Journey to the Past

When we last spoke I shared with you how I was going through an evolution, returning back to my roots so to speak. Which is why I've struggled to write to you ladies, because it's been hard to talk, when you don't understand yourself. I can't give my perspective, provide input on things if I don't know my opinion on them. I was changing my observation on life so my stance on things were being altered. Ultimately, It just made no sense to speak when I didn't know what I was talking about. I have been transforming into the woman that I have always wanted to be, but. what they don't tell you when you decide that you are ready to make a change, is that you can end up uncomfortable. It was challenging to give up bad habits and giving in to the peer pressure of society. Turns out that was my real issue with my most recent renovations in my reality, I was out of my little comfort zone and I didn't know how to act. Finding out who you are is especially challenging when you have buried yourself under so many false pretenses for so long. As I have been working on the rediscovery of my psyche & my personality, I found myself taking a trip down the good old lane, memory lane that is. As I reminisced on my life, what I've witnessed, the things I've experienced I was wondering where I went wrong & why I decided to hide. That was the reason I embarked on this journey into my past, but along the way I noticed something else. From the very beginning I had people anticipating on me to fail. Knowing that some people have always hoped the worst for me left me feeling hurt, but realizing that I was accomplishing their hopes for my life left me feeling worse. Lately it seems that the only thing I have been successful at is failing. I was taking loss after loss, opportunities missed left & right, contract options filled with bullshit from top to bottom, leaving my mind spinning in circles not knowing up from down, but this wasn’t the first time.

My life has been a constant cycle of my faith being tested, hope being challenged & will to accomplish being put to the test. It seems that when I believe to have found a path to take, the ground would suddenly fall from under me. I know, I know another girl complaining about her plans not going the way she planned, who hasn't heard this story before? While this is somehting that happens to us all, I guess its different this time because well, it's happening to me. The real reason this bothered me is because the type of person I am. I'm a planner, I like to be organized, have a schedule, for goodness sakes I write a to do list of accomplishments to complete before I can go to sleep. One thing I pride myself on is my ability to plan for the future, but yet, despite all my efforts, my plans always seem to go astray For a long time this infuriated me. I mean what was the point of me taking the time to write out a three year, five year & ten year plans if life was just going to change it? How was I supposed to make it to my goal if I didn't stick to the plan? I wondered, maybe I was missing the sign, maybe this was a hint from the universe telling me I was wrong. If every time I make a plan things never turn out right then maybe I wasn’t meant to make a plan. Since I couldn’t keep my plans together I decided to give in to the universe and forgo my plans. They seemed to serve no purpose so I may as well live life with no thought for the future. I made the declaration that my new plan was no plan. Yeah that was the stupidest idea I ever came up with for my life. I very soon realized that having no plan made it easy to have no future. I had no guideline, basic structure, nothing to look forward to & soon found myself in a rut. My spirit was being diminished, I felt drained, even though I had done nothing, my ambition had dwindled & soon enough I was depressed. How depressed? Crying eating poundcake watching the Victoria Secrets Fashion Show depressed. I figured since I wasn't going to be an angel, I might as well be fat. So what's a girl to do when all of her plans result in losses and having no plan results in feeling low. I was plagued with this conundrum for weeks & spent hours at night wondering what was it that I was supposed to do.

