"The 7 rules of Life" mini series: "Disconnect to Reconnect"

Welcome back to "The 7 rules of Life" mini-series. I would like to start by apologizing to all of you out there following the blog, encouraging me, reading these articles and using them as a way to inspire yourself to find your own way. I have been absent from the platform because of certain situations that demanded  my full focus and attention. Although I am not currently back full time to my blogging schedule (every 2 weeks; post is up on Mondays) I will do my best to post some articles and keep you in the loop. The blog is still here, I am still here; I just took a step back, a break to evaluate things, situations and life more clearly and it was a much needed thing in a world where people don't seem to ever stop.

We live in a world where the demand and the pressure is so high that we sometimes forget how important it is to just stop for a minute. We underrate the value of a step back because we are used to idea that we have to constantly be moving forward. And what happens is that we get burned out, we get exhausted. In between meeting the demands of the people surrounding us, behaving like we are superhuman, trying to make everybody happy, there is truly no time or energy left to evaluate what we want and what makes US happy.

These past couples of days have came with their share of toughness and challenging situations to deal with. As a response to life giving me lemons, I thought there was only one thing to do: keep moving forward no matter how hard it was. Which I did but soon, I reached a point where I was just emotionally exhausted, I was burned out and I couldn’t pick myself up anymore. I felt like I was trapped in some kind of vicious circle where the more I was trying to push and move forward, the harder it was for me to get my head out of the water. It is when I decided that I needed a break. So I took one: I disconnected myself from everything and took some time to evaluate my life. I took a step back to think about what I had gone through, what my life was like at the moment and what I wanted to do next. But most importantly I took time to reconnect with myself.

I got to a point where I couldn’t move forward because there were too many things I just pushed to the side pretending they didn’t exist in hope that it would make my life easier. But it did not: it only made things worse. Being stuck and having such a hard time getting my head out of the water made me understand that before I could deal with the challenging situations ahead of me, the sadness, the frustrations, the brokenness, the emptiness, the tears and the chaos, I had to heal first. I had to get to the core of myself and find the root of the problem to fix it instead of treating the symptoms. I had to reconnect with myself, fix myself, and heal myself before attempting anything else. It was something vital. Taking a step back was an opportunity for me to be in touch with myself, a moment to evaluate who I was, where I was going and what I really wanted and needed, what was best for me.

It was a really enlightening moment where I got to learn a lot more about myself than I thought I knew. It gave me a chance to look back and appreciate what I had accomplished, who I had become. I learned to spend time with myself, to nurture myself, to grow, to explore new routes and avenues the noise of the world around me prevented me to. It allowed me to also map out the changes I wanted to incorporate in my life not to make people happy, not to satisfy their demands and expectations, but first to make myself happy, second to create the life I have always dreamed of, and last, to be the person I have always wanted to be.

You can’t deal with life if you are broken and sometimes the best way to move forward is to take a step back. It is essential to disconnect with everything else around you and reconnect with yourself if you want to keep moving forward and get to the place you are meant to be at. It’s a moment where you get to define your true self, a moment where you mute everything else around you and tune into yourself to create peace, happiness and healing from within because like Trent Shelton always says “It all starts with you”

"The 7 rules of Life" mini-series : "Make peace with your past so that it won’t screw up your present"

Introducing the first part of "The 7 rules of Life" mini-series, I wanted to talk about something some of us have experienced more or less at different levels depending on our ability to recover from situations that happen in our lives and affect us whether we are aware of it or not. So today, let's talk about being stuck in the past, hoping that my experience will help you let go and move on. Now let's be honest here: it is really easy to stay stuck in your past and quite frankly for being there, it is one reason why I would NEVER judge people having a hard time letting go of things. Letting go/ making peace with your past is so easy to say but it is really a hard thing to do and anybody who has been there once in life can attest it. I can attest it. So many things can hold you in the past, things you might or might not be aware of. Things you thought you let go of but truly you buried in and repressed until the day something triggered those repressed feelings or reopened that ugly wound you thought you were done dealing with.

