Allison Vesterfelt's Blog, page 3

What to Do When You Want to Give Up and Quit Everything

Every now and then this feeling comes around—like everything I’m doing is for nothing and I might as well give up. This time it showed up on Tuesday morning, around 5:40am. Discouragement is just so normal like that. It rolls up next to us at stoplights or comes streaming in through the window with the morning sun.

This time was no different. My alarm went off and I rolled out of bed to change for my yoga class, but as I did, the sinking feeling came over me.

What are you even doing with your life?

Shouldn’t you have this figured out by now?

That second question is really the worse of the two. I mean, if it were just the first question, I could probably handle it without wanting to light a match and burn everything to the ground. But that second question is what does me in.

Every time.

It reminds me of something I heard Glennon Melton say recently, which is, “it’s not the pain that takes us out of the game, it’s the shame on top of the pain.” In other words, it’s not the hard work of building something that makes us want to quit, and I doubt it’s even the uncertainty of wondering whether our hard work will pay off. We are wired for challenge and really quite resilient to pain.

Where our wires get crossed is when we start wondering: aren’t I too old (or too blessed, or too whatever) to be asking this question?

What’s wrong with me?

When life doesn’t go how you planned

I was talking on FaceTime to a friend the other day, catching up after a long time of not being in touch. I asked how he was doing, and since we’ve been friends for more than a decade and he’s not the kind to pull punches, he answered:

“To be honest, it’s not going that well.”

He explained how the relationship he’d been in for the past five years had come to an end, and things were “complicated” with his family, and that he was questioning his career path. He said he’d thought a lot about quitting everything and moving somewhere else, but wasn’t sure where to go. I sat on the floor of my bedroom, nodding in agreement, days away from moving myself, disheveled and surrounded by half-packed cardboard boxes.

“Life just don’t always go the way you plan,” he said.

We both laughed. Wasn’t that the understatement of the century.

But the whole thing made me think about how much easier it is to handle discouragement when we know we’re not the only ones who feel it, when we realize this is such a normal, human, everyday kind of emotion.

It also made me think about how quickly heartbreak takes over when life doesn’t turn out how we plan. When the relationship falls apart, or the marriage falls apart, or the business deal falls through or the job falls through or the illness falls over us unexpectedly. Suddenly we find ourselves in a place we never expected to be, wondering if and where and how we made such a terribly wrong turn.

But what if we didn’t make a wrong turn?

What if we are exactly where we were always meant to to be?

Exactly where you are supposed to be?

I was with a good friend last weekend, spending time with her and her four kids. We woke early on a Saturday morning to watch her son play in a peewee football game. Later, her three daughters wanted to read princess books and do dances while I videotaped them. Then they wanted to snuggle on the couch and watch High School Musical.

At one point my friend came in the room where I was on the couch with her girls—one of them literally draped over the top of me—and mouthed Thank you to me from the door. All I could think was:

Are you kidding me? I couldn’t be any happier.

After the kids went to bed we sat on the couch and drank wine and talked about how different our lives were. Her house is full of crayons and noise and music and sweet little voices and beautiful activity. Mine is quiet and peaceful and lonely much of the time and my closet is organized by color—for whatever that’s worth.

A quiet moment came, and that’s when I said it.

“I’m kind of jealous, honestly.” I looked at her.

“Me too,” she admitted.

We both laughed. And there, in the quiet of the night, with all of her kids sleeping, we sat in awe at the fact that no matter the circumstances of our lives, we are all pretty much asking ourselves the same question, under the surface: am I making the most of this one precious and beautiful life I’ve been given?

We are more the same than we are different. (Tweet that)

Whether we are all exactly where we are “supposed” to be—no matter where we are—I don’t know. Can any of us really say for sure? But “supposed to” is a close cousin to shame anyway, so I doubt answering that question is going to make any of us feel any better. What I do know is RIGHT HERE is the only place we can be. Right here, RIGHT NOW is all that exists.

What other choice do we have?

If we are going to be in our lives with our whole hearts, RIGHT HERE is where we have to start.

The only way to succeed.

My friends Jill and Kate came over to my house the other night with wine and tacos—literally the BEST kind of friends—and we sat around until late talking about this very topic: about how life doesn’t turn out how you plan, how you can work and work and work toward something that falls apart without your permission, or how sometimes you make a huge investment in something that never seems to pay off.

When is it time to call it quits?

That was the question we threw around with each other.

How long do you keep working at something, investing in it, giving yourself over to it, having hope, believing in it, praying for a miracle, before you finally decide to go put your mental, emotional and spiritual energy energy in a different bank account? Is there a time that comes when it’s actually a good thing to give up?

By this point the tacos were gone and we were leaned back on the couch and swirling glasses of wine. Kate spoke up.

“I figured the only way to succeed,” she said, “is just to keep going.”

We chewed on that for a bit. I thought about how, for so much of my life, I had measured my success by outcomes. By circumstances. By certain mile markers I assumed I was supposed to reach—a measure of career success, an amount of money, a house, a car, a relationship that “worked” in the way I thought it was supposed to work. I figured if I checked all of the boxes and followed all the rules that things would just sort of, you now, fall into place.

I was waiting for a time and place where things would be settled in my life instead of working to curate and cultivate a feeling being settled in my own heart.

The problem with this, of course, is that life is constantly shifting and changing; and no matter how many rules we follow or how many boxes we check, we have so little control over the outcomes we seek. Not to mention “outcomes” can be pulled from underneath us in a single second. The marriage can end. We can lose that perfect job. The house of cards we are so proud to have built can come tumbling down.

All we have is RIGHT NOW and the only way to make the most of it is to just to keep going.

The time to quit.

Recently I had to say goodbye to a friend I love dearly.

I don’t make a habit of saying goodbye to friends. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve done this in my life. I’m loyal to my very core, so once you’re in my life, you’re pretty much in it for good. But this friend was an addict who was unwilling to confront her addiction and worse than that, I was an addict—addicted to pleasing-people and making her happy and cleaning up her messes.

For awhile, we were the perfect match—her with the messes, me with the cleaning them.

But things had reached a breaking point.

See, sometimes the feeling of discouragement is a great gift to us, a message from our bodies or our minds or our souls, telling us something is off, something is wrong, and begging us to do something about it.

So we had a conversation where I tried to tell her what I needed and she tried to understand and we both cried. The whole thing was heart-wrenching. I worried maybe I was giving up on her too soon and I think she probably felt like that, too. It didn’t take much before I started to second-guess my decision.

Was I doing the “right” thing?

Was I withdrawing my love from her?

But as sat there with her, hand on her back, letting her cry, I thought about what Marianne Williamson says about relationships—that they don’t ever really end, they just change form. Meaning once you have loved someone you don’t ever really stop loving them. You simply change the way that love is expressed toward that person. In fact, at our true nature, we are MADE of love, which means all there is is love.

