and now for something completely different......you!!!!

Coming back home to live after 28 years away gave me an interesting perspective. I can remember pulling onto the Carlisle Pike in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on a cold winter night as I drove the final 10 miles of my journey. I panicked. I caught a glimpse of the awkward, insecure teen I was all those years ago and wondered if all the improvements and polish I had put on myself the last three decades would successfully pass through the time warp I was hallucinating to arrive safely in the next station of my life. Throughout the years, I had numerous opportunities to make broad changes every few years in my life, personally, professionally, and even geographically. This meant I got to pack up my experience bag and start anew at each juncture. People didn’t know what or who I was in my previous “life” so they probably assumed I had always been the person they saw. Truth be told, I was evolving at each and every turn. When I left corporate America to return home and run the family business, I had a fairly extensive bag of tricks that I was proud of. Yet before I could say, “Mom, I’m home!” the metamorphosis process started yet again. This time it was highly accelerated. Not only was I meeting a vast number of new people, I was reading personal development material at an unprecedented rate. Most of this was a direct result of my new job as a publisher. I got to spend work time reading, writing, editing and publishing material about what we all strive to become.  Many people refer to this process as “reinventing” yourself and for many years I thought that is what I was doing.  I was making alterations based on what worked and what didn’t. But in reality, I was getting much closer to the truest version of my own self. And that is the only place where one finds happiness, contentedness, and autonomy. So don’t beat yourself up over not becoming what you wanted to be. Everything you need to excel in life is still waiting right inside of you. When you get to this point you’ll realize that the string of shattered dreams and painful heartaches scattered along the way were all there to make you the most powerful version of yourself.