Advice

When I told my Uncle that I got engaged, his advice was this:

My 2 biggest things in a relationship are being able to speak your truth and have it be heard, and being able to hear your partners truth. The rest is all icing on the cake.

I've been thinking about that a lot. It put to words something that had been floating around in my mind for a while. M. is very good at this. I am not. I have a tendency to be quite selfish. I tell him he needs to open up and tell me what he's feeling and what he wants, all the while figuring out how to convince him that what I want is best. I wasn't even aware of it for the longest time until he finally said something to me about it. Now, I'm trying really hard to just listen and to understand that his needs are valid even if I don't understand them. It's hard. I never really had to that before. It was always whatever I wanted or thought was best for me, and now it's what's best for both of us, and finding a compromise that is best for both of us. I'm learning to sacrifice some of myself so he can be in a better place, learning to find a balance, learning to live as part of something bigger than just me, learning how to form my own family.

Mondo Beyondo List

In an attempt to fight my feelings of becoming stagnant, I wrote down my Mondo Beyondo list the other day in hopes that writing it down will bring me one step closer to accomplishing something:

• Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro
• Build or renovate a house
• Become mostly fluent in another language
• Visit every continent
• Explore as many countries as possible
• Sell a piece of artwork
• Heal someone
• Become a mother

Sure enough, when talking to M. about how I felt like I was stagnating, and that we were becoming a boring couple, he suggested we learn a foreign language together. Of course, we both want to learn completely different languages, his all involving learning a language with a different alphabet (which, from past experience, I do not do well with...let's just say it involves throwing books across the room in frustration when attempting to learn Greek). So we've tentatively decided to learn French. (southern France for our honeymoon perhaps?!?)

So what's your list? If you could do anything with your life, no limitations, what would it be?

Goal

My goal is to start writing regularly. I think it will be good for me on all kinds of levels: personal, spiritual, creative. I've been feeling trapped and stagnant lately, as well as my depression returning, and I'm determined to not just sit here and let it happen anymore.