January 1, 2022, came, and I expected…
… that we’d start home renovations in January, and it would last 3 weeks.
… that we’d drop Lily off to boarding school, and she’d return well-behaved.
… to resume both my podcasts (Yvette, Unplugged! + HMAY?!) at the top of the year.
… to finally have the discipline necessary to achieve the fitness goals I have for myself.
… my locs to be developing beautifully.
However, January 1, 2022, came, and what happened was…
…our home renovations took 10 weeks.
…we were scammed by the boarding school, and pursued an alternate method for training.
…we had to tear down our set for our in-home podcast to get the floors done and we’re now in limbo on getting a new office where we will eventually record the podcasts.
…my emotional eating status is on high, and I’m still thoroughly addicted to sugar.
… after 55 days on the loc journey, I had to comb them out. However, shout out to @JDivaStyles for her knowledge of hair and helping me to do right by my journey. That’s a whole topic to talk about in and of itself. To be continued…
An expectation is a noun defined as, “a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.” I know I am not the only one who has been left feeling disappointed because of my expectations, right?! The thing about expectations in my life is that I have high expectations of myself, and further put those same type of expectations on others. As I typed out that last sentence it seems obvious that’s not fair. However, in practice that’s not a truth I’ve internalized in the past. I recently had a conversation with a very wise woman who helped me to workshop through some of the relationships in my life, and to place them more appropriately in certain buckets. In this conversation, we were specifically talking about friendships. However, I do think there’s a version of the exercise that could be implemented for family and professional relationships as well. Anyway, by placing certain friendships into specific buckets I’ve come to see how much lighter I am because my understanding of the relationship reduces or more appropriately places the expectation of other.
In addition to the expectations listed above, I expected I would be sending a weekly email and writing a weekly blog. However, being displaced from our home has kind of thrown me completely off. I mistakenly expected that we’d be able to live in our home while the work was being done, but as a family of 6 (plus a puppy) and who homeschools I quickly discovered that was naïve of me. Between January and February, the kids and I slept in our own beds 8 days. We stayed in 3 different Airbnb’s while we had the work done in our home. I did not expect for us to be getting the entire downstairs re-floored, but that happened too (among other unforeseen circumstances) which contributed to the extended time. Long story short, we discovered water damage in our kitchen which led to new floors all over. I mean might as well, right?!
Nonetheless, we are finally back in our home. Praise the Lord! Still, so many things are out of place, and I just can’t seem to muster up the energy it takes to bring things back to order. My expectation is that I would be able to do that on top of all the other day to day responsibilities that exist in my life, however I have resolved I need to extend more grace to myself in this season.
As our bathrooms (and eventually our floors) were being demoed, it created a lot of dust, noise, and even further discovery about what existed behind and in between the walls of our home. Therapy has kind of served as a demolition of sorts. In my individual therapy over the past couple of years, we discovered there indeed was a wall. We’ve discussed the different purposes that walls serve, because I see myself as being completely open and vulnerable with others. However, walls don’t just keep people out. They also uphold structures. I’m not going to get too deep into that at this time, but my wall was upholding a structure. Nonetheless, it needed to come down and after a 3-week intensive back in October 2021 it came down. I experienced my own internal demolition. The dust that settled was heartache that I’d hidden behind the wall for decades and now the noise of it is emotionally consuming. In some ways parallel to the home renovations there has been an internal renovation happening within me.
What I’ve come to understand is I have no control over my own internal renovation. I’ve come to experience the Holy Spirit in a way that makes God even more real to me in this season. For years I’ve had this false sense of control only to realize I really DO NOT want control (and that I never had it, LOL). I’ve come to exist in the palm of my Heavenly Father’s hands and that’s the only place I’ve been able to find comfort, peace, and joy in this season. The Psalm says, “Be still, and know I am God.” I was recently encouraged to be still. To sit in the heartache for a while rather than trying to fix it. Allow myself to feel what I’m feeling rather than trying to hold up the wall that presents a false sense of having it together in spite of. In my stillness, I have faith that God is rebuilding foundations, putting up new drywall, etc. to get the glory in the end. What I’ve been able to observe in our home renovations is that things get messy and sometimes ugly before the beauty can be appreciated.
It’s interesting because I’ve sat down several times in the past couple of months to try to write, and this is the first time something has come free flowing. Maybe it’s because I’ve always only been able to share about what I’m experiencing… what I’m processing through. I’m going to continue to show up in this space, because sharing is caring. I do believe God has given me and my family the capacity to share in order to be an encouragement to others. I do not have it all together, but I know the One Who holds it all together. Specifically, in letting go of some of the high expectations of myself the weight is off me and on God. Just as putting certain relationships in their appropriate buckets made me feel lighter, relieving myself of the things I have no control over does the same thing. Maybe you’re in a season where you need to let go and let God. It’s not so cliché when you actually do it.
Xo!