One night as I lay alone I recalled my failures & decided to write a list, not just the recent failures either, I went back, way back, back into time.(BTW If you get that reference be my friend) Back to elementary school when I didn't make Teachers Pet Desk that one week in 1st grade, following behind my sister and falling off my bike & creating this scare above my lip in 3rd grade, getting a flip to ORANGE in 4th grade. Being bullied throughout 6th grade, testing & switching out personalities through 7th grade, getting ISS in 7th grade & the last time my mom beat my ass in 7th grade (Yeah 7th grade sucked). Then my first breakup in 10th grade, first time failing a class in 10th grade, loosing my starting spot on the tennis team in 10th grade (Damn, 10th grade sucked ass too), not making it into my dream school after being waitlisted my senior year. Transferring from college to college until I just dropped out all together, to not being able to find a job and being evicted, from being with a guy that was your best friend to breaking up and not even being able to speak to each other. I hadn't even been successful in the simplest of things that I wanted for myself, like this blog. This was something I created for me to share with the world and yet, here it is, my two year anniversary and I have failed to write once a month let alone once a week. I digress though, you guys get the point, I wrote out my failures, all of them big or small, all that I could recall. Seeing all of them wrtiiten down out on paper staring back up at me made them feel even more real. The list seemed to daunt me, it didn't seem fair that I had to take that many Ls. You would think they would be happy to go around to others & not pile up on me. I lay down thinking on all these loses and the pain I felt when I experienced each of them. Just as I was about to began the 'Why me?' song & dance I decided to do one more thing with my list. Next to each of the failures I wrote a note, the lesson from my loses. That's when that light switch came on & I remembered something. The loses give you lessons. How could I forget such a tremendous piece of information, I mean did I learn nothing from Rafiki & the Lion King?! "Yes the past can hurt, but you can either run from it or learn from it.” -Rafiki. Kelly Clarkson was right, what doesn’t kill me does make me stronger. It seemed that all those memes that I had passed around and reposted about moving forward and learning from the past and pain were apparently just words that I shared because they were trending. I didn’t fully take heed to the information I was being offered. It was time to stop talking and take action, accept my past and move forward because without them I don’t know where I would be.

All the loses of my life gave me the greatest lessons of my life. I learned the most from the failures because they kept me humble, they kept me hungry, and they encouraged me to go for more. The only difference between the loses I had faced then and the ones I have been going toe to toe with now is that I was letting the them break me down not build me up. I was letting all the dirt of the negativity, the discouragement, the disapproval, the hate & the anger that I was being hit with bury me. In the past I would have taken that dirt wiped it off of my shoulder, let it settle under my feet & used it to stand on. What happened? Why was I allowing myself to be buried again? I guess I had gotten comfortable that way since I was use to being buried under the pretenses of who everyone thought I was, who Susie was. When Susie was here she was on top, but as the saying goes what goes up, must come down. Down I fell all the way to I hit my head on the ground and it knocked some sense into me. I stopped living a lie and started living for myself, but I was uncomfortable in this new life, I didn't like being on the bottom. I didn't want to to stay here so I was trying to climb back to to the top. I just couldn't make it there, no matter how hard I tried. I didn't understand I had been up there once, why I couldn't I get nabck to my spot. Then I was reminded, you came crashing down because you didn't have a good foundation. I wasn't stable when I was a the tip, that's why I fell, I needed to secure my foundation. For so long I had been struggling against gravity to put myself back in that place, but the thing was, I didn't really want to be there. I wanted to be back on top, but I didn’t want to be in that place, I didn't want to live that life anymore. This left me even more conflicted because I was striving for success, but I didn't feel accomplished. For so long I had been basing my accomplishments on the only type of success that I knew, so even though I had begun to make progress I still felt that I was failing. I was planting roots, securing my foundation and I was even starting to grow, but with every bloom I made I felt that it was wrong. It was like planting apple tree, but waiting tomatoes to harvest. My accomplishments were hard to appreciate because they didn’t come in the ways I was use to seeing, I was use to leveling my success on how many Instagram likes and video views I had achieved. Now, I was getting good grades & signing business contracts, but I felt that somehow, I had less.

It seemed that I wasn’t accomplishing things anymore because I didn’t have an audience to tell me that what I was doing, the plans that were progressing, the moves that I made, were the right ones. I didn’t know that what I was doing was correct because I didn't know if my success was accepted by the masses. Funny I never realized how much I valued other peoples opinions. Acceptance is the next step that I am facing in my spiritual, mental and physical metamorphosis. I have learned to accept my failures, I am accepting myself in my growth and I am learning to accept my success as accomplishments on my own. It’s an adjustement period to say the least, but I’m greatful for making it to where I am today. Accepting your past is necessary to progress into the future, but you have to strong enough not to stay in the past. Wish me luck ladies as I continue this journey and wherever you are in life I hope that you come out on the other side smarter, stronger and successful. Happy two Year Anniversary COLORS.

Photograph: Antonnia Giggetts Age 5.