Route: Recalculating

I love this feature on my GPS, it means I can completely screw up and if I give the GPS a second to catch up, it will recalculate my route and continue guiding me to my destination. AND…. best thing ever, there isn’t even a limit on how many times I can mess up.

Last week, during therapy, I spoke with my therapist about a peace within myself that I had recently discovered. I explained to her that I felt this freedom from judgement and failure. Not just judgement of others, but specifically the way I would usually over criticize myself. Over the last few months, with a lot of help from my therapist and friends, I have been able to recognize that messing up doesn’t mean YOU’RE messed up, making a bad choice doesn’t mean YOU’RE a bad person, and most importantly, everything doesn’t need to be perfect, there is always room for mistakes.

A lot of times in therapy, I need to relate the way I am feeling or what I am thinking to a more concrete example, a lot of times it is something that I can visualize. I have always seemed to understand ideas better when they could be represented in a more tangible way. On this day, in our conversation about messing up and still being able to keep moving forward, it made me think about driving, specifically missing a turn or an exit on the interstate. Instantly I could hear the GPS in my car saying RECALCULATING, RECALCULATING, because I had mad a wrong turn or drove past the one I was intended to take. At no point while driving, does missing a turn make us change our destination. Instead, we make a u-turn, or go an alternative route, but our destination remains the same, with our route looking a little different. This idea made life make a little more sense to me.

If we have a bad day, or even a bad week, does that mean we just have to committ to having a bad month, or a bad year? Nope. We can choose the route we want to take in life and all the other things that matter too, like the speed at which we move (those stupid socially induced timelines we think we have to keep up with), the kind of car we drive (our bodies, but more importantly, how we feel about our bodies), our playlist (our attitude towards things), and lastly who our passengers will be (literally, who you will take with you on your life trip).

I truly feel like this visual helps me keep going and helps me make sure I don’t let myself get stuck in one place for too long. I am on my way to having loads of self-compassion that will let me hold my head high even when I make mistakes. I am not a failure and I do not let my bad qualities define who I am. I am now intentionlly using my mistakes, failures, and rough patches as fuel for my journey. It would be so easy to say that a life without a wrong turn or missed opportunity would be the best life to live, but would it really? Many of the greatest things I have experienced and accomplished have come from a wrong turn or being lost. Sometimes you have to take that detour to get where you need to be in one piece.

So today, we can just say I am roaming. I’m one of those Sunday afternoon drives you take with your spouse (pre-kids), you know the one where neither of you know where you’re going, but you have your windows down, your shoes off, a link of boudin from Don’s (iykyk), and no route in mind, but you’re certain you’ll know how to find your way home.