📷: February 1, 2020 – Self Portrait

My exercise for this new month is to not measure my performance or success on how perfect I execute something, but instead my level of effort

Starting off this month in bed with Loulou curled up next to me and the first episode of the Goop Lab playing in the background. The episode is the wonderful white world of wellness and its current exploration of psychedelics. I’m not as cynical as my previous sentence would suggest, I believe there is power in exposing different healing modalities through mass-media. But if you watch the show without some sort of eye-roll, then there is a clear disconnect from 99% of the rest of the world.

However, maybe I could benefit from psilocybin to further deconstruct the maze of mental obstacles I constructed this past month. Simply put – January was not my jam. On the last day of the month, my Lou accidentally ingested 5-HTP and had to be rushed to the emergency room. She was experiencing Serotonin Syndrome, and her BP had dropped to 65 by the time I brought her to the vet. For reference, a healthy dog of her size should have a BP of 110.  It was an extremely scary way to end the month, but Loulou is healthy and we are together again.

This morning I woke up with incredibly painful menstrual cramps. CBD, ibuprofen, a hot bath – nothing took away the severe discomfort. I feel like not only am I shedding my uterine wall, but also shedding the pain and discomfort of this past month.

I’ve dealt with negative self-talk my entire life, like a little mean girl inside my head spewing out the most venomous one-liners. Most of the time I just ignore her and she goes away, but she was so loud last month that I decided to take a new approach in 2020.  Today, I broke out my journal and I talked to her like I would do with a real-life mean-girl. I sat that bitch down and addressed her. I recognized that hurt people, hurt people and that she was in pain. I addressed that the negative talk is coming from a place of self-preservation, but it isn’t productive and because of that – its objective of keeping me safe was null in void.

In my conversation with my inner bully and a few other characters, I zeroed in on my perfectionism. Fear and perfectionism strapping me into a depressive anxiety-ridden straight jacket. My exercise for this new month is to not measure my performance or success on how perfect I execute something, but instead my level of effort. I will measure my progress on an idea, goal, or commitment based on the effort I put forth. Basically, all I need to do – is to do my best.

The beautiful and freeing aspect of doing your best, and not being perfect, is that “one’s best” fluctuates. It’s not rigid. Instead, it ebbs and flows, making room for the various stressors and curveballs life throws at you. Instead of choosing to just do my best, in the past, I think I’ve chosen to not show up for myself. It’s easy to just not show up and avoid facing the inevitable failure of not being perfect because I already knew I couldn’t be. But even when exhausted, I can spend a little time showing up in whatever capacity my best is that day. Right now, my best is laying in bed next to my dog, with my computer on my lap and writing this post. It wasn’t what I had outlined for today, but looking at my personal commitments and what I could invest my best self in – here we are.

It’s ironic. Here I am being snarky about Goop at the top of this post and 600 words later, I’ve shared my own wellness revelations.

How was your January and start to the decade? Mine could have been better. But it’s a new month and a new mindset. Here I go.