I love you—always.

You love me—always.


This made me feel a little bit better. Because it made me see that this wasn’t a question about giving up on my friend or not giving up. It wasn’t a matter of quitting or not quitting. Instead, this was a question of whether or not I was willing to change. I am willing to change. I am willing to change. That’s what I recited to myself silently as I sat there with her.

Because a willingness to change, I’m learning, is the key to the peace we are looking for.

When I feel miserable, when I am discouraged, when I feel like quitting, when I’m scared to let a relationship change form, when I’m clinging for dear life to things life is asking me to let go, when it feels like everything is falling apart or “things” are not turning out the way I wished they would, I whisper to myself, “I am willing to change, I am willing to change.” I am willing to change my perspective. I am willing to change my mind.

I will never give up. But I will be wiling to change.

Miracles are literally born from our willingness to change.

A sweet potato and a nap.

I ran by my friend Sarah’s house the other day. She lives about 0.2 miles from my house, so when I’m out running I often run past her driveway.

This time I decided to stop and say hello.

She asked how I was doing and I told her how I had woken up that morning with that sinking feeling, and how I had spent the whole day packing my house, and how everything was a mess and I wasn’t sure what the next six months of my life were going to look like. I mentioned to her how the holidays seemed like they were sneaking up and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for Christmas.

She nodded and kept listening.

I told her how I’d been writing this book but I wasn’t sure if anyone was ever going to read it, and how tortuous it felt to think that the thing would be stuck on my computer forever, without a purpose. I told her how I was behind on writing blog posts and I felt like I had been struggling over this thing for so many years, maybe it was time to give up.


Then she looked at me, in my running gear, all hyped up and looking like I hadn’t slept much, and she said something I won’t forget.

She said, “you know, sometimes you just need to eat a sweet potato and take a nap.”

I laughed, because I knew what she meant. She meant that so often we think our problems are complicated and existential when really they are quite simple. So very normal. A sweet potato and a nap. Sometimes we need to pull ourselves together and try harder and go faster and longer. Other times we need to soften, to give in a little, to give ourselves permission to take a break. Strong and soft.

No, we don’t get everything we want right right away. But we have every single thing we need for right now.

Always.

All we have to do is just keep going.

The post What to Do When You Want to Give Up and Quit Everything appeared first on Allison Fallon.

The Good Wife (A Poem)

On Thursdays, I always share a poem with you—one I love or one I’ve written. Today’s poem is one I wrote called The Good Wife. Hope you enjoy.

The Good Wife

She is holding a spatula

in her hand

when her husband comes home

from work, barking

about how she forgot to

turn on the oven vent and did she

buy more milk?

She is just standing there,

holding her spatula

in the air like a white flag,

eyes wide, and mouth

open.

Then she says, Yes dear,

here’s the milk

you wanted. This

is real life.

Yes, in real life her mouth

is moving and she is saying that

thing about the milk, but in her mind’s eye

she is not holding

the spatula at all.

No.

She is picking up that carton

and roaring like a caged

lion—

hurling as hard as she can

across the room, screaming

that if a person cared so much

about an oven vent, he should learn to cook

for himself.

Milk everywhere, just

dripping…

The post The Good Wife (A Poem) appeared first on Allison Fallon.

Running, Hiding and Falling in Love

I started running about ten years ago, during a dark season of my twenties. Yet another one of my relationships had ended in “failure” and I felt like love was something other people could make work, but not me. So I took up running as a sort of sanctuary, a reminder that no matter what happened, I could get away from everything if I just had the right shoes on.

That if I kept pushing through the pain, eventually all the sensation would fade away and I would feel like I was flying.

My biggest problem with running was always pacing.

I would start too quickly or train too hard or hear someone was running a 10-miler on my “day off” and I would join them instead of resting. You can do this for awhile, but not for long before your body starts to just basically boycott. This looks like every single part of you, at one point or another, spasming or screaming or holding up a metaphorical picket sign reading: UM HELLO, I GIVE UP.

One day you try to get up and go for a run and you can’t even walk.

This is what happened to me. Over and over and over again. I would talk this big game about how I was some super-strong runner when the truth was I was just good at pretending like I wasn’t in pain.

As much as I’d like to believe this was an issue limited to running, that would be untrue. We are basically the same, wherever we go. And my tendency to run too fast, to deny my injuries and to pretend like I was “totally okay” when everything was falling apart bled into everything in my life, like tie-dye.

Sometimes you think you’re hiding but you’re not. We are more transparent than we believe ourselves to be.

I trained for the Portland Marathon twice. The first time, about halfway through, I got a stress fracture in my right hip and had to stop running completely. This was the word from my doctor. He told me that if I ever wanted to run again, I would take six months off. I asked him if this meant I could do short little runs—you know, just to keep things going.

He lectured me about how some people are in wheelchairs and I should get a grip on myself.

I complained to a friend about this. She was a long-time runner and I hoped she would have some sympathy. She listened and nodded her head but reiterated what the doctor had said—that if I wanted to keep running in the long term, I should take the six months. “Play the long game,” she told me. “Do you want to be running at 60? Or do you want your last race to be your last race?”

As long as you are breathing

A few months later, when I got started running again, I called that same friend. I asked her if she had any advice for me this time around. She said that if my lungs were getting tired before my legs, I was running too fast. “You have to keep breathing,” she said. “Your breath is the most important part.”

Your breath is the most important part.

That stuck out to me. It’s what I thought about this morning, more than five years later, as I drove to Percy Werner Park and stood at the bottom of the hill, staring up up up into the woods. I thought about my friend’s advice: your breath is the most important part. I noticed the leaves were changing—just barely—which means that even though I stopped running for awhile, it has been almost a year since I started sneaking away to do this thing again.

Getting back into something after you haven’t done it for awhile is strange because in your mind, you can do things you can’t actually do. This is, come to think of it, basically the description of getting older. In your mind, you are bounding up the mountain like a gazelle—legs strong like tree trunks and lungs pumping air in and out. You are eighteen. In your mind.

In actuality, your legs are like spaghetti noodles underneath you and your lungs feel like they are on fire. As if you just smoked an entire pack of cigarettes—which you have never actually never done before.

You are awkward and flailing.

You are nauseous and wheezing for air.

It’s such a strange thing to feel like such a beginner at something you used to feel pretty good at. To feel weak where you once used to feel strong. It’s a strange thing to think about all the ground you’ve gained with everything you’ve lost—you know? Such a strange paradox to think about all this way you’ve come, and how you’re still here, the same old place you’ve always been.

I just kept reminding myself, as I stood at the bottom of that hill, of what my friend told me that day all those years ago—not to out-pace myself, to let my legs get tired before my lungs. Breathing is the most important part, she said. Maybe it didn’t matter how fast I climbed this mountain, or how I looked doing it, as long as I just kept breathing.