It can be an ugly breakup, the loss of someone dear to you, someone who did you so wrong and hurt you so bad that you can’t seem to get over it. A mistake you made which has been haunting you ever since. Whatever it is that is holding you in your past, you have to go back to it and deal with it. You have to find the root of the problem and solve it. Finding a way around will only delay the onset of the symptoms for a few days, a few months or maybe a fear years? But sooner or later it is going to come back around and kick you in the behind. I have myself been through a lot of very emotional things which I thought repressing was the answer to. But then every time I thought I was fine, something would come along and just hit on that very one thing I was trying to repress and cheat myself into think I was over with. It took me a while to understand the reason why this would constantly happen. Why it hurt so much but most importantly why it always seemed to bring me back to one specific thing deep down I knew I was not over with. And then I understood that maybe life was giving me an opportunity to go to the root of an issue I had that I never really dealt with.

Maybe life was giving me an opportunity to face those emotions I only knew how to respond to by shutting down and pretending I was okay. It was time for me to open up, talk about those issues, let out all those repressed feelings of anger, sadness and frustration. I had reached a critical point where I had no other choice but to talk about the way I felt and address those issues in order to  be able to move forward. It was the time I finally had the opportunity to forgive myself for the mistakes  I made and understand that it was my past. Not my present, not my future, just my past. I had the opportunity to hold onto the lessons and let go of the pain and the mistake in order to better myself. Once I finally understood this and I starting fixing what was broken by treating not the symptoms but the root of the disease, it finally felt like I was ready to move on. I was finally ready to definitely and permanently close some doors of my past I was always so prompt to reopen and burn some bridges that I knew would take me down roads I never wanted to take again. It wasn’t easy but I wanted to do it. I was tired of my past screwing up my present. I was done carrying over the broken pieces of me from my past into each new day I was offered and that I was supposed to use to build a better, happier and stronger me. Though making peace with my past is a daily effort and a constant work in progress, ever since I started doing it I feel more at peace with myself now than I ever felt.

I have learned two very important lessons from that journey. The first one is that I had the wrong notion of being strong: I thought it was not showing the world how you feel but I discovered that being strong is about showing the world that you have struggles too. You cry too. Your life is not perfect but you deal with it. You fall but you don’t stay on the ground: you stand up and you keep walking to reach that destination you are going to. The other and the most important lesson is that my past is just a story and coming to the full realization of this definitely set me free. I realized that the situations I went through, the mistakes I made were meant for me to learn a lesson and LET IT GO of the pain/ the situation.

It will not be easy to make peace with your past and letting go of all these things that are holding you back, if you are ready to move on to live a better, happier life and build a better future it will be worth all the troubles and the hardship it comes with. And if after this you are still not convinced and you are still stuck, just remember that you can't grow unless you let go.

Hope in the midst of pain and chaos

Pain is something natural that at a certain point in our life we all get to experiment. Some people can be good at handling it some other are not so great. I used to think that I was great at handling pain, smiling to the face of the world while pretending that I was okay but I was not. I used to think that crying or admitting that me being in pain especially emotionally was a sign of weakness but it wasn’t. there is only so much you can take and sometimes crying is a way to for you to say that you have tried to be strong for so long and you are just exhausted. But in no case does is make you be any less that what you are: a human being. Then I finally got to understand that it is totally okay to not be okay because life is not perfect and all pink: there are moment where reality is too harsh and pain can be difficult to suck in.

At some point in your life you have to come to the full realization that there is a need for you to acknowledge the pain. You need to stop hiding or running away from it and face it no matter how abrupt or intense it can be. Life will always bring you pain: physically, emotionally, etc… life will bring you pain under all its possible forms. You don’t get a say in that. When it comes to the emotional pain you don’t get to choose if you get hurt or not: we all eventually be hurt whether we want it or not. This is the sad and somewhat harsh reality of life. However, you get to choose how you deal with your pain, you get to choose who will have the privilege to be the author of that pain. You get to pick the way you want to look at that pain and consider it.

