When my mom was living near me, I relished the status quo. I can’t say it was my comfort zone—we didn’t have the best relationship, I’ll confess—but each day it seemed there was some new challenge to face (avoid?). Oh, how I would have loved life to just stop and wait for my mind to catch up to what we were facing, get a handle on the complications of her situation, feel like making a decision. It never did.

Most of your resolutions and things you want to change are not automatic. They are new and related to things you don’t like about yourself: flabby body, too scattered and not centered, focused on day-to-day and not connecting with others. But you actually have a lot going for you and these things are connected to what you want and how you want to be.

I am not a great leader of the masses. I don’t believe it is my life’s role to lead a contingent into salvation, peace, and enlightenment. When I think about my desire for “world peace” I can either get helplessly catatonic over that fact or wipe my hands and say, “Phew! Thank goodness we had Jesus, Buddha, MLK, Nelson Mandela to take us there,” at least in part. But seriously, where have all the cowboys gone?

Sometimes we do things just because we’ve been doing them for so long, even though we’ve lost the meaning, the importance, the connection to our true self.

It was a cool spring evening and the shear curtains in my small, shared bedroom billowed as the pleasant, westerly breeze wafted through the house. But I couldn’t enjoy the early spring warmth, the smell of the setting sun and just-blooming lilacs. I was frozen, face-down and stiff in my bed with all the lights on. I was petrified, certain he was hovering outside that dark window watching me.

I remember when my children were young and the blur of life back then. I was exhausted at times, but mostly I was amazed watching these little beings we somehow created grow and explore the world. I admit there were times when I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing, but we had made the conscious choice to build a family; it was what I truly wanted in my life.

But I forgot.

Brenè Brown says, in a recent Good Life Project podcast, “The greatest pain I’ve ever seen in my work is from people who’ve spent their lives on the outside of the arena wondering what would have happened had I shown up. That’s a pain that …has become a far greater fear of mine than having to dodge some hurt feelings sometimes. What if I would have shown up and didn’t sing?”

Not singing is not an option for me anymore.

My problem? I don’t know what’s in my arena.

When I think of love, my mind immediately goes to Dictionary.com’s definition of the word in terms of a relationship and a feeling: a strong feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, such as for a parent, child, friend, or pet. Ahhhh. Don’t we all want that.

You know something needs to change. You recognize the void, feel the emptiness. You hear the small voice of discontent whispering in your soul. Maybe it’s a new voice. Maybe it’s been there so long it owns a beach house on the outer banks of your mind.

The question is: Are you willing to change? Is the pain of staying the same finally greater than the fear of actually doing something different?

When suffocating within my own negative thoughts, struggling to communicate effectively with a loved one, I can step outside and notice the scar on the pine tree damaged years ago by a bolt of lightning. Hurt by a power much greater than itself, it still stands, tall, strong, reaching for the sky amid the other trees vying for the same rays of energy.

Nature does that for me.

In her book Rising Strong, Brene Brown examines the idea that when we don’t have enough information about something we make up stories about it to protect us and help us make sense of a scary world. “In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect.” She discusses how this is true when dealing with others in our world, but what about how we make up stories about ourselves?

I used to say (and believe) that I wasn’t creative, that I didn’t have the thought processes of someone who can catch an idea or whim from the air and shape it into existence, that I couldn’t take a blank sheet of paper and instantly transmit beautiful and meaningful images, or a take blank screen and surrender a flowing, song-like paragraph from deep within. Oh, the stories we tell ourselves.

If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you can’t.”

I think I first heard this from my high school basketball coach who I realized, in hindsight, was trying to teach us gangly, awkward teenage girls some life lessons. At the time, we just thought he was strange: nobody talked to us like that. He was tough on us. He didn’t cut us much slack. At one practice I remember hyperventilating in the hot, stuffy gym—actually breathing into a brown paper bag—and Coach’s impatient look. It wasn’t that he was insensitive (although my teammates might disagree with me); he was waiting for me to recover, get over the physical hurdle, start over again. I was the team captain, and he needed me to keep moving.

I just can’t stop thinking about the things we hold on to that don’t serve us in our life, the weights that drag us down while we absently look the other way and fight to move forward to make progress toward a more satisfying life. A lot of times they are things we’ve held on to for a very long time: a limiting belief, way of being, grudge, path not our own.

Have you ever put yourself in an uncomfortable situation, gone to a new event by a group you did not belong to but looked really fun, put yourself out there because you knew you needed to expand your horizons? Have you ever been forced to start a new life due to some unforeseen life event?

Why would “Importance attached to a thing” be called “stress?” Think about it: when things don’t go our way, when a situation occurs we don’t like, don’t expect, or triggers some past wound, our mind goes into “RED ALERT” mode, resulting in reactions from slightly elevated blood pressure to hyperventilation or maybe unexpected rage. Let’s face it: we like things to happen the way we like them, the way we want them to, the way we expect.

I could feel the boiling rage inside me swell to a bubble when he walked into my office and said he needed a few more minutes to charge his laptop before we left. I had to spend the day with him, and it was only 8:30 am. It was already too late. All I could do was suppress the grease fire going on inside me, containing it before it exploded out into the world.

What do you see when you look in the mirror?

If you’re like me, you really don’t think about it much anymore. In the morning I look up—yep, that’s me—put my head down, start brushing my teeth, never looking up again. Yes, I look at myself when I put on my make-up, but am I actually looking at myself? I’m looking at the evenness of how I put on my foundation. Looking for any stray, witchy-poo chin hairs. Did I put on enough mascara? Eyeliner? If I brush my hair one more time, will it poof out on top like I want? This is what I see.

But have I really looked at myself?

On our way to St. Petersburg to visit family last weekend, I plugged in David Goggins’ new book, Never Finished, on audiobook for the ride down. In case you don’t know Goggins’ story, he is the epitome of endurance, both mental and physical, the only member of the US Armed Forces to complete SEAL training, Army Ranger School and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training, and completer of more than 70 ultra-distance races. Like most of us, his story is more than these outward accomplishments.

You deserve it. You’re worth it. You need it.

I have good friends and family that tell me (remind me of) those things often, but I’m not sure I’ve always listened to (or believed) them. The thing is...they are right. I DO deserve to take care of myself. I AM worthy of pampering myself. I DO need to stop and take care of my physical and emotional needs.

So why don’t I? Why do I think that small voice whispering “I need a reset” or that physical weariness almost yelling “REST!” don’t matter and “soldering on” will quench their needs?