How good this looks on Instagram

I started up the hill thinking about pacing—about how often in life we push ourselves to do things we don’t want to do, that are impractical or unreasonable for us, and for what? Who are we trying to impress? In and out, in and out. That’s all that matters. Alone in the woods, with headphones in, I realized running wasn’t so much a sanctuary of aloneness for me these days as it was a way to come home to myself.

In moments, I would try to muscle my way up the hill and lose my breath. Then, I would pause. In and out, Ally, in and out.

So much has changed in the past ten years and also nothing at all.

I am not as strong as I once was, and also stronger than I ever thought. (Tweet that)

I wondered if this isn’t the reason so many of us are so lonely in our crowded, busy, Instagram-filtered lives, if this isn’t the reason we are anxious and depressed and drinking ourselves to sleep at night: because we’re doing all the things everyone has told us we’re supposed to do, the good things good people do—we’re running up these giant hills—but we aren’t even breathing.

Our bodies are full of energy, residual fire and passion. But we are out of sync with our breath.

Our hearts are hopeless and tired.

I’ve been taking yoga this past year and my yoga instructor says you can do yoga without breathing, but if you do, you’re not really doing yoga. You’re doing something else—flinging yourself into handstands and warrior two and whatnot. It looks good. You know, on Instagram and whatever, but what’s the point? I can’t help but think about how good a life can look on Instagram and how truly terrible it can feel to be actually living it.

This is what happens when we stop breathing.

You can do pretty much anything without breathing. But why would you?

That’s what I thought about as I hit the running trail this morning, as I worked to find my breath in the sea of trees. I thought about how much slower of a runner I am now than I ever was before, but about how running isn’t the punishment it once was; about how much of my life I have spent putting on a great performance—making it all look good for Instagram—and how little time I have spent actually enjoying it.

As I climbed the hill in front of me, I felt my chest tighten and I slowed to a walk.

When you listen to your breath, it guides you. It will tell you exactly what you need to know. It will whisper secrets to you like, you don’t have to do it all. You can come undone. This isn’t a competition. You were not built to look good for Instagram. Over time, we really do get better at listening

Finding love and finding your breath

I went on a date with a guy recently. Then another date. Then another one. Things were going great at first—you know, the way you feel during the first part of a run. Like you could fly. Then one day he told me I was fascinating, which I took to mean he thought I was crazy and never wanted to see me again. I told him I never wanted to see him again, which was my way of telling him I was staring up that hill into the woods—thinking how I’m not the runner I once was, and how I’m the same runner I’ve always been.

Things are always more complicated than we want them to be. Most of us are running and hiding.

It is so very hard to tell the truth.

As I rounded the corner to the end of the run, I looked up to see that giant hill. I am familiar enough now with this run, with its curves and loops and hills and trees that I should have seen this coming, but for a minute, I forgot. And when it came into view, I felt my heart sink into my stomach. My legs were already shaking and my forehead was dripping with sweat so that my sunglasses were sliding down my nose.

How was I ever going to climb this thing?

I did the one thing I know to do, which is to pull my attention to what is right in front of me. If you focus too far up the hill, you get overwhelmed and scared and distracted. You keep trying to decide if you can make it all the way up, which of course doesn’t matter nearly as much as just staying with your breath. If you are breathing, you can do pretty much anything. Your breath tells you everything you need to know.

I counted my steps. This is a trick I learned back in my running days. It’s a sort of hypnosis, distracting you from the shaking, from the panting, from the fact that you don’t know how far you can go, from the ache of knowing we really know nothing, and from the thrill of giving something a shot. So you just count, one two… fifteen, sixteen, seventeen… twenty three, until you lose count, or can’t count any higher.

Then you start over from the beginning.

A ways up the hill I felt my lungs seizing, to the point where I felt like I couldn’t get a gulp of air anymore. So I slowed my pace to a walk.

This is the kind of thing I used to kick myself for—for taking breaks in the middle of a run, for not being “good enough” to make it up the hill. I don’t do that anymore. These days I just try to look around and admire the scenery and acknowledge the miracle it is that my body has brought me all this way.

I mean, can you believe it?

My feet and my legs and my arms and my BREATH, oh this miraculous breath, has literally brought me to this exact moment, this perfect place here in the middle of nowhere.

I’m not nearly the runner I used to be. I’m the best runner I’ve ever been.

How to do pretty much anything

I found the perfect rental a few weeks ago. My house had been on the market for a couple of months and so I had been looking for a new place to go. I’d looked at 100 places and none of them seemed even remotely right, until this one. I drove out to see it and it was on the water—in the city but ON WATER—and I couldn’t think of anything better.

It’s all happening. That’s what I thought to myself. Everything was going just right.

I started making plans, as you do. Calling the movers and picking out patio furniture and thinking of people who would sit back there with me to watch the sun dip behind the mountain. Thinking of one person, in particular. Then, within a matter of days, everything came unraveled. The house. The guy. The relationship. All the things.

I tried to hold it together but we cannot hold these things together. It was never our job. All we can do is keep breathing.

In and out, in and out.

And now, I keep getting that feeling you get when you stare up at the mountain again after years of not running—into the forest of possibility. It’s exhilarating and also terrifying. I keep thinking about how I used to be so good at this—the packing and the purging and the moving on and the not knowing what was next, but how maybe I was never as good as I thought I was.

Maybe I was just good at pretending like it didn’t hurt so much.

I’m not nearly the runner I used to be. I’m the best runner I’ve ever been.

This morning as I finished my run and climbed into my car, I thought about how my whole house is going into boxes, a sort of dismantling of things so I can rebuild again. I don’t know if I can do it, but the one thing I know is I can’t stay here. None of us can. We cannot resist change. It is happening to us, whether we like it or not.

All we can do is keep breathing.

I am counting my steps… one, two, three… seventeen, eighteen… twenty three… and it’s all happening. For better or worse. This is it. This is my life, my incredible miraculous life and my body, my feet, my heart, my BREATH which have brought me all the way here, to this exact place, in this exact moment.

Isn’t it incredible?

I climbed into my car after my run, and thought about how life doesn’t have to be the punishment it once was. It hurts. There is no getting around that. But I am learning to admit how much it hurts, which makes it hurt a little less. I’m doing it. Imperfectly. Messily. Stupidly. Flailing and slogging and pausing when I need to and catching my breath. We are getting there. Slowly but surely.

I am learning I can do just about anything if just I keep breathing.

And maybe for now, that is enough.

The post Running, Hiding and Falling in Love appeared first on Allison Fallon.

Love Goes On (A Poem)

The Thursday tradition continues, where I share with you a poem with you I’ve written, or one I love. Today’s poem is one I wrote called Love Goes On. I hope you like it!

Love Goes On

I have not seen you

in seven days

now.

