What’s wrong with me?!

After a weekend celebrating friendship, love, and new beginnings, I found myself reflecting on the insecurities we carry — even when we seem like we have it all together. In this episode, I explore the question of whether we truly need to fix ourselves, or if the real work is learning to love and accept the person we’ve been all along.

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Hey, thanks for tuning in. So, in a previous episode, I had mentioned that I was planning my sister-in-law's bachelorette party, and it just happened this past weekend, and we had a blast. It was a lot of fun, and it was so nice just getting to celebrate her and seeing how happy she was and you know getting ready for this new chapter of her life. And this whole weekend kind of inspired this episode. Um, it actually took me a couple days to be able to record it because my voice is still a little bit shot. And I have to say, I lived in uh Texas for 13 years, and I thought I had been used to the heat, and I've only been gone for two. But Texans are built different when it comes to partying. We were at a rooftop bar, and I don't know. I told my husband, I don't know how there aren't more like deaths in the summertime in Austin and San Antonio, just from people just dropping from dehydration between like the partying and the drinking and the heat. It's just crazy. I it didn't matter how much water and electrolytes I had the day before or the day after, it's already been almost a week, and I'm still thirsty. But anyway, back to the weekend. So it's been over 10 years now that I've been a wife and a mom, and I've had girls' nights here and there, but I haven't had a girls' weekend like this in I don't know, at least like 20 years. Um, so it was interesting being in that environment again, especially around getting ready, going out, you know, doing the makeup. Um, and it was kind of interesting how most of us were at least in our mid-30s or older, and I still kind of felt like we were all still teenagers. In the sense that I've always heard things like, oh, once you get to a certain age, or once you hit 40, you start to give less fucks about what others think, you you start to kind of own who you are, right? And it's something I've talked about before and something I've been working on. Um, but just seeing, I guess, the insecurity that everybody was kind of carrying, especially one woman. Well, I mean, everybody, but one in particular, um, kind of stuck out for me. My sister-in-law's friends are beautiful, and some of them have had work done. And from the moment that she that I met her, she was pretty much always apologizing for the way her hair looked, or like nitpicking at herself in the mirror, or saying things like, ugh, look at my thighs, look at my hair. And I thought, wow, that's so sad. And the reason why it hit me even harder, like it literally hurt, was because I've talked to myself that like that a million times, and it reminded me of my own inner dialogue. And I thought, why are women so hard on themselves? Like, why do we do that to ourselves? And it also made me realize that, like I said, some of them have had work done, and I don't mean any disrespect by this, but it just kind of made me realize that it doesn't even matter what you look like. At the end of the day, what matters is what you think of yourself, and also, you know, as corny as it sounds, don't judge a book by its cover, right? Just because someone looks like they got it going on, or they look like they've got it all together, you have no idea what they're carrying on the inside. It made me think about how often do I look in the mirror and immediately notice what I changed before appreciating what's already there. And it made me realize that sometimes the harshest voices that we'll ever hear is our own. Then later that night, uh, after we went out and uh were a little tipsy and had our second dinner of the night, uh, we started talking, and one of the women started opening up about just things that she had gone through with her health and depression and things that she had been carrying. And she said something that I think so many of us have felt, or at least I know I have. And at one point she said, you know, like I'm just tired. I'm tired of feeling this way, and I wish someone could just fix it. And, you know, it hurt again because I I know that feeling. I've spent years reading books, listening to podcasts, going to retreats, doing the things, asking questions, trying to heal, trying to grow, always believing that there was something that needed fixing, that there was another version of me waiting on the other side. A better version, a healed version, a version that was finally felt like I was enough. But when we were having this conversation, something just kind of clicked. And I realized that I'm kind of at the point where I'm finally getting it, that the goal was never really to fix myself. That the goal maybe was to stop treating myself like I was broken. Growth is beautiful, healing is beautiful, learning is beautiful, but somewhere along the way, I think I started to believe that I was a project instead of a person. That love is something I had to earn after enough work, after enough healing, after enough improvement. And what if that's not true? What if growth isn't about becoming someone else? What if it's about remembering who you've been all along? I realized lately that I don't want to spend the rest of my life asking what's wrong with me. I want to start asking what's already beautiful about me that I haven't learned to see. Something that I did a while back, and it was funny because this I guess assignment or whatever you want to call it, it kept coming up through different mentors or teachers that I had. And I think the original person that I learned it from was um Louise Hay. She's like the OG mindset uh queen from I guess the 90s. But she has a book called like Love Yourself, Heal Your Life, and she talks a lot about mirror work. So, what you do is you stand in the mirror and stare at yourself, and you have to try not to catch yourself, you know, nitpicking or judging yourself, it's just stand and look at yourself in the eyes and tell yourself that you love yourself. Like you stand and you say, I love you. And it sounds super simple, but I dare you to do it because if you do it right, it will bring you to your knees in tears because it's so hard to actually say that to yourself and to actually feel that for yourself. And I still do it from time to time, it doesn't make me as emotional as it used to, but it's still something that's not easy to do, which is insane. So, yeah, this week I challenge you to try that and pay attention to the conversations that you're having with yourself. The one that's constantly running in your own mind. When you look in the mirror, what do you hear? And also ask yourself would I talk to my best friend this way? Would I talk to my daughter this way? Would I talk to my son this way? Maybe that's the question worth living inside this week. Thanks for listening. Leave a review or a comment, and I will catch you on the next one.