Friday Reflection: Be Daring to Live a Life You Love

 

Quote of the Day: “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” –Cecil Beaton

Weekly Show Reflection:

Hellooo, my fellow Motivators!

I want to give a little shout out to Jan, one of our members of our private Facebook group. She likes the name Motivators because she feels that’s what we are ALL doing, so I’m running with that. Thank you, Jan, for all of the insight and humor and motivation you bring to the group. It makes me insanely happy to see you there.

So, today. Today I have been reflecting on the guests of the week, and I am pretty moved. I feel like what they’ve done is powerful. I am moved by the daring they have had, the nerve to step away from judgement, and to step away from the hefty investment they had made in something in their lives to start something new. And “Stepping away” from it feels like the perfect terminology because they were quiet about their actions. They just followed what they knew was right for them, and they quietly transitioned into that.

For example, Monday’s guest. On Monday, Dr. Sharon Livingston PhD was on the show. There are probably, and I don’t think this is an underestimation, 100 topics I could have discussed with Dr. Sharon. Since the interview, she and I have probably discussed twenty of them. But, Sharon could have come on to speak about one of her many passions, or she could have come on to teach us a lesson on one of the multiple skills, techniques, or tools she is familiar with. However, when I realized that she wrote a novel about being dumped by a best friend, I asked her if she would come discuss this with us. Creative writing is a new passion for her, one she started late in life but has fallen in love with. This book is only the first of many she plans to write.

Writing this specific book: Get Lost, Girlfriend! How I Found Myself When My Best Friend Dumped Me was part of a healing process for Sharon. The thing is: It took a lot of daring for Sharon to write this. She had to block out the judgement she knew would be coming in order to find a true place to tell this story from. She says on the show that there are many places one can find support when they lose a loved one through death or divorce, but when it comes to friendships, we are just expected to get over it. How difficult of a decision it must have been for her to put this story on paper and out into the world, even in a fictional way.

I just keep envisioning myself writing a similar story. In my real-life relationships, I have been the one who has left, and I have been the one who’s been left. Even though this story is fiction, fiction is based on reality. The hardest part for me in writing a story like this is knowing which parts of the story my friend would know and recognize. Because the whole time I was writing, I’d be thinking about how her perspective would probably differ from mine. And how she would most likely be reading this at some point in time. I presume Sharon had a similar experience, and that she had to shut down those voices, or she could have talked herself out of writing this story. I mean, imagine writing a story about your best friend, you know how your friend thinks, and that would be the hardest part in the writing process. I think the other hard part is that writing a book like this one pretty much says that you’re walking away from the years you had invested in a friendship. Regardless of any, or all, of this, Sharon wrote the book anyway. The girl has, what’s the word: kahonas?

Tuesday designer/decorator James Swan was on the show. James is an interesting person with an interesting story to tell. Personally, I think James could and should go on the road speaking to people about following your truth and overcoming hardship. James went to college,