I know. I know. It’s not the adults. It’s life.

Yeah. Well… while that may be true — that life is messy — so are we, the adults living it.

Think about it.

We come into this world, these perfect beings of love. Vulnerable. Naked. Divinely beautiful. Defenseless.

We carry with us only two things, a fear of falling (removal of support) and a fear of loud noises.

The rest… well, those hopes and dreams, yearnings and possibilities, concepts of who we are — limiting beliefs and full potentials… those are all constructed by the adults in our life. We don’t carry them with us when we come into this world. We pick them up on our journey.

Which means, we’re often picking up other people’s expectations of us.

And then, we forget to let them go (or don’t know how) and end up living our lives as if what other people think of us, or expect of us, is most important.

See. Adults are the messy ones.

The question is… What are we willing to do about it?

Getting over our messy is messy business.

It takes a whole lot of patience, compassion, self-care and… the thing most of us struggle with, self-love.

It’s to be expected we struggle with it. We’ve spent so much time picking up the pieces we think other people want us to carry or think will make them happy if we carry them, we don’t really know who we are.

Note the lack of ‘forgotten who we are’ in that statement? Yup. It’s not there. That’s because to forget something we have to have had it in the first place.

And yup. That sentence includes a past perfect – past participle of the verb (I think). See, my remembrance of those English classes where I learned all about present and past perfect and participles and tenses was a long time ago. Using them correctly today is sometimes challenging.

But here’s the thing. I don’t remember ever being taught about self-love. Which means, it was never high on my list of lifeskills in my early adulting days. Which is another way of saying, I wasn’t carrying it from my teen years when I stepped across the threshold into adulting.

And that’s where adults come from. Teenagers.

Yup. Those angst-ridden, surly, defiant, ego-centric, life-defying, boundary testing teens were us before we became ‘adult’.

So then we ‘grew up’, and granted we got smarter about a lot of things we studied so that we could have jobs and build careers and maybe even change the world. The thing we didn’t necessarily get smarter about? You guessed it —  this thing called being ourselves without the mess we’ve carried with us.

And that my friends leads to the statement… adults are messy.

Here’s the thing though. We don’t have to stay messy.

It takes… (go back up ten paragraphs)… patience, compassion, self-care and… self-Love.

We gotta love ourselves through the messy to get to the juicy.

To love ourselves through the messy, we have to be willing to stand in it without employing the arsenal of tactics we’ve developed to avoid getting all messed up by our messy. You know. The running away, hiding out or simply ducking every rough spot we come upon with things like anger, self-deprecation, tears, avoidance, fake smiling, appeasment, building walls, and the list goes on.

Tomorrow afternoon, a group of people will walk into a room designed to support them through the gateway into living their lives free of ‘the messy’.

Choices Seminars begins tomorrow and for those walking into that room, either as coaches or as trainees, the gifts are immeasurable. The value infinite.

And believe me, the work is not easy but stepping into living life on your terms with joy, love, compassion and grace as your constant companions (even when you mess up) is worth giving up a lifetime of making messes because you’re living your life by other people’s expectations.

‘Cause let’s face it. It’s a whole lot easier to clean up your mess when your foundation is built on Love.

I won’t be in the room coaching this month as I am taking care of me. I deserve to live a juicy life which means, when I bump into a messy place within, it deserves my full loving attention. I’m worth it.

For those in the room, there’s one thing I know for sure they’re going to find and that’s the thing the world (and each of us) needs more of… Love.

Check it out! You deserve it!

And, in case you’ve forgotten, you’re worth Loving with all your heart and soul.