The last time we spoke on the phone

was when

you were driving out of town.

I was beautiful to you then…

but now?

Well, now, love goes on—

a train leaving the station,

a plane taking flight,

that feeling you get when

you realize you might be

one minute too late

to make it.

But love

does not stop.

It keeps on going and going and flowing

and then coming back around

again.

It keeps us up at night,

and early in the morning,

wondering.

Love goes down

to your bones,

to your toes,

to the places

and spaces

you did not even know

existed

before love did

what love does.

Its very nature.

Its purpose.

Love draws us forward.

It pulls us in.

It keeps on loving us

long after we thought

it was done.

Love goes on and on and on.

I tried to stop loving you but

I couldn’t, so

instead I stopped trying

to stop.

Love is like that.

It calls to us from the future, from the past,

from thirty thousand feet in the air

or two hundred miles down the track.

It whispers to us,

a freight train,

a jet plane—

a wild and powerful

force.

Love goes on and on and on

without our even

knowing it.

The post Love Goes On (A Poem) appeared first on Allison Fallon.

Why Women Stay in Abusive Relationships

I once heard a statistic that the average woman leaves an abusive relationship nine times before she leaves for good. Nine times. I still haven’t been able to track down the exact source of this statistic, so I can’t validate its accuracy. But I can tell you from my own experience, and the experience of close friends, this sounds about right to me.

Add to this the fact that 1 in 3 women will be abused in her lifetime and what you have is an epidemic of women who, during one of the most “liberated” times in our culture are still being controlled by violence and oppression.

You might think this is an issue that doesn’t apply to you. But if the statistics are right, you have a high likelihood (33%) of being in some kind of physical altercation with a romantic partner at some point in your lifetime. And even if you don’t ever find yourself in that place, pick your two closest friends, because one of them will.

Read this for them. Read this for yourself.

Read so women everywhere can be set free.

Why do women stay?

This is of course the most often asked question about abuse, and it’s a valid one, although it can feel a tiny bit insulting to the victim—who does have valid reasons for staying, even if she can’t fully articulate them. Still, it’s an enormously important question to ask—and to answer—because until we understand how and why abuse works, we can’t begin to unravel it.

I’ll never forget watching this TED talk and listening for the first time to a smart, capable woman talk about staying with a man who beat her.

I was mesmerized.

I was in tears.

Because finally—finally—this gave me permission to see that victims of abuse do not always fit the stereotype we give them. It gave me space to see that a woman could be smart, independent, capable and successful and still fall into an abusive relationship. Maybe so many women fail to admit the abuse they’ve suffered because they’d rather stay trapped and in denial than to embrace a title that makes them seem weak and ineffectual.

Especially when what they know to be true, in their spirits, is that they are incredibly strong. They are fighters and survivors.

It must be mentioned, too, that just as victims do not always fit the stereotype we give them, neither do abusers. They can be kind and charismatic, leaders in their community, with plenty of friends and a considerable amount of influence. As long as we think of victims and abusers as having to fit a certain profile, we will, for the most part, miss them.

Abuse? What’s abuse?

One of the big problems with the epidemic of abuse in our culture is that those of us who participate in abusive relationships often do not know we are doing it. This confusion happens for a variety of reasons, ranging from the fact that we don’t talk much about abuse, to the fact that abuse is learned behavior, so anyone who has experienced abuse is likely to repeat the behavior that led to it.

As it turns out, this has a good deal to do with brain chemistry.

In his book, The Body Keeps Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk explains how the abuse cycle literally changes your brain. Your neurological pathways are routed so that once you’ve been in an abuse cycle once, you become predisposition to go back to abuse, again and again. It’s like a strange safety-blanket for a child.

Most [victims of child abuse] suffer agonizing shame about the actions they took to survive…the result can be confusion about whether one was a victim or a willing participant, which in turn leads to bewilderment about the difference between love and terror; pain and pleasure…

Did you catch that? Bewilderment about the difference between love and terror, pain and pleasure. What a confusing world to live in where you can sense something is “off,” but where you have no other choice but to assume that this is just “the way it is”.

No wonder we’re so confused.

The nature of the abuse cycle.

The other thing that makes abuse so confusing is that abusive relationships tend to follow a predictable but confusing cycle of abuse, which moves from good to bad, and back to good again, without much warning or explanation, making it difficult for anyone to get a grip on what is truth and what is fiction.

I’ve written about the abuse cycle before, but essentially, it has four stages.

Tension building
Violent or abusive act
Reconciliation
Calm

A skilled abuser will use flattery and gifts and what’s called “lovebombing” to win the approval and attention of a woman. Then, after he’s endeared her to himself, the abuse cycle begins. If the abuser knows what he is doing, there will be enough time spent in the non-violent stages of the relationship for a woman to have hope that the connection can be maintained and eventually restored. When in the “abusive” stage of the relationship, she will probably think:

“If only I can fill-in-the-blank, we will go back to that time when he admired me and loved me…”

Like an obsession, this becomes all she can think about until she has achieved that end. The only problem is, she will never achieve that end. Because the very nature of the cycle is that it goes around and around and around.

The only way to end the cycle is to get off the merry-go-round.

What ends the abuse cycle.

I was talking to a friend the other day who bravely ended an abusive marriage. The violence in her house was physical, emotional, spiritual, financial—pretty much the entire spectrum. As we sat on her couch and talked about the specifics of what happened to her, we shook our heads at the ways we blind ourselves to what is really happening in order to survive.

If you were to meet my friend in person, you would be shocked to think she could end up in that kind of relationship. She is an Nationally awarded network TV producer, who has literally been trained to communicate clearly and effectively with celebrities, political candidates, high profile personalities, even convicted felons.

Again—abused women really do come in all shapes and sizes.

She also shared how many times she would think, “as soon as… [this stressful season is over, we live in a new city, we have a stronger support system, we can get into therapy, he gets a raise, I get a new job…] the abuse will end.” Victims of abuse will often do this. We blame the abuse on ourselves, on our outside circumstances—anything but the abuser himself.

The truth is the abuse never ends because outside circumstances change, or because you have suddenly learned to do a better job of following instructions.

For abuse to end, the abuser has to change. And you have zero control over that.

She thinks it’s her fault.

This is what keeps so many women from getting off the merry-go-round of abuse: the underlying sensation that whatever drama is going on in the relationship is her fault. It was something she did or didn’t do, something she said or didn’t say, something about her that is fundamentally wrong. If only she could find a way to change that thing—whatever it is—everything would be okay. So she spends all of energy trying to figure that out.

Meanwhile, the merry-go-round spins on.

If you’re wondering why a woman would take on this kind of responsibility, the answer is simple.

She has been cultured to feel this way.

Women are—statistically—less confident than men, less likely to express their opinions in a meeting, more likely to qualify their opinions when they do express them, more likely to apologize for something that isn’t their fault, less likely to trust their intuition or instinct, and more likely to defer big decisions to someone else—usually the men closest to them.

