Personal Growth

 

Do you ever look back over your life and wonder at where you've been, what you've gone through, and where you are today?  Did you loose yourself or find yourself?  

Recently I was in a situation that left me asking myself these questions and analyzing my own journey.  Is the person I once was completely going, as in destroyed?  Am I now unrecognizable to those who knew me before?  It made me sad to think that a part of me was destroyed to become the woman I am today.  My questions to myself and then the answers I discovered revealed a great deal.

I started this world knowing nothing, learning and growing.  Accepting the lessons I was taught and as I grew up I had dreams and hopes even plans for what I believed my future would be.  (I look around and I am nothing of what the girl I once was envisioned for my future)  Yet, that girl is still with me.  If she wasn't I wouldn't still continue to dream and work so diligently to make those dreams come true.  

Then I married my first husband.  The woman I was then was so young and so foolish, I believed everything would simply work out like it was supposed to.  Unfortunately that marriage was plagued with forms of abuse that left deep marks on my soul and spirit.  As I walked away from that marriage I kept my married name because I felt like I was no longer that young girl and couldn't go back to that name because of what it represented in my mind.  I tried to grow embracing a new side to who I was, but not quite feeling complete in my own identity, while believing I was healing from past abuse.  

I then married my second husband.  That path in my journey was actually a returning to my much younger person because I married my first love, the man I'd dated in high school, the one I believed, at the time, that God made just for me.  That marriage was also plagued with a unique kind of abuse in many forms, but one in particular hinged on a strange sense of jealousy.  I had a very successful Avon business, working towards and accomplishing such goals as earning an all expense paid trip to New York City through my sales.  I was growing, I was blossoming, I was becoming secure in my own identity.  Yet, for each of my accomplishments he was jealous that they weren't his and thus he wasn't the center of attention.  Sadly, due to this as well as the affairs and countless lies among so many other problems, I doubted myself in every area.  By the time I walked away from that marriage I left being a shell of the person I once was.  Needing that clean break I fully embraced returning to my maiden name.  (It's amazing the significance that a name has to a woman.)

In the last 9 years I have grown and learned who I am and exactly what I want in my life.  I have learned to chase dreams I never imagined were possible and to embrace life to the fullest.  So after my questions and self examination I can honestly say I have carried each version of myself with me and they all come together to make me the strong independent woman I am today.  I am truly no longer any of the former versions of myself and yet each of those versions all combine to enhance the woman I now am.