Happy Friday everyone! What a week. This was my first week back at school and let me tell ya, this has been the longest week ever. Not in a bad, “I want this to end” kind of way, but in a “I can’t believe I have only had 4 days of classes” kind of way. As many of you know, this is my last year of school. If you have been keeping up with the blog for a while, you also know that last year was ROUGH. I wrote a lot about having a positive attitude, keeping perspective, and the power of optimism. However, most days I struggled. I was so overwhelmed, anxious, and stressed. I think that most of my blog entries were reminders for myself more so than reminders to you all. Don’t get me wrong, last year wasn’t a bad year, it was just a year of challenging growth.

By now, I am sure you are all caught up on my crazy, unplanned summer. If not, I will give a super brief sparknotes version. I started my summer in working in Colorado. I moved out there at the end of May and started working right away. Now, I LOVE the mountains. I am a mountains over beach gal every time (not that you can’t love both) so this was a dream. I was able to stay for just about a month and then had to move home due to some scary and unexpected heart problems. I was told that I was supposed to do nothing. In order for my heart to heal, I needed to rest – like all the time. I hated this. I had all the time in the world with my own thoughts, and that was not what I wanted.

However, I am a firm believer that God’s plan is always better than mine. So, while I was at home, resting and thinking, God was working on me. As previously mentioned, the past winter semester was not great. This summer, as I was reflecting back on the semester I just wrapped up, I realized that my schedule wasn’t any busier than schedules I have had in the past. Sure, there was some circumstances that I had never dealt with, but it really shouldn’t have been that overwhelming for me. So, what was the deal? The deal was that I was not in a great headspace. It wasn’t my schedule that was making my life stressful, it was my own anxiety and insecurity that made it stressful, and seemingly impossible.

This summer was essential to the preparation of my mental state for the current year. This is my last year of college and then I have to adult. I’ll keep my sappy senior moments to a minimum. The Madeline that ended the school year last year is not the same Madeline that walked into the school year this year. This summer forced me to look at myself, my life, and what I was letting rule over me. What I found was not a person I liked or wanted to be. My insecurities were affecting my relationships with others and my relationship with myself. I knew if I wanted the best senior year I could get, I had to get it together. ~Spoiler Alert~ it is not all together BUT it is certainly getting closer.

What did this look like? Great question. First of all, I had to fall in love with myself. I needed to appreciate all that I am, what I have to offer, and all that I am worthy of (not easy, still working on it). I couldn’t expect to devote my time and attention to others if I couldn’t even devote a little attention to myself. Of course, this blog entry is about to tie back into the underlying theme of this whole blog, GRACE. Ugh I’ll probably write this every time I post. We have got to get better at giving ourselves grace. I hope you all are better at it than I am. The second thing that needed to change was recognition of the good days. I have naturally been a positive person my whole life. Until recently, I was consistently a half-full kind of gal. Looking back, I had lost this optimism and replaced it with worry, doubt, and fear. I was being weighed down by the bad days. At the same time, I was making every day a bad day by simply failing to recognize where the good was. Step three was that I needed to stop relying on anyone but myself for happiness. Your happiness cannot be dependent on anyone else. It is not fair to you, and it is definitely not fair to them. Recognition of these three steps, and I was back to boogying.

It is not an overnight process. It took me moving all the way to Denver, having my heart freak out, moving all the way back home, and a lot of initial loneliness for me to even be able to recognize that change needed to happen. Change is not linear, but growth is. What I mean is that your process might take a lot of back and forth, good and bad, up and down days, but every single curve on the map is pushing you forward (that is where the linear part comes in). So, for the umpteenth time, give some grace. Give grace to yourself as you grow and give grace to others as they grow.