“We must dig patiently with our pens to excavate our real selves.”  Sarah Ban Breathnach

It does take time to discover who we really are, doesn’t it?  Or maybe we know all along, but we deny it or ignore it out of fear.

“Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.”  Patricia Hampl

I never liked myself growing up.  I always wished I was more like someone else.  I wanted someone else’s hair, someone else’s body, someone else’s athletic talents, someone else’s “coolness.”  I always felt awkward, like I didn’t fit in.  As an older adult, I learned that my shyness was sometimes taken as an aloofness by others.  Boys I had crushes on were actually afraid to approach me.  I guess the joke was on me.  I wish I could go back to that young girl and tell her that she was just fine, just the way she was.  Teach her that by being so shy, she was robbing herself of so much.

“Faith Baldwin tells us: ‘Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.’  The delay of our dreams does not mean that they have been denied.”  SBB

So the teenage me missed out on some things due to her lack of confidence.  But the beauty of life is, I am still ending up where God had planned for me to be all along.  It may have taken me longer to get here, and there may have been some painful detours along the way, but the final destination is the same.  Here I am in 2014, transforming my life with Simple Abundance and becoming the woman that I was always intended to be.  Doesn’t get much better than that, does it?

Shalom!

P.S.  If you are new to these posts, Transforming 2014 is an online book club of sorts.  We are reading Sarah Ban Breathnach’s book, Simple Abundance:  A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, together so that 2014 can be a transformative year for all of us.  Use the comment section to inspire fellow readers or share your difficulties so that we can support you.  You can find Sarah’s book on Amazon, and it is available in the Kindle version as well!