working with what is

realized anew that of the many social skills i picked up from my birth family, the one that was drummed into me was the importance of spending my time, energy & resources doing things with no expectation of any sort of benefit or return from others i took that a step further - that getting anything of emotional or financial value for what i did somehow diminished the very value of what i'd done.

there are a lot of messages received through my early years that might have been intended or not, could even have never been sent (so many of my memories were picked up elsewhere & attributed by me to the important others in my life or were the result of an utter misunderstanding of something said), but this one i know for sure was sent & resent.

such a dumb message!

i believe that parents & families should send & live the message that we should all value what we do, expect a sense of value from others - emotional & financial, when appropriate - and allow ourselves to feel a sense of disappointment when we get nothing in return, without allowing us to be deterred in taking future similar action.

i believe that parents & families should do everything possible to instill a sense of positive value within each other by modeling those behaviors, in their actions to others & in their expectations of themselves.

and i am forever grateful that i knew, deeply on some almost visceral plane, that what i experienced with family social skills was off kilter. knew from an incredibly young age. didn't know what was messed up, but pretty sure something was.

we all get the earlier lives that we get. it's tempting to think that others got a better break with family situations or life opportunities, but the fact is that we get what we get as our personal building materials & wasting any time envying something that might not even be is foolish. work with what is. those are your building materials. if they are somehow sub par or warped or unusable, ditch them & start out with new stuff. but use all the building lessons learned over the years - they're in there. use the ones that work, not the ones that produced unstable structures. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that what each of us is here to do is not do stuff that's detrimental to ourselves or others and to invest ALL our time, ALL our resources, ALL our energies into creating something sound that benefits us & ideally all others.

start out by working with what is.