Most of the time, pain is associated with so much negativity but there is actually another side to pain. Pain is there to remind you that you are still alive. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to feel that abrupt pain that at time feels unbearable. Waking up everyday, putting one foot in front of the other in spite of giving up is a reminder that you are still here and you are making it alive. Each day is a miracle because you survive the pain from the day before and you make it into another day; and as long as you keep on doing it there is hope that one day you will be okay and that the pain you feel today will one day be part of your past.

Also, depending on your perspective of life, you can see pain on different angles. you can see it as something that hurts you and breaks you. It is totally normal and this is something that most of us do because it is the natural and human way to go about it. But you can challenge yourself and go beyond what you would normally see and look at pain as an opportunity to build yourself. It is similar to the perspective one can have of chaos. Yes chaos is everything being ruined, tore down and nothing is left standing. Chaos in itself is depressing. this is the normal outlook that every human being could normally have. But beyond that, beyond the fact that I have to start everything all over again, I see chaos as an opportunity to build myself the way I always wanted to be. I see an opportunity to turn my life into what I would have always wanted it to be. The same is true for pain: it is an opportunity to learn and allow for every scar to remind you that you can heal and every time you heal you become stronger.

Although this is true you have to understand and accept that healing doesn’t happen overnight: you need to give yourself time to heal. Time eases the pain, it helps you heal from your wounds. Everybody is different and everybody heal at a different pace. Just because someone recovered over a short period of time doesn’t mean that it will be the same for you.  Just like someone taking 2 years to recover pain doesn’t mean that it will take you the same amount of time. You have to do your own experience of it and find what works best for you. You have to find your own pace and work on yourself until the day you actually are actually okay.

As far as I am concerned, reaching that point where I am okay is a work in progress for me. There are days where everything seems easier and there are days where pain hits me in the face and stabs me in the chest. But “that's the thing about pain: it demands to be felt”. I have learned to cope with it, keeping in mind that I could be okay today, tomorrow, in 3 weeks, in 1 month or in a year. It will take as long as it has to but eventually one day, I will be okay. And so will you. Until then take care of yourself and carry on to the best of your ability.  

Struggles only curvy women understand

Let's face it: nobody is perfect and even though Mother Nature has blessed us with the most flattering features of all time (we all know what I mean here), we curvy women can't seem to get away with some of the below mentioned facts. And pretty much all of us will somehow cringe at the fact that we can totally relate to this whether it is on a daily basis or just when we go shopping and can't seem to be able to fit into anything nice and flattering!

1. The button down shirt gap aka sneak peek
if you mother nature blessed you with the greatest cleavage you never though you would have you understand that one. Like you literally see a shirt that is supposed to be your size. You think it will fit because well it is your size. You put it on and then all of the sudden you realize that you are giving the entire world a sneak peek to what is supposed to be hiding behind a buttoned shirt. Free preview!

2. No answer to the question "which size are you?"
such a hustle and you always have that weird face when the lady helping you shopping is asking you : which size are you? See, one curvy girl does not simply has one size. You have you regular size and you have your boobs size. But in reality your true size is your boob size lol. Why? Because if you can’t fit your boobs in, it doesn’t fit. Simple as that lol

3. One size never fits all
I never got the concept of that one size fits all. Like seriously... It never fits me. It is always too small and I feel like I can’t breathe in those types of outfits. It is more like one size fits most because excluding me. And I don’t get the point of this. I am just saying…

4. The never ending gap in your pants waist and the way-too-long struggles

you could fit a baby in there! Seriously! And this happens because you have to size up to have you butt fit in those jeans. It doesn’t matter if it is too long: after years of shopping that way you just tap into your shopping budget and go straight to the tailor to alter your jeans and make them look descent. Really shopping is a budget when you are curvy.

