My focus for week 1 was to change this significant thing/belief: “When I got married, I became disempowered. That it didn’t matter how hard I work(ed), nothing I would do would be enough or good enough. Especially when it came to financial contribution.”

The story I decided to tell myself was that this happened to be an Olympic-like training it what it REALLY is to believe in yourself more than anyone else and despite current “reality” (current outward results to this point). And that in the past I’d felt like an unstoppable badass in many areas but maybe that was also largely because I was doing things that garnered other people’s praise and approval, especially people I loved and respected. That living with someone who doubts me and the value of what I do has made me be much more clear about what is really important to me, and how to establish boundaries around that in a stronger, more healthy way (still working on this part tho…). That this happened for me to help, heal, and strengthen my most authentic self, to help me love myself even when I mess up, fail, disappoint myself (it’s happened plenty in the past several years so lots of practice), and then learning to do this frees me to love the people I love not because they approve of me or believe in me, but because I want to love them. So, maybe what felt like disempowerment was a stripping away of false power and guiding me towards a more solid foundation – real freedom and power. Badass 2.0 – a work in progress. But a work in progress is way better than believing the disempowered version of the story.

This has led me to the work for week 2 – a specific example of how to continue to love myself and take massive action when I am also feeling deeply disappointed (like my heart aches and my head wants to explode with agony) by my failure to successful achieve a goal – and I’m also feeling very ashamed around it around my husband especially.

The thing I want to change is that I have been wanting to write books since I was a child. I finally started to give it a go in law school and then after law school I spent a lot of time “working on my writing” (I know, you’re cringing at “working on” and my insides hurt thinking about it!). I have since been “trying to write books” for 13 years and have not finished a final draft of one yet (My F for this is :head wants to explode with agony and my heart hurts).

My current story is: “I have been making progress and creating real results the last two years,” and “This is the year I finish one or two!” but then a voice answers, “you’ve been saying that (this is the year!) for years – how is this year going to be any different?” My story is also that I have to sneak this in because I feel so much pressure about making money first so that I can afford to focus on this. My story is that I am a loser (that really bites to write that thought down and admit it) for all this effort but not to take it all the way and finish it.

The facts are: Lifelong desire to write books, stories, poems, screenplays.
I have at least 10,000 hours spent writing in the last 15 years.
I have at least 5 crates/bags full of notebooks, journals. I have thousands of pages on my hard drive.
I have published (not counting endless blog posts here) about 10 pieces of my own writing (essays, an opinion that I wrote for a federal judge/clerkship, short articles).
Three were attributed to me.

And then this is all the further I’ve been able to get because, I know I’m repeating myself, but my heart really hurts over this.

Do I stay with the hurt? I am having a hard time getting to the story I even WANT to tell, much less one I believe.

By the way, I knew this was weighing on me but I had no idea just how much until I started to do the homework. Thank you!