This is not to say all women feel this way, but so many women do, partly because the idea that women are less-than is woven deep into the fabric of our culture.

When a woman finally decides to walk out the door (time #9) it’s usually because she has decided to put an end to this way of thinking. She’s found a way to say, “This is not my fault. There is nothing I can do to change him.”

It’s woven into the fabric of our faith

Speaking of the fabric of our culture, I can’t address this topic and not talk about the fabric of our faith communities and the tremendous role they play in encouraging women to stay in abusive relationships.

I read a book recently by Ruth A. Tucker called Black and White Bible, Black and Blue Wife that does a great job of unpacking this phenomenon. As a woman who was married for two decades to a pastor who beat her repeatedly, Ruth talks about the terrifying way so many faith communities teach women to stay—even when it may cost them their life.




The message is, “this is just part of the program.”




Check out what John Calvin—one of the great church fathers—has to say about a woman’s “duty” to her husband in the face of abuse.

We do not find ourselves permitted by the Word of God, however, to advise a woman to leave her husband, except by force of necessity; and we do not understand this force to be operative when a husband behaves roughly and uses threats to his wife, nor even when he beats her, but when there is imminent peril to her life… we… exhort her to bear with patience the cross which God has seen fit to place upon her; and meanwhile not to deviate from the duty which she has before God to please her husband, but to be faithful to whatever happens.

Not only is a woman not permitted to leave her husband when he beats her, but additionally, she must fulfill her “wifely duty” to “please” him in spite of his abuse? And this is what God wants? This text is from a few hundred years ago, but if you’ve spent any time in church culture recently, you know the whisperings of this ideology have not fully faded.

How many abused women have been sent back home to their abusive husbands by a church that believes it is her role to “save” him?

Pastors, church leaders—you have to be more careful about this.

For the women who have suffered or are suffering.

For women who have suffered an abusive relationship in the past, or who are suffering now, first I want to say: I’m deeply sorry. But I’m also deeply hopeful. Because if you have demonstrated the kind of courage and resilience it takes to face of this kind of terror and survive, imagine how much power and resilience you will have when that opposition is out of your way.

You are already so brave and so powerful.

And you have only scratched the surface.

First and foremost, if your safety is in immediate danger, call an abuse hotline. There are resources out there for women. As scary as it can seem, you can make a decision that is right for you. You can do this. Think of all you have already survived.

If you are unwilling or unable to take that step right now, or if you’re not sure you need to, I want to urge you to tell someone. It doesn’t have to be someone specific. Trust your gut with this. Sometimes you’ll have a sense that one person is “safe” and another person is not safe. Trust that. Tell someone who seems safe. You’re holding a tremendous weight. Let somebody hold it with you.

If you are reading this and questioning yourself—thinking, “something feels off about my relationship but I’m not sure…” my advice is the same. Tell someone. Breaking the silence is your first step to freedom. If you think your partner would be angry that you told another person, well, there’s a good hint that what’s happening probably shouldn’t be happening.

Evil hates to be exposed.

Love has no fear of exposure. Love is light.

Ultimately, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that if you feel there is something wrong with what is happening to you, there probably is. You can trust yourself. You can trust your perception of the world.

For the friends and family members of victims.

There are a few specific things I want you to hear.




First of all, don’t assume that because your friends have never told you that they are in an abusive relationship, that means they aren’t. Just because you don’t think you know anyone who is stuck in the abuse cycle—doesn’t mean you don’t. Abuse victims come in all shapes and sizes and have become incredibly good at hiding.

Second of all, the best thing you can do for someone who you think might be in an abusive relationship is just to be there. Don’t push the issue. Don’t try to convince her to leave. Just be the kind of person she could come to when she’s ready to “tell someone”. Listen and don’t try to fix. If you push her, you may push her away.

Instead be someone who says, “what do you need? How can I help?

Make sure she knows, “anytime you need to call, come over, spend the night, etc—I’m here.”

She will come to you, eventually. Hopefully before it’s too late.

Final thoughts.

There is so much more to say on this subject, I couldn’t possibly fit it all here—even in this long format. I’m certain I’ve left something out. I’m certain I’ve misspoken. I’m not a trained expert on this subject. I’m just a woman who has suffered and who is passionate about doing anything I can to light the way for others.

All that to say, don’t let the conversation end here!

Share your stories. Share your experiences. Share your resources. Share your advice. Share this article and talk about it.

So much good work has been done for women in the past 100 years and I’m so enormously grateful. So much progress has been made. I am able to do work I love and support myself and live in peace and freedom because of the sacrifices those good women and men made.

There is more work to do.

Onward.

Extra Resources:

Why Women Stay in Abusive Relationships, Time Magazine
The Narcissistic Cycle of Abuse
The Body Keeps Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk
Jackson Katz TED talk, “Violence Against Women—It’s A Men’s Issue“
Black and White Bible, Black and Blue Wife, by Ruth A. Tucker
Leslie Morgan Steiner TED Talk, “Why Domestic Violence Victims Don’t Leave“

The post Why Women Stay in Abusive Relationships appeared first on Allison Fallon.

What Makes Your Heart Smile (a Poem)

This is a Thursday tradition where I share with you a poem I love or one I’ve written. Today’s poem is one I wrote called What Makes Your Heart Smile and it’s about the most beautiful thing that happens when life doesn’t turn out how you plan.

I hope you enjoy reading!

What Makes Your Heart Smile

Eventually,

all your excuses run out.

You’ve had all these things you’ve

wanted to do—to

write a book or start a

business or learn to paint—

but

something… or

someone… has

always

been in your way.

Not enough money.

Not enough time.

Not enough energy. You are

NOT ENOUGH.

Those words ring

like a dinner bell in your brain,

over and over and over

again.

Every night at five o’clock.

Then, eventually…

your excuses run out.

Your husband moves out

and you lose your house, and now

you’re in a tiny apartment

for tiny rent. All the drama

you once held dear

has come to an end, without

your consent.

You whine and complain

about these things for a bit—

about how lonely you are and

how sad it is and how

there just SO MUCH SPACE

you can hardly face it.

But then you decide to stop

complaining. Because well,

what can you do about it—now

that the excuses

are gone, it’s

just you.

only you.

The only one to blame.

So you drive to the paint

store. You look at watercolors

and a canvas. And as you’re standing

there,

alone and in your sweatpants, with

glasses on and hair up,

you giggle to yourself.

Because you have no idea

what you’re doing.

Not a clue.

You’re a total beginner.

And because this is NOT the life

you imagined for yourself.

But the woman behind

the counter smiles

and comes to help

and tells you

exactly

what you need to hear

which is that

there are really no rules

to this painting thing, and that you

should just go for it.

Paint what

makes

you heart smile, she says.

