"You can't break a person who's not afraid to eat alone"

My therapist shared a video with me from A Coral which you can find on Instagram here.   She is an entrepreneur with a large following including several of my Instagram followers.  But more importantly to this post, her message hit home.

As I listened to her I walked through my life going all the way back to my childhood continuing through all that I experienced in the last couple years.  I felt my own evolution as I internalized her words.

I could see myself as a little girl swinging on the swings at the babysitter's when I was five or six and then sitting on the rock I named "Mucky Island" as I got just a little bit older and roamed the neighborhood.  It was that young I was already learning to "face the silence" and "sit with loneliness."

"They've already learned how to clap for themselves.  You can't bring down somebody who stopped waiting for validation."  I found another journal with some writings in it this morning as I scrambled to find a notebook with more empty pages for the trip and in that notebook are writings from maybe about a decade ago where I reflected on my childhood.  In those entries, I talked about how little my parents praised or paid much attention to my accomplishments because they were always focused on my sister's struggles.  I wrote that I learned to feel proud of myself instead of waiting for my parents to notice.  I learned to clap for myself and validate myself.

In the workforce, as a reliable, intelligent, hard-working employee, it is so easy to get overlooked and dumped on as managers focus all their energy on their problematic employees and on getting the work done.  They forget about the woman down the hall who has never missed a deadline or turned in subpar work.  They just assume she will always be there, reliable, consistent, producing quality work.  And although I sometimes crave some external validation - some sort of acknowledgment, the absence of it doesn't deter me.

In the same sense, I didn't need my spouse to be a source of validation because I could provide that for myself so it was easy to overlook when he rarely provided it.  

"You can't bring down someone .... who turned their pain into power, who turned their wounds into wisdom."  This is the last year and a half in a nutshell.

And her opening line, "You can't break a person who's not afraid to eat alone" is a beautiful visual of who I am becoming.

I don't know if I agree with her though that I won't ever fall.  But I do know that when I do, I will pick myself back up again just as I have done over and over throughout my life.