Life Is

I look at my life and I see what it is. It hasn’t always been that way. I used to look at my life and see what was.

Life was a broken childhood. Life was my alcoholic mom. Life was getting kicked out of school. Life was realizing what the icky feeling about my mom’s boyfriend was. And then all of a sudden,  life was my mom’s death. Then life was my grandmother, consoling herself through me over the loss of her daughter. And then my grandmother’s death. Then my father. His death. And in between, life became all the things that reminded me of what was. Life became what I talked about, what I missed, what I longed for from yesteryear, what I never wanted to remember again.

I used to believe life was not fair. But “fair” has the connotation of right or wrong, good or bad. Hey, you can’t do that, that’s not fair! Fair balls, fair trials, fair weather. That either-or space I’m moving out of: judgment.

We judge ourselves, we judge others, and then we judge ourselves some more. We look at our lives and wonder what could have, should have, would have been…if only, if only, if only!…life was fair. But life is not fair; life just is.

Back in my childhood I was the latchkey kid who walked herself to and from elementary school nearly every day. I was the awkward junior high school girl who was too shy to speak most of the time and rode quietly on the bus, unaware that freedom was built into childhood. I was the girl who lost her mother at 16. I was the girl who worked instead of going to college. I was the girl who wouldn’t get married because she thought she might be gay. I was all that I am not today.

This challenge, I’m reminding myself this morning, is about pledging myself to some, one, all of the topics on a list. At least, that’s what it started out to be. But what I start rarely ends exactly as I intended. Beginnings morph into beautiful endings we never could have imagined right from the beginning. This challenge has turned into introspection and evolution by way of words shared with you from my head, my heart, my soul.

From my head, I tend to over-analyze. From my heart, I tend to be naive, see the good in everyone and everything. From my soul, I see me, I see you, I see us, just as we are and I grow.

From my soul I see that my childhood was not good, it was not bad. It’s just my past. I can compare war stories, and there will always be someone who had it better, someone who had it worse. Better and worse don’t matter, though—not even what was, only what is.

Today I’m pledging myself to being fair to my Authenticity. Fairness in Authenticity. Fairness in being me. Fairness in being.

Life is what it is. It’s not about fair or not. It just is.

June is Self-Evidence + Authenticity month here at Authentic Realities. This post is a part of my June blog challenge, which I invite you stick around for, read a bit, and even get yourself in the mix if it suits your fancy.