5. Cute stuff are never your size
you can’t have it all: either it is cute or it is your size. It rarely happens that it is both. Why? See #4 loool
It can happen that you find something cute in your size but let’s be realistic it doesn’t happen that often. And it is not that you are a plus size. It is just that you have been abundantly blessed and that Mother Nature has been more than generous to you. loool sad

And don’t even get me started on trying to make it through the finding a seat in the movie theater. Ring the Butt alert!!! It is all over the place and in everyone’s face! looool We might have a lot of struggles but at the end of the day, even though we will never be skinny minnies, we are happy with the way we look because guess what? We look daaaaaaaaaaamn good

Il est temps d'etre heureux

On consent parfois à beaucoup de sacrifices par amour, ou même parfois parce qu’on se dit qu’on n’a pas d’autre choix. Mais combien de personnes sont prêtes à faire ces mêmes sacrifices quand il s’agit de nous ? Combien sont capables de renoncer à leurs rêves ? À leur bonheur comme certains d’entre nous osent le faire pour que nous aussi nous ayons notre petite parcelle de bonheur.
On nourrit des rêves en secrets, des projets qui ne verront jamais le jour juste parce que nous vivons encore dans cette prison, dans cette illusion que le bonheur des autres vaut mieux que le nôtre. Nous préférons renoncer à nos rêves parce qu’ils pourraient briser ceux des autres mais combien de personnes se mettent à notre place, dans nos chaussures pour se rendre compte du mal-être qui nous ronge ?

Devant la face du monde tout va bien mais au plus profond de nous tout crie misère et chaos juste parce que nous ne sommes pas heureux. Il n’y a rien de plus noble que de renoncer à son bonheur, a ses rêves pour que les personnes que nous aimons soient heureuses, mais à un moment il faut savoir dire non à certaines choses et à certaines personnes pour être heureux. Depuis quand être heureux c’est être égoïste ? On a tous droit au bonheur alors pourquoi pas nous ?

 

Qu’est-ce que les gens vont penser ? Est-ce qu’ils vont me comprendre ? Comment ils vont réagir ? Qu’est-ce qu’ils vont dire à mon sujet ? Depuis la fondation du monde les gens n’ont pas arrêté de critiquer les choix des personnes avant nous et ce n’est pas avec nous que ça va changer : ça existait avant nous et ça existera après nous. Ce que les gens pensent ou disent n’est pas le plus important. Le plus important c’est votre bonheur, ce que vous ressentez. Les gens n’ont pas besoin de comprendre le pourquoi des choix que vous faites, ils n’ont pas besoin de comprendre pourquoi vous avez besoin de les réaliser pour être heureux. Ils ont juste besoin de les accepter. Vous n’avez pas besoin de vous expliquer sur vos décisions et d’étaler votre vie au premier venu. C’est votre vie, c’est votre bonheur qui est en jeu.

Quoique vous fassiez de bon comme de mauvais les gens vous critiqueront et auront toujours leur mot à dire. Mais je préférais être critiquée avec un sourire aux lèvres, vrai, sincère, qui vient du cœur et qui dit au monde entier j’en ai rien à foutre de ce que vous pouvez dire ou penser tant que je suis heureuse, que d’etre critiquée pour des choix que j’ai été obligée de faire et qui me rendent encore plus malheureuse que je l’étais auparavant. Dans le premier cas le bonheur fait la balance avec les critiques, dans le deuxieme vous sortez deux fois perdant.

Personne n’a droit de citer quand il s’agit de votre bonheur, de ce qui pourrait vous libérer de cette dépendance aux antidépresseurs, aux anxiolytiques mais surtout des larmes que vous versez chaque soir et dont personne ne connait l’existence. Parfois pour être heureux il faut être sourd à ce que les gens disent, être aveugles aux regards de dédain et de mépris qu’ils portent sur vous et n’écouter que votre cœur. Votre vie, votre bonheur, vos choix : arrêtez de vous souciez autant de l’opinion des autres et vivez votre vie. Au début ils vous feront la tronche mais s’ils vous aiment vraiment et s’ils voient comment vous êtes heureux, ils finiront par s’y faire et embrasser votre vision et vos choix.

Stop worrying...

... Start living