Inside Out

I saw Inside Out yesterday afternoon with my girls.  I had really been looking forward to it as the movie is about emotions.   Yes, emotions! The characters names are emotions!! Really.   How much more could this appeal to me?  The central character was an eleven year old named Riley.  

Seriously! 

 I laughed, and I felt like I had to cry but couldn't.  I still feel blocked up about that.  I have been studying emotions for the better part of my entire life.  I've always been an observer.  Getting a Masters' degree in Counseling was just the beginning of my formal training.  I'm sure that it began earlier than that, in childhood.  Now, the last 7-8 years I've really been concentrating by using therapy, life occurrences and a passion to understand feelings.  Infertility and postpartum depression blew me away.   I felt so lost and alone.   Therapy helped me to begin to understand what was going on and to heal. 

Along the way, these are the issues that I have delved into head first:  dieting and exercise, eating disorders, compulsions, codependency, spirituality, religion, The Twelve Steps, mindfulness, perfectionism, self-esteem, forgiveness, acceptance, dying, and grief.  One has led into another and my life has opened up beyond measure.

But yet still I hide.  I feel like I hide. 

There are so many thoughts I have and I have spent so much time studying and learning, yet still I think I don't know enough.  I will always be a life long student but I do know some things.  I don't give myself enough credit.  

I am still afraid to tell what I really believe.  

I think one of the reasons that I do, is because I still label myself overweight in my head.  Because I have not attained perfection in my body size that discounts all of the thoughts in my head, my life experience, and the intensive study I have undertaken. 

So I still have low self esteem.  {chuckling}

I don't know what it is. But I feel like breaking out of this.   This coming school year I have less on my plate - less volunteering with things I felt I had to do.  There will still be volunteering just in another capacity - with less planning on my end.  I am currently feeling passionate about the following things: getting my house in order (clearing the way for a cleaner vision), practicing yoga, and planning time with my friends.  

Oh, and running a household and raising two daughters.  One being a teenager very, very soon.

I just can't sit around and wait for the phone to ring.  I have to get off my tuckus and initiate things myself.  

Here goes.

Namaste.