And you stand there, staring

at her—beaming—

because your heart is

already smiling.

Already.

So you go home and

paint in your living room because,

well, there is nowhere else.

And you are not good. No, you

make a huge mess.

But your heart is shining and

that’s all that really matters in this life

since

we only get

a few short years to live it.

Think about how

much time you have wasted

already.

The post What Makes Your Heart Smile (a Poem) appeared first on Allison Fallon.

What to Do About Getting Rejected (So It Doesn’t Crush You)

I met with an author recently who had just been rejected by a long list of publishers. She’d been working on her proposal for months, had labored over her sample chapters and marketing plan. She felt in the deepest part of herself that she was supposed to write this book. And still, the publishers told her, “no”.

No—we don’t think this book has an audience.

No—we don’t think it will sell.

No—we don’t it is a good idea.

By the time she and I met, she had processed the rejection and had found some peace around it. But if you were to rewind to the moment she hung up the phone the week before, you would have seen a devastated woman, on the verge of giving up. I’ve been there—rejection from a publisher, from a friend, from someone I loved—enough times in my life that she didn’t have to explain herself.

I know it all has this way of making you feel like nothing matters, like all of this was worthless anyway, like everything is falling apart.

Of course, none of that is true.

But unless we have a healthy way to categorize and process rejection in our lives, the pain will keep us from a life full of excitement, fun, adventure, risk and play.

It will prevent us from bringing our greatest gifts to the world.

Why get better at getting rejected?

Rejection is a natural, normal part of life. You cannot date, have deep or meaningful friendships, get married, survive a marriage, be a parent, do any kind of creative work in the world, or accomplish anything else of substance without a little bit of resilience to rejection. 
That’s because rejection is part of the process.

We don’t think of rejection like this. We think of getting rejected as a sign of our personal failure, as a sort of gavel coming down on the value we have (or don’t have) to bring to our work or to our relationships. But what if rejection isn’t that at all? What if rejection is actually a messenger to us—giving us insight we couldn’t get anywhere else?

More on that in a minute.

First…

Why does rejection hurt so much?

I’m convinced the most painful part of rejection is not the rejection itself but the story we tell ourselves about the rejection.

Take a minute and think about the last rejection you faced. Maybe you were fired from a job, or maybe you were left by someone you loved. Or, maybe the rejection was more subtle. You texted a friend and they didn’t text you back. You found out your friends did something fun but didn’t invite you to come along.

Even small rejections feel big, depending on the story we tell ourselves about them.

What was the story you told yourself about your rejection?

Why did you tell yourself it happened?

When a romantic relationship comes to an end, we often tell ourselves something like, “this always happens to me, I’m terrible at relationships, if only I would have done fill-in-the-blank differently, I’m such an idiot, I wasn’t good enough…” When that becomes too painful, we fluctuate to a similar story about the other person—which goes something like, “&%*@&$#! He promised… she promised… what a liar… what an idiot… men can’t be trusted… women can’t be trusted…”

These stories are our way of coping with the pain of rejection by providing a kind of explanation for why the rejection happened. But ultimately they end up causing more pain than they can numb.

What if you found a new story to tell yourself?

It wasn’t the right timing
There’s something in this for me to learn
This has nothing to do with me.
I do not know the whole story. I will not make assumptions.

When we release the painful story we had been telling ourselves, we release most of the pain of rejection.

What is left is grief. And grief is something we can handle.

What getting rejected is telling you.

When we assume rejection is about us (our failure, our inadequacy), we miss the most incredible thing rejection is actually trying to show us—which is that, while there is nothing wrong with us, there may be something wrong with what we believe about ourselves. Getting rejected clearly illuminates these beliefs—all the “I’m not good enough,” messages and “this always happens to me” crap that has been getting in our way all of this time.

We cannot discover our true self until the “false self” dies. That’s the way Richard Rohr puts it.

Rejection helps us to do that. Rejection is this great gift.

Your “false” self is how you define yourself outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After you have spent many years building this separate, egoic self, with all its labels and habits, you are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t you be? It’s all you know. To move beyond this privately concocted identity naturally feels like losing or dying… if you do not learn the art of dying and letting go early, you will miss out on the peace, contentment, and liberation of life lived in your Larger and Lasting Identity…

—Richard Rohr

The problem with beliefs is they are incredibly powerful. They are the rudder of our lives—a filter through which we process all of our experiences. If you believe you are worthless, for example, everything you experience in life will be filtered through that belief. Even when something good happens, you’ll filter it through your “worthless” belief and think to yourself, “This is too good to be true. It won’t last..”

When you’re rejected, you’ll think to yourself, “see? I knew it. I told you so.”

On the other hand, if you believe you are full of love and made of love (your true self) and have so much to offer to the world, you’ll filter everything that happens to you through that belief.

When you experience rejection, you’ll think:

Wow, I am so loved and protected…
There is something better for me. Thank goodness I’m on my way to finding it.
This experience does not change that I am love (true self) and I am loved.
There is something here I’m meant to learn—and I’m so grateful for the chance to learn it.
This is a guiding hand of love, pointing me in different direction.

Rejection, in many ways, is challenging you to put your false self to death and embrace your true self—the highest, most loving, most effective, most beautiful version of yourself.

Rejection is YOUR GREAT GIFT.

The worst thing you can do when getting rejected

One of the greatest lies we tell ourselves is the the best way to endure rejection is to “grow thicker skin”. You hear this all the time in the world of business and art and relationships: “over time you’ll learn to grow thicker skin. This stuff won’t get to you as much.”

Nothing deepens our pain in this lifetime quite like following this advice.

The problem with growing thicker skin is that this is the false self at work again, the ego self, the self that wants to protect and hide and posture and pretend like everything is OKAY when they you are NOT OKAY. The ego self is at war with the true self. And the danger of embracing this advice is that we cut ourselves off from the one thing that actually heals us—LOVE.

Our hearts. Our desires. Our dreams.

The essence of ourselves.

The truth is the only way to become resilient to rejection is to stay connected with ourselves, with our hearts, our desires, our wishes, our dreams, even when it hurts like hell. Even when we aren’t sure how things will work out. Even when it seems like all is lost. This is the great paradox: we lessen the pain or rejection by embracing the pain of rejection.

The lie we tell ourselves is that feeling the pain of rejection makes us weak.

The truth is that feeling the pain of rejection makes us human. Rejection is part of life.

Learning to grow “thicker skin” might prevent some pain for you in the short run. But in the long run it will prevent you from getting what you most deeply desire. We get what we most deeply desire when we are strong enough to bear the pain of waiting for it and still soft enough to receive it when it comes.

The great challenge of getting rejected.

The great challenge when facing rejection is this: can you be more yourself after the rejection than you were before? Can you allow rejection to illuminate those negative beliefs about yourself, so you can put them to death and give your true self more space to live? When getting rejected, can you allow it to motivate you toward your own becoming, rather than the alternative?

