Begging Me To Come Home

I texted one of my best friends on a Monday night, 

"I'm so sick of trying to be perfect."

"I wanna be back to that free version of myself who drank beers on top of mountains and woke up to sunrise snowshoe every morning with a cup of coffee."

Circa 2014 - 2016, I experienced the absolute truest forms of freedom for the first time ever.

These photos.

These moments.

This is Colorado.

This is nature.

This is travel.

This is expansion.

This is wild.

This is freedom.

And none of it has not been lost.

Somewhere in the midst of my early to mid twenties I began to lose that freedom, as a shadow of doubt swept over me.

I began thinking (my first problem, thinking instead of feeling) that I had to do things a certain way.

"People think my life is supposed to look a certain way" and "I want to make my parents proud (but don't know how)" combined with my all time favorite, courtesy of social media, "I can't share anything about my life unless it looks really cool, unique and out of the ordinary."

Truly, shout out to social media for creating a platform that has actually changed peoples' lives so much that their self worth has become congruent with what their Instagram feed looks like.

That's not okay.

I started to realize that the more I measured my self worth by the appearance of my Instagram account, the further away I took myself from FREEDOM.

But today, I feel myself coming back to a feeling I know still exists, but has spent some time living underneath so much fear of "not being good enough".

Freedom is not lost.

That "free version of myself who drank beers on top of mountains and woke up to sunrise snowshoe every morning with a cup of coffee" still exists.

She might look a little different, but those feelings, gosh, they still exist.

Freedom is never lost.

Not for me.

Not for you.

It looks different for all of us.

But it's never lost.

Not for any of us.

Maybe not at first, but eventually it all makes sense.

.

Finding freedom means coming home.