LIFE INVENTORY DAY

Storytime with Kate

Inventory day at any retail or restaurant job normally SUCKSSSSS. This isn't that :) We're doing life inventory 🦋

If you're anything like me, and I know you are because you're here...

you work hard. on yourself. a lot.

The other day I was in my dream car that I recently bought for myself with my own money that I paid off in less than 6 months. Right as I had to kick it into 4WD to get myself out of a swirly situation in the woods down by the river with my dog, and best friend of 11 years, I was thinking about women and power and autonomy and I burst into tears because, like a ton of bricks, it hit me that I'm the most liberated woman to exist in my family line.

I don't know that for a fact because I don't personally know all of the woman that came before me... obviously.

And, I felt that shit in my bones.

I have worked very very hard in my life to establish freedom.

Freedom to do what?!

Love the people I love.

Make the financial decisions that I want to make.

Use my voice.

Feel safe in my body.

Make big bold yes' and nos.

To organize my life around.. me.

To do the next right thing according to me.

To create things.

As much as some people like to think that single middle aged cat ladies like myself are ruining this country - I'd actually like to note that we are in fact, the lumbar spine of this country. *This is your super sturdy (THICC vertebra) low back that SCREAMS when the prime movers around them, your core and glutes, aren't pulling their weight in a deadlift.* 

We can show up for people when our married and parents friends can't.

We can speak more firmly and freely than most.

We can go to therapy and the gym and take care of ourselves so that we can be present with *gestures broadly* all this.

We're nurturing and firm.

We build community.

We are the aunties.

We've had to do a ton of shit for ourselves so we deeply empathize with loneliness and the fact that I'm capable of figuring it out - so you need something?! I'm 10/10 not going to let you do it alone and no, I don't know anything about what you need to get done but I 10/10 know that together, we can figure it out.

We're weird and we make you happy and comfortable.

You don't have to defend the people you're having a hard time with to us because in this moment, all we care about it you. As I told a friend the other day, "your marriage certainly is not my greased up pig, not my fairground. But you however, are my greased up pig and my fairground. Stop defending them to me and just tell me how you're doing."

And because sometimes the best person to get help from isn't somebody who's been in your same shoes. Maybe it's somebody with some weird outside cat-lady perspective because if we're going to do things differently, we have to do things differently. And the cat-ladies are doing things very differently :)

Along with this sense of freedom I feel heavily the fact that most women both in my neighborhood and around the globe, are not as free as I am.

And as reproductive rights are being actively taken away by the government, when I say free I don't mean that I've been liberated systemically - women are not free systemically. No bodies are. And, white women in the US like me have quite a bit of reckoning to do with the fact that systemically, we are MUCH more free than the global majority of women.

The libration I'm talking about though comes from within. I practice it. I do it on purpose. When there's a decision I have to make, I take into account the impact it'll have on my autonomy.

Freedom is also the 5th theme of the My Self Study Practice :) so would you look at who got me here?! I've been unpacking the idea of my personal freedom for many many years. It feels a little bit different all the time.

I felt a significant shift of Saturday when I realized the freedom that I truly do get to experience on a daily basis.

Because it's something I've fought for.

And in realizing that it's here now, I learned something:

I have instincts that, if I listen, will protect my autonomy.

I don't have to fight.

I just have to listen.

Boundaries now (and as the 6th theme of the My Self Study Practice, these have become so much more fluid and easy for me - I truly started from the bottom with these and now I'm here 😂)

honey, you deserve to rest in your hard work. You deserve to take a look around and be like, "fucking wow. absolutely incredible that I am here now." Celebrate that somehow in a way that feels real to you.

It's important to look up and look around at the life you're building.

Is it the life you want to cultivate?

Or maybe you notice a few things out of place?

If so no worries, we can rearrange. Reorganize. Declutter. Repaint.

That's what Ruby and I are here to help you do - build a life that feels like your own - a life that feels like home.

But we're also here to make sure you celebrate where you are every single step of the way because if you never stop to look around at where you are, you'll always feel lost.

You deserve the time to take inventory. You deserve the time to celebrate it. You deserve to rest in your hard work.

honey, I'm so proud of you and I'm on your team.

xo,

k