This is the invitation.

It’s quite literally what getting rejected is asking you to do.

Like this quote says, our tendency with rejection is the opposite of this. Our tendency is to contract, but if we can find a way to stay open in the face of rejection, to keep showing up, to be more of ourselves, getting rejected becomes the very best thing that ever happened to us.

It’s how we find our way in the world.

Instead of simply being broken hearted, we become broken open.

What do you really want?

One practical way to stay connected to ourselves and our desires—to our hearts—is to admit what we want, even if we can’t have it right away.

Let me ask you something:

Can you want something or someone that you can’t have right now?
Can you be honest about something you desire that you may never be able to have?
Can you stay connected to who you are and what you want, even thought you don’t have 100% control over achieving it?
Can you trust that you are exactly where you are supposed to be, even if it doesn’t feel like it?
Can you be in your life with your whole heart?

Those who survive the pain and find any measure of happiness are the ones who are able to, in the midst of it all, stay connected to love, to our hearts, to our true selves, who find a way—despite the drama of it all—to silence our ego selves and embrace our true selves, the self that is made from and enveloped in pure love.

Extra Resource:

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
Lovability by Robert Holdern, PhD
Richard Rohr’s Daily Newsletter

The post What to Do About Getting Rejected (So It Doesn’t Crush You) appeared first on Allison Fallon.

The Journey (a Poem)

The Thursday tradition continues—where I share a poem with you that I’ve written, or one I love. The following is a poem I adore by Mary Oliver called “The Journey.” It’s about making the decision to leave behind your excuses and step into your destiny.

I hope you love this poem as much as I have.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations—

though their melancholy

was terrible. It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road was full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice,

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—determined to save

the only life you could save.

The post The Journey (a Poem) appeared first on Allison Fallon.

Body Shaming, Being “Fat” and What A Woman Really Wants

A friend of mine recently found a fake Instagram account that had been started with the sole purpose of making fun of her body. This friend is young, beautiful and probably one of the kindest people you’ve ever met—which isn’t so important to the story, except to point out that even young, beautiful women can’t live up to the impossible standards set by culture.

If you’re a woman, you know this to be true and you know how deep the wounds of these comments go—even if they have zero grounding in reality.

And they just keep coming.

The world as it is has very little use for your womanhood. You are considered a weaker sex and are treated as a sexual object. You are thoroughly dispensable, except for bearing children. Your youth is the measure of your worth, and your age is the measure of your worthlessness. Do not look to the world for your sustenance or for your identity because you will not find them there. The world despises you. God adores you.

—Marianne Williamson

The hard truth is women today face constant and impossible expectations coming at us from every direction. Magazines. Television. The porn industry. Billboards. Not to mention other women and men who have been indoctrinated by the same culture we have.

We think we want to be skinny, that this would solve all of our problems. But this is not what we really want. Men don’t want “skinny” women and women don’t actually want to be skinny.

We’ve been fooled to believe this is what we want.

Holding onto this belief is disconnecting us from ourselves, from our Truth, from our source of our vitality and energy and life.

Women, depression and feeding ourselves.

I have a friend who has been battling an Eating Disorder her entire life. Most of us think Eating Disorders are some “extreme” condition only a few women face, but the statistics say otherwise. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, 40-60% of girls ages 6-12 have already started worrying about body weight.

Oh my goodness, did you catch that? Ages six to twelve.

Whether or not this develops into a full-blown Eating Disorder is a bit difficult to pin down, since eating disorders happen on a spectrum, and since what might be considered “disordered eating” to one person might seem culturally normal to another (a latte for lunch anyone?).

But if my personal experience is any hint, I would say most women in their lifetime will experience some kind of dis-ordered relationship to food.

Disordered=Dysfuctional. Disturbed. Unsettled. Imbalanced. Upset.

And unless most women do some work around their relationship to food, and live with an awareness of the cultural pressures we face, far too many of us will live our lives worried more about what size jeans we wear than what we have to offer to the world.

No freaking wonder women are depressed.

What a woman (really) wants.

My friend who has been struggling with her Eating Disorder for nearly three decades came over to my house the other night, sobbing. I knew how she felt. She was me—ten years ago. I knew how trapped she was, how alone she felt, how this addiction controlled her and how truly terrifying it feels to lose control of yourself.

I also knew that almost anything I could say to her was going to make things worse.

The oversimplifications.

The pithy compliments (“but you’re already so thin…”)

The urges to “just eat”.

A woman who is starving herself is doing so much more than trying to lose weight. She is desperate to matter in a world that has told her there is only one way to matter as a woman. She is determined to take back control of herself in a world that has taken control from her. She is doing what women have been rewarded for since the beginning of time: disappearing.

She is doing everything she knows how to do to own her body again—even if that means destroying it.

So what I did instead of giving her advice was to reach out and put my right hand firmly on her midsection—higher than her belly, but lower than her chest—and my left hand on her back in the same place. I pressed my hands toward each other, so that she could really feel the pressure.




“Do you feel that?” I asked her. “That’s the weight of you, that’s your substance.”

She kept crying and crying, but I knew she knew what I meant—as abstract as it was.

What I meant was that, as women, in a world where we are told what we need to do to matter is to get thinner and thinner and thinner and smaller and smaller, we lose touch with the fact that the most beautiful thing we can do is grow fuller and richer and to feel the full weight of ourselves. The most beautiful thing we can do is to feed ourselves, literally and figuratively, to give ourselves permission to eat, to exist, to show up.




What a woman really wants is to connect with the substance of herself—her dreams, her desires, her divinity, her deep love and essence.

That’s what a woman really wants.

The great misconception of being thin.

I realize how all of this might land coming from someone who is quite naturally thin. I’m tall—5’10’’—and my weight has fluctuated between 120 and 160 for my adult life. My happiest, healthiest weight is around 130. As I write this, I’m about 128. I say all that not because it’s anyone’s business, really, but just to acknowledge the fact that, yes, I’m thin.

And here’s the great misconception about women who are thin: that we are somehow happier with ourselves and our bodies than anyone else. That we do not struggle to look in the mirror without the self-loathing thoughts and silent comments that every other woman has made to herself at some point in her life.

That we do not also pick at our cellulite and grey hair and wrinkles.

Finding flaws in ourselves is what we do as women because it’s what we’ve been trained to do by the world around us, and because if we can focus on our physical flaws, it gives us a tremendous excuse to not do the hard work of actualizing our mental, spiritual and emotional potential.

Being beautiful is easy. It’s on sale at your local department store.

The rest of it can’t be faked. Spiritual growth can’t be purchased.

“Stop worrying about being fat. You are not fat. Or rather, you’re sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring or fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this.”

