Catch up

Hey! Cynthia here. How you doing? It's been a while. So I wanted to check in and just talk about some of the things that have been going on. And some of the observations that I've had. And to again continue to share some tidbits and insights in helping everyone to learn to move out of these spaces that we've created that we think are protective. But what they really do is they box us in. And so I wanted to share with you kind of a little bit, you know, from the first perspective of, you know, what's been going on for me. It was, you know, going into the past weekend, it was really, really interesting that I noticed that my mood had switched, you know, continuing to be— we're on the last day of full national lockdown rules here in the UK. The first step in opening things up happens tomorrow. Now I don't have any people in my bubble, so it doesn't really change my life, to be quite honest, other than, you know, if folks wanted to start getting together, that would create opportunity that didn't previously exist in terms of meeting up outside, going for a coffee, etc. So the whole idea is that when you go into those spaces and you start to realize where you're at, like what your mental position, what your emotional state is, you know, I mean, that comes with practice. And that comes with really doing the deep work on yourself. And I can't stress enough that, you know, much like the first step of acceptance, you know, is the preparation. For acceptance. And like all of the steps, you know, the step where you work on acceptance of yourself, or you work on acceptance with your, your quote, what I call it, kind of your local community, your friends, your family, your immediate co-workers, things like that. And then you go to, you know, a larger group once you have that kind of built to a point where you can then more comfortably move to more to the societal level. And again, you don't have to be LGBT or anything else. It's just simply where you feel you aren't fitting in, that you're not, you know, kind of a part of that conversation. It's, you know, how do we move? And again, it's not for the marginalized person to move. It's for those that are doing the marginalization to move. The oppressors, right? So learning kind of where we're at in the process. And of course you can oppress yourself. This whole idea that you limit yourself, you box yourself in, is a concept that builds on that. So, you know, just understanding when we are aware of where we are at. And we look to the process of acceptance to kind of just go, "Yep, that's where I'm at." And then not to berate yourself like, you know, "Oh my gosh!" Like, you know, "How you do it?" What are you going to do to move from that point? Like, think of it as a place of awareness. And when you become aware, the question is, "What are you going to do next?" And really the process of acceptance allows us to more gently move through that and open ourselves up to accepting ourselves, and through accepting ourselves to ask others to accept us. So I challenge you to take a look at yourself. And if you're not used to it, take time, be gentle with yourself. But you need to start and you need to start in building it. We've had, you know, over a year now of this kind of lockdown process. Hopefully as vaccines start to get rolled out in different places, people in communities start to open up. And of course, we've— if you're like me, you've, you've built your own new box, um, the box that, you know, not comfortable around people. Um, I haven't had to be for a year. I haven't had to deal with it. So while it seems that that's something that you would crave to get back, it's also a box that we've built because We had this concept of, you know, fear and protection for our health that we need to move beyond. So as we move out of it, we need to be cautious. We need to be careful. We need to be careful with ourselves, but we need to be cautious, you know, with our health. And we need to just gently move into the space. But I ask you to look to acceptance as one of the ways that you can Learn that process, and if you do that, you truly will have an enriched life. Thank you for listening.