need me. Though many times I let myself get lost in the shuffle and empty feeling in my own identity as Mom & Wife, it is a tremendous blessing, this I do know. I get to have the front seat, cheering section leader, and personal bestie to each of these incredible girls. That is my privilege as their mother, one I maintain to do my best in God’s grace to do for His glory in His story. His story for them & His story for me. SO I got to work, working on me.

I considered getting a traditional job & helping our family financially with these newfound hours of free time, but after weighing the pros & cons I quickly knew that would be foolish. I was in no shape to reenter the traditional workforce and add one more thing to the plate of responsibilities I was barely keeping intact.

With one in every school level, high school, middle school, elementary school & preschool, I knew I was embarking on one of my busiest & most challenging seasons of life yet. The dynamics of four or more kids alone can bring it’s share of added challenges to the parenting game, but spread out as interestingly as we have done, makes those dynamics even more complicated. I digress, life is full of challenges for each of us regardless of the number of children or our circumstances, what I was getting at was, that I had realized that I was about to meet my parenting match this season if I didn’t get my shit together.

I needed to figure out the best practices to be at my best. To break bad decision patterns, to improve where I could improve, accept what I needed to accept & be ready to be in control of my habits, the good & bad. If I was going to best lead these 4 incredible daughters moving forward in their own personal paths as their mother, I needed to be sure I was doing my best to do so honoring myself & God so that they didn’t pick up my bad habits and saw a Godly, motivated example. My habits, if I’m honest, had never been so poor as they had been this past summer. I had always been conscious of my role as their mom is seasons past, even at my worst points in my mental health challenges I have done my best to hide what I could, to let it effect them as little as it could. This last fall back to the bottom of the pit, I hit hard though, and I stayed there. I had no reason to fall, and that may be the real reason I hit so hard & stayed so long. I had no “reason” to fall.

I use this analogy often to explain my anxiety & my mental illness battles.

It’s me, In a really deep pit, clawing my way to the top, past layers of broken tree roots, rocks & dirt. Just climbing all day towards the little speck of light at the top, the exit. Every good habit is another reach towards the top, every positive thought, every success, no matter how little, is progress towards the top of the pit.

Eventually, after enough little progress, the speck of light turns into a circle of light, and after even more that circle grows until I can just reach the top of the pit and feel the solid ground surrounding the opening.

Now sometimes in the progress towards the top I hit weak roots, or a loose rock that causes me to stumble down a little before regaining my grip. I am not a quitter, stubbornness is in my blood, so I don’t let those unexpected things cause me to fall when they occur on occasion, I do however tend to struggle when multiple little things come in the same section of the pit wall, causing me to fight for solid gripping again.

I may backslide a little but eventually I regain my grip and get my focus back. I begin to slowly climb again towards that light. Many times I have gotten to the very top of that pit & felt like I was finally about to be able to climb out, put my feet on solid ground, and start the new story. The one where I beat mental illness.

Many times when I see my fingers gripping the top, ready to pull myself up, “Something” outside of my control, in God’s will for our life, falls right down towards the top of the pit, smashing my fingers, making me lose my grip, and back to the bottom I fall, crashing down on my back pinned to the bottom by this “Something”. Be it grief, be it financial burden, be it health concerns, be it loss of job, be it marital strife, be it loss of friend…there had been many “Somethings” over the years and I could always blame them for being the reason I fell. Eventually I would work hard to get out from under the “something” and with God’s help, I would push it too, like the “Somethings” before, to the side & start my trek back towards the top.

When I am at that breaking point at the top of my pit, losing grip right before I fall, I almost always have a moment crying out with my mother where I ask “Why am I here again?” through breathless sobs. She comforts me and lets me cry & scream it out and then tells me that, she doesn’t know, but He does. When I say, “I am not strong enough to keep doing this over & over and that I just want to be worthy of getting out of the pit.” she tries to remind me that I am worthy, it’s just not my story, it’s His story and she tries to get me to reframe my thinking away from looking at it as a pit I can’t escape. She reminds me with God it’s not about being worthy. This too shall pass because He has seen me through countless other pitfalls in my life. The pitfalls I could never see coming.

This time was different.

This wasn’t really a pitfall, this was like an all out free fall. It was like if I was at the top of that pit, reaching towards the top and I had a loose rock pop up in my hand and set me into a small backslide, where I then decided to just push off with my feet into an elegant backflip, concluding in a swan dive into my own mental health decline. I had no good reason, it wasn’t really a conscious decision, but it also was a blind abandonment to the skills and tricks God has spent the last few years enlightening me on in my mental health journey. I didn’t mean to end up at the bottom of the pit again but I also couldn’t really put a finger on a “Something” to blame and I had somehow plummeted to the bottom anyways. It was then that I realized it’s because if my pit is an analogy for my mental illness, then I will never actually get out of the pit, I will never get that feet on solid ground moment at the top, because, like my mom always tells me, that’s not my story.

My story is His story and in His story, mental illness is part of my story. I can plan, plot, organize, and prepare until I am blue in the face to “beat my mental illness” but that’s never going to matter, because it is a part of me. It’s my brain, wired how He wired it and the best I can do is work to understand it and keep it healthy so I can be a light for Him.

Well here we are, at the peak of the holiday season, midway through another month, on my birthday to be exact, and after spending much of September, October & November focusing on my health & well being again I can happily say that my cup is doing better at retaining. As we enter into these final weeks of 2019 I am not ready to throw in the towel on this year yet!

I started this year determined to spend it reaching towards goals a younger me was too intimidated and doubt filled to even set. I set personal goals, I set family foals & I set business goals that I intend to chase after until the end. I will fail at some, but I will fail trying and that’s more than I can say about myself in some seasons past, so that’s progress.

I am learning more about how to pit climb and accepting that it’s a past time that is part of my life, so now navigating the pit feels less ominous. I am also committed to continuing this discussion about mental health. I am not a professional, I have no medical training or licenses, I have not studied devoted to the topic for years, but I have been in the pit. Mental Illness is a part of my story, not my whole story, but a part of it all the same, and it’s a conversation that needs to have light shed on it, so in my little corner of cyberspace, I commit to shedding a light on it.

That being said, over the next weeks and months I plan to highlight some of the tips, tricks and tools that I use to help manage my mental illnesses and improve my overall mental health.

For today though, I will spend it being in the moment. Enjoying my birthday with my little army of kids and my absolute best friend & “person” celebrating the closing of the last season. 36 years of my life are over and I have many hurts & many trials within those 36 years, but I survived them and I am on the other side of them blessed beyond measure, even bbn if sometimes that’s hard for me to see in the Pit. I am truly blessed & my next season of blessings starts NOW!

Thanks again for reading & supporting my writing!

Have a Dazzling Holiday Season!

~ Rebecca