—Cheryl Strayed

As long as I’m obsessing about how my thighs don’t look quite like they did when I was 23, and wondering how I missed the decade-long break most people get between acne and wrinkles, I don’t have to think about what my actual role in this world really is—since that feels like a much harder question to answer. I don’t have to face my real insecurity, which is that I don’t matter unless I can find a way to win a man’s attention.

It’s all a distraction. A beautiful, brilliant distraction from what really matters—and from what a woman really wants.

What makes a woman matter?

I had a conversation with a friend the other day where I told her I worried I had wasted my life. Here I was, 33 and divorced, wanting a family but not sure if I would ever be able to have one, working hard to focus on what I do have—amazing friends, a beautiful life, a successful career, a litany of new opportunities on the horizon.

But was that enough? Was I enough?

I told her that part of me looked at her life—married-with-four-kids, carpools, soccer games, that sort of thing—and wondered if maybe I was behind somehow, if I had missed my chance, wasted my time with the “wrong” men, if I had wasted my life.

She laughed. Do you know what she said to me? She said:

“Sometimes I look at your life and think the same thing!”

She told me she wondered if she had maybe had too many kids, or started too young, or given up on her dreams. She wondered if she should have spent more time focusing on her own career, and about how her 20’s were over now and there was nothing she could do to get them back. The whole conversation made us both breathe a sigh of relief.

It made me think about how short life truly is, and how the the only thing we can really ask of ourselves is to be in it with our whole hearts.

Do we really want to waste that time worrying about what size dress we wear?

Additionally, the conversation made me realize (again) the tremendous pressure there is for women to be something specific or do something specific in the world. Be thin. Be beautiful. Be a good wife and perfect mother and have the perfect family and the perfect marriage. And while you’re at it, don’t forget about your career. Climb the ladder. Win the title.

It is both ironic and tragic that we are fighting so hard to matter by doing these things when the one thing we need to do matter is the thing we most resist: to stop trying so hard and simply feel the weight of ourselves.

To exist. To eat. To feed ourselves. To show up.

“Beauty is an internal light, a spiritual radiance that all women have but which most women hide, unconsciously denying its existence. What we do not claim remains invisible… Society programs us, through the subliminal messages of popular culture, to believe that we are not truly desirable as women unless we adhere to the current standards of physical beauty…. [Yet] the woman who is truly self-aware knows that her self is a light from beyond this world, a spiritual essence that has nothing to do with the physical world.”

—Marianne Williamson

It isn’t until we abandon the definition of beauty and success the world has thrust upon us that we will be able to embrace the one that was given to us at birth.

This is what a woman really wants.

For the woman who has lost herself.

One of the most difficult times for me to feed myself in recent life was right after my marriage ended. I would talk myself through eating three times a day, but most days I missed the mark. This was not because I looked at myself in the mirror and thought I needed to be thinner. It was because, as hard as I tried not to go there, I wondered daily if this whole thing was my fault.

If you do not believe you deserve something—love, food, whatever—you will not allow yourself to take it, even when it’s right in front of your face.

I’ll never forget my therapist saying to me:

“The reason you are wondering if this is your fault, Ally, is because a woman’s worth in this world is measured mostly by her ability to please the people around her, so she finds herself making them happy, often at her own expense. You have been indoctrinated in this belief from a very young age…”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right. For my entire life this is how I had measured my existence. Was I a good friend? Was I a good daughter? Was I a good wife? Not that there is anything wrong with being these things, but who is the measure of a good wife? Who gets to decide if a daughter is a good daughter or not?

And how dangerous is it for me to measure my worth and value and weight in the world by somebody else’s measuring stick?

A surprising number of women in our world have no idea who they are. And a big part of me wonders if this is because we’ve told them exactly who they need to be: thin, beautiful, successful, put-together, nice, sexy but not too sexy, emotional but not too emotional, a good mom, a good wife, a good daughter, a good sister… the list goes on.

It is difficult to find yourself in a world that has already decided who you are.

What powerful women do.

I have these two friends who are incredible women and are showing up in their lives 100%. They are singers and songwriters and also learning the tell the story of what happened to them—a story some very powerful people would likely prefer they not tell—a story that shakes the very foundations of what our culture wants to believe about women and beauty and value.

Anytime you start to shake foundations, people get nervous.

What will we all hold onto when this whole thing comes crashing down?

But despite the fact that this is a difficult story to tell, they’re doing it.

They’re doing it without any spirit of meanness or vindictiveness. They’re not trying to get what’s “owed to them”. They’re just giving themselves permission to show up in the world. To use their voices. To become themselves and to release other women to do the same. They’re leading away for all of us.

They’re doing it boldly and bravely.

They’re doing it slowly and intentionally, but also with conviction. They’re doing it without knowing exactly how the whole thing is going to turn out. They’re just choosing to step into the beauty of their own story. They’re afraid sometimes, but but they’re doing it afraid. They’re not measuring success by what someone else says about them, but by whether or not they were able to be in this world with their whole hearts.

What would it look like for you to show up in your life like this?

What would it look like for me to show up in mine?

What if women all over the world made the choice to shop playing so small, playing by the rules someone else set for us and to become ourselves? What if stopped trying to be so nice all the time?

What if we stopped starving ourselves and started really growing into ourselves?

That is what a woman—and this world—really wants.

Extra Resources:

This is What A Feminist Looks Like, an article by Barak Obama
Why This Female Nashville Duo is Speaking Out, The Washington Post
How the Media Makes Men Hate Their Bodies Too, Time Magazine
National Eating Disorder Association
A Woman’s Worth by Marianne Williamson
Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted by Polly Young-Eisendrath
Empowering Women by Louise Hay

As always, for more resources from me about women and power, and other subjects I write about, visit my additional resources page.

The post Body Shaming, Being “Fat” and What A Woman Really Wants appeared first on Allison Fallon.

All Of Life Is Poetry (A Poem)

This is a brand new tradition where I share a poem each Thursday—either one I’ve written, or one I love. Today’s poem is one I wrote in response to the fact that people so often say they hate poetry, or they’re scared of it.

It’s called All of Life Is Poetry. I hope you enjoy.

All of Life Is Poetry

All of life is poetry—seemingly

unrelated images, events

strung together like pearls in a

necklace,

so close

but barely touching.

All of life is poetry—

cloudy and confusing,

a squinting at things that

do not make sense

until one day, they do.

All of life is like that—

singing and burning

and ringing

and screaming from the rooftops,

whispering

quietly in the middle of the night,

waking you, at times,

from sleep.

Secrets we keep

hidden from everyone

live in our poems—

the only place they fit.

All of life is poetry,

boring if your eyes are closed

terrifying if they are open,

and you are breathing through it.

Poetry is a gift.

All of life is poetry.

Sing, sing, sing with me.

Sing with it.

The post All Of Life Is Poetry (A Poem) appeared first on Allison Fallon.