A Journey to Fit & Fast

I think perhaps my favorite quote on this topic comes from my favorite person ever: Brene Brown. She stated ‘shame is the feeling that you are bad, guilt is the feeling that you have done something bad.’ Shame is essentially the fear that something within us makes us unworthy of love and connection. I have to admit, I spent some of my evening co-mingling with the ever negative shame gremlins. Background story: I innocently, or so I thought, stopped to pick up something from my ex husband’s home. When I did so, his girlfriend decided to verbally attack me, randomly, fiercely, completely non provoked.  She said some intensely hurtful things, and though she has literally no bearing on my life at all, I internalized some of her messages for a short bit. Now, it took me like two hours to run what she said through my ‘truth bank,’ and realize that the words are both untrue of the human that I am, but also that they come from a human who is clearly hurting in some capacity (normally f...

Change is an interesting beast, when being tackled by humans. It can be fearful, it can really be a lot of things. It can also certainly be daunting when done in too big a quantity. So while I set out to change a few things within myself this week, I had to reign myself in and take it slllloooowww. I have this vision of myself returning to the state that I felt most alive. I was committing to working on myself and my shit, I was running and being social in that capacity. I was really dedicated to me, and to just enjoying life through that. I focused on nutrition and exercise to feel good. I did a lot of retrospection and loved blogging. It was fairly effortless, really. It became a way of being. So, I had to remind myself that I wouldn’t just ‘magically fix’ myself in a week. Instead, I decided to dedicate this first week to making one of these changes. I decided each day to spend at least 10 or so minutes each morning reading, journaling, or doing something that puts ME in ...

So, as it turns out, I owe a giant apology to the universe, my family, my husband, my friends and probably most importantly myself.  In chatting with my rather insightful partner, we came to an incredible realization. We aren’t struggling as a couple and a family because we don’t have the skills to communicate or be a happily married couple. We are struggling as a couple because we have lost the ‘us.’  What I mean by this is in the process of ‘just being’ and ‘just getting by’ we had forgotten to take care of the number one and number two in this process: each of us as individuals. I used to be this person who sought out self improvement through reading, physical improvement through running and physical challenges, and someone who pursued my passions in things like photography and anything that my little heart had a desire for. In the course of mom, wife, bonus mom, I had willingly handed over my ‘Kara’ and it happened ever so slowly but really resulted in near catastrop...