Week 17: Share your favorite quality about yourself

My favorite quality is not my ability to keep up with weekly blog posts.

After returning from our trip to Lisbon and Barcelona, I feel like I've been tiptoeing through miles of sinking sand. I'm trying to run as fast as I can to solid ground, but every time I pause to breathe, I sink a little.

If you've ever worked in (or been a student of) higher education, you know that those last two weeks of the semester are brutal. They're brutal for everyone involved, and after a beautiful ten days of exploration, intrigue, and even relaxation in other countries, I returned to a chaos I know well.

Once we overcame the semester, new pressures appeared as it became abundantly clear to me that the U.S. of A. doesn't care about women, and wants our bodies under the government’s control. This sinking sand hurts. I'm waist-deep in it.

Week 17's blog should have been written nine weeks ago. But here I am... digging my way back out and trying to find my footing.

One of my favorite things about myself is that I know who I am. It took me 35 years to get here, but I'm confident in myself. If someone doesn't like me, then that's on them. It's their problem and not mine.

I have spent my entire life being "good," and I mean literally striving for perfection and security in a way that held me back from experiencing a lot of what life has to offer. As I reflected on this "goodness" I embedded in every aspect of my life, I realized that I did it all to prove something to everyone else. I never once needed to prove this to myself. Finally, finally, finally, I've accepted myself for who I am. Still "good," just now by my own measure of the word.

I remember praying for confidence as a teenager. Night after night, I would beg to be brave, but this is just not a quality that comes naturally to me. I question every single move I make. Somehow, thankfully, in the past few years, it has clicked. I thought I needed to be prettier, smarter, stronger, faster, etc. to be confident in myself. I thought I needed others to give me validation in order to be confident.

Do you want to know how I found my confidence? I cut out everything that made me feel less than. I cut out everything that I looked to for validation. I unfollowed people to whom I constantly compared myself. Basically, if I felt like something, someone, somewhere was in my way, I let it/them go. Unfortunately, in my youth, cutting things out wasn't really an option. But this is one of the perks of adulthood.

I also really like my hair.