Gen-Y Gives Thanks For Thanksgiving
24 November 2009
8 Comments
I’m taking a little bit of a break from my #BlogCrush series to feature another series that I’ve been reading pretty diligently the whole month of November.
Sharalyn Hartwell has been collecting submissions all month long and posting them from bloggers across the internet. Many of the submissions are folks who have been featured in my #BlogCrushes. Others are bloggers I want to feature.
Regardless, the Gen Y Gives Thanks series is phenomenal. So instead of reading about one featured #BlogCrush this Thanksgiving week I urge you to check out a whole lotta gratitude/appreciation/thanks going on.
————————————
When we are children, most of us are brought up to depend on everyone else. Parents/family/guardians provide things like shelter and food. Our teachers provide us with new things to learn and expand our horizons. Our friends provide us with the essential team members necessary to create a pick-up backyard football game. Eventually you start providing some of these things for yourself. Maybe it’s a dinner you have to make at age 15 cause your parents can’t make it home. Perhaps you take out books from the library that get you thinking in a way you’ve never thought in school. Or you take hikes up mountainsides to sit at the top and look out over the lakes and trees and lose yourself in your thoughts. For me, this indepence was like a shiny present that someone had bestowed on my at the age of 19. And I went out of my way to build walls and rely on no one but myself. Like a badge of honor I made sure that my life was my own and control was all mine. Control became an obsession of mine, a card I knew I always had to play. When control was lost, I did everything in my power to regain it.
This year I began some big changes though. As a result of my current job I began planning out my next couple years, and the reality of owning my own business. After ten years of never going on more than a third date with anyone I began actively “putting myself out there again.” I started my blog and shared some things about myself that I had been scared to share with even my closest friends. Through all the changes I re-learned an important lesson from my youth. I live with my younger sister. She is my best friend. She cooks most of our dinners, cleans the house most of the time and in general takes care of everything here with my crazy schedules. She told me “When you said you are planning on opening your business I knew that I’d have to do this stuff so you can follow your dream. You know how proud I am of you, right?” I have gone out on a bunch of dates this year, which have all led to a whole bunch of relationship failure. I’ve made some pretty amazing connections with people on my blog and though they sometimes hurt me cause I’ve let them get close, I have come to depend on many of them.
Yep, this year the thing that I am most grateful for is working on learning that sometimes you get the most out of life by depending on others just as much as you do yourself.
(PS – I was so honored to be asked to be a part of this, above is my submission)
(PS – I was so honored to be asked to be a part of this, above is my submission)
Did you know I have a private newsletter that goes out ONLY to subscribers? It offers stories of travel adventures, writing brilliance, links to great content around the internet and other crazy shaningans.
