Have you ever climbed stairs?  When I used to work out with my favorite trainer, he loved to make me work out on this stair machine at the gym.  I hated that machine.  I would climb and climb and never go anywhere, I would just be profoundly sweaty in the end, even after just about 3 minutes.  Even though externally I didn’t get anywhere, internally, I gained lot in terms of fitness (thanks Chip). Stairs are hard work. It takes a lot of effort.  Making huge changes like developing a new identity, or even small ones requires steps and those steps feel like climbing a staircase, and it is hard.  I sweat and breathe hard and want to stop and take a break, but just like on that stair machine, if I stop, I go right back down to the bottom.

I read this great blog last night.  It was called Life Divided by Zero. All I could think of is how smart and creative the author is and I wondered, where to hell is she now??  Because none of those words felt consistent with how I am behaving. I have been going down the stairs, or at the very least trying to rest on the step I have gained without going further.

I have realized that I am trying to make a huge change and transition in my life.  There are steps to doing that.  Steps require climbing.  I climbed to the top of step one which was figuring out who I wanted to be and pictured it, visualizing my life as I want it to be.  Then, I made a mistake, I stayed comfortably on that step, magically just waiting for my life to be transformed.  Yeah, it doesn’t work that easily. When I reread the words I had written that “I had to let go of all I am in order to become who I want to be”, it hit me.  I need to climb to the next step.  I know who I want to be and I can visualize it.

Step two, I have to figure out what is holding me back. When I went through my physical stuff last spring, I allowed myself a set amount of space (8 boxes) and then I picked up each thing I owned and asked myself a question: Is this important enough to go in one of those 8 boxes?  From the answer to that question I made three piles: the things I was sure I wanted to keep, the things I was sure I wanted to discard that weren’t working for me anymore, and the things I wasn’t sure of. Then I packed what I wanted to keep, discarded those items that didn’t work, and did a second culling of the “not sure of” pile. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.

Just like when I got rid of my physical stuff, I have to go through my internal self. What are the internal and external barriers to becoming the person I want to be? What am I still clinging to in my old life, why am I clinging to it, what purpose is it still serving me?  I have to examine my internal beliefs, attitudes, self-talk, memories, and all the things that are barriers to moving on.  It isn’t just giving up stuff, it is giving up resting in the dysfunction I have been living with in order to keep from doing the work needed to become who I want to be.

This step is even harder than the step where I gave up all my physical stuff.  This step requires going through all that emotional baggage I carry around with me packed up nice and tight in my internal Sampsonite. I have to open it up, expose it, and go through the mental exercise of examining each piece and separating it those same three piles: those things which work for me, those things which I need to let go of, and those things which I am not certain of.  Then letting go of that which I am sure isn’t working and then going through another cull and really getting to the minutiae of the parts that I am not certain of.

If I want to be the girl with the guts and courage who could write this blog, if I really want to BE her and not just talk about being her, and if I really want the life I have visualized, I have to go through the internal work.  Change only comes with the internal processing to make the internal consistent with the external.  This is gonna suck.