I had a conversation this week regarding my journey of finding passion or being excited about life. I remembered a time when I found excitement uncomfortable, I did not express passion for anything or excitement.

I lost my freedom to be excited when I got let down almost every single time something excited me. This is how the light gets extinguished in a persons life. As a child our eyes light up for so many things and the people around us let us down, and slowly but surely we lose the ability to just trust something enough to be excited.

A few years ago I realized that I had no fire burning inside of me anymore. My light had been put out and I was really just walking through this life in a comfort zone that was not healthy or moving me in a positive direction. I was so numbed to pain that excitement became too risky. Too many people had let me down and too many negatives had dampened my spirit. However, it was not all doom and gloom because once I realized that I had no fire burning for my life, I began to search for things that will ignite a flame in my belly once again. The process of finding ones passion is a very scary process and it involves letting go of many protective mechanisms that I thought were keeping me safe but instead were keeping me imprisoned. The topic of caging oneself is a very interesting one because nobody is really stopping us from living our best lives but us. We stop ourselves by telling ourselves we cannot do it or should not do it and will not do it. Whatever it may be, we don’t give life a chance because we are too afraid of the possibility of pain that comes along with the risk of excitement.

One example is that I have only recently started celebrating my birthdays properly and by recently I mean +/- 10 years out of my 40 years I have celebrated properly. This began not because I chose to celebrate but because the people around me saw a need to create light for me on this day and saw how I shied away from any light that was shone on me. I had to learn to accept love, because I did not trust love. I had to learn how to be celebrated because I never truly celebrated myself. It sounds really sad, and truthfully it was. I’m not saying I didn’t have people that wanted to celebrate me, because I really did, I’m just saying that I had trouble trusting that process and allowing those people to celebrate me without caution because they were unsure of how I would react.

Pain drowns passion, but once you begin to heal the pain, your passion will have room to resurface and create the flame in your soul that lights up your eyes. Once I made the decision to try, to push myself past the comfort of my pain, to allow myself to feel pain freely with an understanding that it is not forever and that from that experience growth will come. One small risk at a time, one small step at a time. But you have to do the work, you have to try to understand why you hold back and heal that pain, feel that pain and move past it or you will be stuck in the realm of doom and gloom with no excitement for the rest of your existence.

I am happy to say that if I can break free of this dark space then so can you. I started to try new things, like dancing, and I started this blog, I started writing more and I changed my career, I even changed my mind about myself. I realized that if I don’t give myself the time of day then who will? It took a complete change to wake me up, it took an entire community to show me that I have really been living in darkness. I give credit to the dancing community for showing me that I can push myself through discomfort, I can trust some people and not everyone is going to let me down. I had made lots of progress before dance, but it was in this group that my eyes were really opened. How they celebrate you, how they embrace you and you become a part of their family as you are. I tried to keep my distance, I really did , but it was impossible, there was just too much love and light that got thrown my way for me to lose that battle, and now I have a group of people that I can call family and with my dance family I find myself thrown into so much excitement that I could never imagine even living how I used to live. This is an example of how putting yourself out in the world and trying new things can bring so much joy if you just allow it.

My next challenge is personal excitement, for my intimate space, trusting people with my heart and allowing people to be close enough to me to allow the process of trust to excite me. Trust and me are a work in progress but in writing these messages to you and sharing myself with you I am finding that with trusting myself and my very own choices that I trust more because now I trust my choices in the people that I have allowed in my intimate space.

So what I’m saying is… trust yourself enough to pursue your inner desires for yourself. Allow yourself to be excited about your ideas even if people have let you down, you can still pursue your dreams. They will try to dampen your spirits but will only succeed if you let them. You have to push through the pain and fight for your dreams, you have to chase after your passion and you have to absolutely believe that you can do all things that you wish to do. You have to believe in yourself, because you should be your number one fan. You have to remove all things and people that create doubt in yourself and you must surround yourself with people who want to see you succeed and want to add fuel to your fire. Those that are trying to put it out have no place in your life.

Find what excites you and do more of that… Try new things, find new adventures every chance you get.

Thank you for being a part of my journey and adding value to my passion by following my journey.

Tammy