You are not junk on the side of the road

You are not junk on the side of the road.

How many times have you driven down a highway or road and seen a car left on the side? Sometimes they are marked with a sign or a flag, sometimes they look a little busted. What’s always clear is that this car was left behind. Someone left it on the side of the road, for whatever reason, and it's still sitting there to this day.  This car was, in essence, abandoned.

No longer cared for. No longer watched over. Left to the elements, for anyone and anything to hurt it, move it, or pick its carcass apart for their own use. 

Do you treat yourself like this left-behind car? 

Your first reaction may be to say, “Nope, WTF, Sarah?” But I’m asking you a legit question.

Every day you drive a highway. (Not literally, but metaphorically.) You wake up, start your day and drive all around, and, at the end of the day, you park your car and call it quits for the evening. Every day, your life is one big drive. 

Along the drive, you make lots of choices. Where to turn. When to stop for gas. Use your hazard lights, where to switch lanes, etc. The result from every one of these choices can either be to keep you driving safely, or for you to be injured. In some extreme cases, you could hurt your car and have to pull over to the side of the road and leave it behind while you get help … 

The choices you make all day long either assure you drive safely or set you up for danger, to have a car accident complete with an abandoned vehicle. 

Let’s talk about actual life now.

Every day you make choices that either set you up for safety, or leave you open to danger. The hazzard can be from others or from ways that you are potentially hazardous to yourself. At the end of the day, you can either fall into bed having spent the day being productive and good to yourself … or have spent the entire day making choices that are potentially hazardous for you. Choices that dim your light, diminish your strength, or chip away at your personal agency so feel that you have less and less power as the days go by till, eventually, you feel as if you have none. You feel stuck. You feel unable to move. You feel, in essence, like an abandoned car on the side of the road just left there.

You probably hear me talk a lot about “self-abandoning” but may not realize that, when I say that, this is what I mean.

I mean, every day, making choices that either help you to thrive, or ones that (in essence) turn you into a junky car on the side road of life. 

Ouch. I know. That sounds harsh. (Sorry.) But it's true.

Every day we make an endless number of choices, either consciously or subconsciously. These choices either help us connect to our Ultimate You, or take us farther from that. It's brutal, but simple. You may know when you are making the choices, or you may not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have the power to stop self-abandoning. You have more power in your life than you even realize. You just have to see it.

To make choices that work against you is to self-abandon. To make choices that serve you is  to be self-loving. 

I explore this idea more in my most recent episode of Powered by Self-Love, where I take a single topic related to self-love and I break it down in 30 minutes, easy peasy. Click here to listen to “How to Stop Screwing Yourself Over - An Introduction to Self-Abandoning” to learn more!

As always – feel free to leave a comment, I always love hearing from you.

Here for you, always.

Sarah