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and other self-reflections from a road trip!

Things rarely feel how you expect them to.  Sometimes better, sometimes worse and sometimes you feel nothing, and that’s ok. I think we as people have a natural tendency to put so much anticipation and anxiety into what things should feel like and when it does not happen, we feel that something is wrong with us. We need to remember to just be present and observe what is actually happening in the moment without forcing it because that also sets us up for failure and disappointment. And above all do not self-judge. Forgive yourself if you do and then check back into the present again and just be. 

I typed that up on my phone and emailed to myself, while going down the highway on a family road trip recently. I was feeling extremely anxious along with a little bit of guilt, anger and disappointment. Here we were finally on a family vacation and taking some time off, away with our kids and this is what I was feeling. Of course, then you beat yourself up for acting ungrateful for the opportunity and the moments when you could be stuck at work or someplace miserable – the opposite place of a “vacation”.

The guilt was from not being at work. The disappointment was that I was feeling anxious and not some supermom character being all things to everyone, like you tend to see on everyone’s highlight reel on social media. The anger was at myself because I finally wasn’t at work and felt like I couldn’t enjoy myself.

I knew that I needed to get these feelings out of me somehow to feel lighter and decided that I would then email them to myself. I do this also sometimes when I am feeling stressed or anxious and call it my “mental dump”. I cannot explain how much lighter I felt after hitting the send button.

I think in this instance, I needed to just remember to breath, forgive myself for the experiences not feeling how I thought they would or should feel and move on to be able to be present again and take it as it all played out.

This trip was a two-week road trip from Pennsylvania to Wyoming, Montana and 9 others states, 5,542 miles with the 4 of us in our Jeep Wrangler. We had never been away that long in our entire lives and knew that it would be a once in a lifetime experience for all of us, Jeffy (9) and Jaxon (10) included. And being in a small-ish vehicle for all of that time was going to be out of everyone’s comfort zone, and we were probably going to have those moments when you get on each other’s nerves, but leading up to those kinds of trips, you only see and feel the magic things that can come out of them – never the full picture of what life tends to actually be like.

Don’t get me wrong, we did have a lot of those magical moments too, but I didn’t get to fully experience them until I was settled and present and I emailed myself those words:

Things rarely feel how you expect them to.  Sometimes better, sometimes worse and sometimes you feel nothing, and that’s ok. I think we as people have a natural tendency to put so much anticipation and anxiety into what things should feel like and when it does not happen, we feel that something is wrong with us. We need to remember to just be present and observe what is actually happening in the moment without forcing it because that also sets us up for failure and disappointment. And above all do not self-judge. Forgive yourself if you do and then check back into the present again and just be. 

It is ok to have life not feel how you expect it to…it is ok to sometimes feel emotions that you don’t want to at special moments. Don’t fight it, because that will make it worse. Breathe, be present, write it down, don’t self-judge for feeling these emotions that you feel you shouldn’t or don’t want to feel and above all – Forgive yourself. You are human and doing the best that you can!