Crossroads In Life- Choose the Journey To Adult Sovereignty Today

Hi! Welcome! Thanks for visiting. This blog is dedicated to those that have fought a lifetime battle for weight loss while managing the challenges of mental health issues and overcoming family trauma. I have spent nearly my entire life with these struggles myself. Still I have never stopped dreaming of a place in the future where I could be comfortable in my own skin physically and have a peacefulness in my mind, even when a doubt that would ever be possible. My path to this blog has been decades in the making through life experience, self-education through books, videos and seminars and hardest of all self-exploration through therapy. I hope you will join me and we can learn and grow together towards a more tranquil headspace pointed towards the life you always wanted. It is my desire that this shared community space will be used to either help you start taking the first steps toward a life that is true and authentic to you or give you more fuel on your road trip to a better you.

WARNING: This road trip will not easy at points; there will be bad songs on the radio, crummy weather, flat tires, and the occasional breakdown.  All of those things are OK, because the payoff is the parts of the journey were the sky is bright and blue, with the window down and your best buds by your side singing your favorite songs heading towards adventure.

With the belief in my heart that you are here at this blog because, you want positive CHANGE in your life! I am ready for this road trip.  So grab your keys and let’s get on the road!

Below is a graphic which serves as a visual tool of how each one of the factors of life move us toward change as individuals. This graphic will help to set in context the foundations of this blog. Now it is critical to note while progression of time is constant each of the other factors nature, nurture and movement all are best illustrated on a scale, shown in the second graphic. The pivotal feature to remember about the life progression scale is that it is constantly flexing moving up and down within all the various aspects of our lives. All the same, we are working and striving to have more facets of our life on the right side of the scale rather than the left.

Vehicle Type, Make and Model

Referring to the life factor graphics bottom circle of nature it is evident that there is nothing that we can do to alter the DNA structure that we have been given. As humans, we all are born at a certain physical weight whether it is considered large, average or small for the weight of a newborn. It is no secret that a huge number of factors will contribute to our overall growth and body weight and whether we feel comfortable with it, but the feeling of a healthy body can be boiled out into two major categories: nature vs nurture.  For as we grow and mature through the human lifecycle from infants to senior adults the size which we are born at may have little to no impact on the size we grow into as adults.  For as we know, there is no shortage of individuals that are born at the lower end of the weight spectrum that grow to be tall, full bodied sturdy adults, as there are those large baby’s that grow into petite, thin framed adults. You yourself may be one of those individuals. I myself was born at 6 lbs. and 7 oz, quite normal, since the weight range of a healthy newborn is between 5.5 to 10 pounds, with the average normal infant birth rate in the US is 7 lbs. and 5 oz, according to University of Michigan Health.

The physical weight we are born at is of course destined to increase with the laws of evolution. Ideally, we would grow until we reach a size that is healthy both mentally and physically comfortable for us. I would like to note that this size determination is not necessarily related to any stringent insurance, government standard or social media ideas that have been used to define healthy and or beautiful. It is clear that all humans desire a healthy disease free mentally and physically painless body to grow old into. For the sake of this blog, a healthy weight is one that allows your body to freely move about and you are unencumbered by mental dialog that results in maladaptive and unhealthy behavior, which only serve to harm you mentally and physically.

Destination 18

The constant of time moving ahead and the inertia of change are elements of the lifecycle of all living things. Time moves at the same rate for all. All the same, the four elements of nature, nurture, movement and change can have a drastically different feeling to the undeviating march of time. We have all had experience when we were having a great day and it seemed to be over in mere minutes. On the other hand we all have had rough days when the clock seemed to move backwards, and not in that magical history changing way. The inclusion of time in the life factors scale is so primary because time goes hand and hand with both our internal and external perspective which serve to shape our movements towards or away from the change necessary to feel mentally balanced and physically agile.

Vehicle Inspection: Check the Nurture Gauge

As we maneuver towards adulthood, whether the path is easy or more challenging, there will be millions of crossroads that will push us in one direction or another based on four forces that can be both internal and external forces, which are nature, nurture, time and movement. The sum of these factors equal change. Elementally, these forces provide each of us with the foundations of how we will grow up and interact with the world and use our energy for either positivity or negativity towards ourselves and others. In an ideal species model, everyone would have both the biological make up and internal spirt to inherently want to take action for good and do no harm.

Exploring the idea of nurture, each one of us as we grow and mature will often hear an external voice or sense through non-verbal ques that we have an undesirable physical body type or trait. These that voices and or ques may come from within our family unit or from somewhere outside of it. Once a child connects with the idea that for the first time there is something wrong with them that child is at a crossroad each and every time this feeling arises. The intersection that child can be found is at the corner of nature and nurture. It is at this intersection the good enough nurturing of the child can be the difference between arriving at destination 18 either the well adapted or with poor coping skills that prove to make everyday life quite challenging. When the nurturing is good enough the child has traveled a path that was a relatively smooth car ride with a few potholes along the way, but with plenty of repair shops along the route for rest, food and repairs as needed. On the other hand, with poor or absent nurturing the road trip to 18 will seem as though the child has to make a cross-country trip by walking with no shoes, few rest stops offering a little comfort all while playing a game of beat the clock.

On the road

When we look at movement in our lives, it has a nested definition of both literal movement and progression towards our hopes, wishes and dreams. For a large number of us during our preschool years the path is very linear and focused learning the building blocks that will lead us to grade school. Next when we begin school we will start to cognitively grasp the back and forth movement of progress and setback.  Moving along towards high school, those movements become more deliberate as we search to find what we are driving towards. At the same time, this is a period for many young people that they begin to cognitively connect with reasons that make them move away from some life choices and towards others. Nevertheless, during school age there is a natural successive cadence and migration towards the entering college or the workforce, which is very absent beyond the walls of formal education.

Beyond 18

Congratulations! So the government says you are an adult, your parents or caregiver may even say you’re an adult. However, when the clock struck midnight on your 18^th birthday I’m very sure that like most of us you did not feel instantaneously and drastically different. Much less have all the required skills to speed down the highway of life making every decision perfectly, I know that definitely was not the case for me.  Now I don’t want to make light of the naturally challenging process of moving from the structured world of formal education or imply that there is a perfect way to conduct your life.

I would like to define a perfect life; it is one where you are living out your own hopes and dreams and not those of some caregiver or parental figure and hiding yourself because of fear, shame or concern for disappointing others. For a life which you do not make authentically, awkwardly, creatively and wholly yours is tragic and robs the world of positive chain reactions for good.  It took me nearly twenty years to come to this realization through research, self-exploration, therapy and the love and support of my tribe. As you enter this intersection of change for yourself I hope to be a source of comfort, wisdom and force for positive change in your life. Grab your keys and let’s get this road trip on the way towards your selfhood.

Thanks for taking a detour to my blog! Hope to see you soon.