What I Want You To Remember This Holiday Season

There's a reason I’m here, doing what I do.

To remind you of what you can’t see from where you are now. To remind you of your power. To remind you of your beauty.

To remind you that the only reason you can’t see what I can see is because you haven’t come to the part yet where you prove yourself wrong.

Because without proof, you can’t believe it. Without proof, it’s the hardest thing to believe what you can’t yet see.

So my message to you today as we go about celebrating the holidays in whatever way you celebrate, is to stop believing what you’ve been believing about yourself every time another holiday season comes around.

You either believe you’re not enough, or you believe you’re too much. You either believe you have the worst luck, or you believe there really is something wrong with you and it has nothing to do with luck.

You either believe you’re never going to get this love and relationship thing right, or you believe you had it right once and let it get away. With so many of these beliefs, the truth isn't even on your radar.

And that’s what I’m here to remind you of today.

If you’ve only been around people who aren’t capable of seeing you, who don’t appreciate everything you have to offer and everything you are because they can only see those parts of you that they can also see in themselves, there’s no way you can see yourself for who you really are.

They see an image. They see you as much as they have the ability to see themselves.

So if they see themselves in light of their singleness or inability to commit or to sustain a relationship only because they haven’t met the right woman yet, they’re going to see you as someone who needs to be the right woman for them in order to make that happen. But what it means to be the "right woman" for the particular man you've found yourself so attracted to, isn't so much as "right" as it is about getting to the root of what that really means.

Someone who’s real himself has the ability to see someone who’s also real. Someone who’s fake, can only see someone who’s also fake. So "right" becomes so subjective, the worse thing you can do is use it to measure your worth with.

And yet that's exactly what we do.

He craves real, so he’s attracted to you, but when you show him real he can only take so much before it compels him to change or do something different. Since that’s beyond the scope of what he’s capable of, this is where it will begin to fall apart.

He’ll bring someone else into the picture, he’ll remind you he’s not ready for a commitment yet, he’ll put on the brakes, he’ll pull away.

Not because of you, but because of him.

The first time this happens, we can let it go. Never easily, of course, but we learn to.

But when it happens again, and again, and again, it becomes much more difficult to attribute this to him and not direct the blame onto ourselves. After all, we’re the common denominator. There were different men, but only one of us.

Here’s where I want you to hit the pause button. I need you to. Because this is where our story picks up steam and gains momentum and we reduce ourselves to someone with too much baggage, too little worthiness, destined to repeat this pattern again.

Stop right here, Beautiful.

We choose these men. We choose men full of potential with so very little follow through. We choose men just like this because, quite simply, we haven't learned how not to.

We do this subconsciously, so don’t blame yourself. Not now and not ever.

Because there’s a huge difference between blaming ourselves and taking responsibility for ourselves and that difference is EVERYTHING!

Instead, I want you to look into the mirror.

See that? That’s you.

You know what happens when you’re not aware of what you’re looking at? Anything can look back at you and look like it’s you. That’s what’s been happening here. You look into the eyes of someone with so much potential and you see a man who’s been just waiting for you to come along and love him like he’s never been loved before.

Except the problem is, that’s not what he sees when HE looks in the mirror. He sees someone who’s had bad luck and only needs a good woman to make him happy.

He’s not seeing his potential, his need for someone to love away all the demons in him. He doesn’t see any of that. He’s never gone that deep. He’s never been allowed to see that deep! So he doesn’t get that part of the story. He only gets the part that says he needs the image of a perfect woman to melt his heart.

What I want you to take from this, is that it’s never been about you lacking anything.

It’s been about you looking into a mirror and not seeing yourself except through the lens of someone outside of yourself. And when that’s the only way you see yourself - through someone else’s eyes - it’s really hard to see the real you.

If all those eyes failed you, if you feel like they all rejected you or you rejected them before they could reject you, you’re going to see yourself as a failure, as someone who’s forgotten how to believe in love.

This is the season of believing.

I know it’s mostly a cliché, but I also know we can all use a little reality check when everyone and everything around us is going into overdrive around the themes of the season, including believing.

So I want you to do me a favor and believe in something this holiday season.

Believe in the power of new beginnings. New beginnings matter. Being able to recognize the need for a new beginning matters. And so that’s where I’m taking you this season.

While everyone else is doing their holiday thing and you’re feeling that it’s the loneliest time of the year, I want you to remember that the only reason you see yourself the way you do is because you don’t yet have the proof of anything being different than the way it is right now.

And the reason is only because you’ve been with the ones who were never the same ones who could ever appreciate who you really are and what you have to offer while looking through the particular lens they look through!

This isn’t personal. It never was.

It’s you shining for the ones who only knew darkness and didn’t know how to see or what to do with the light.

Shine, Beautiful. Shine.

Today, tonight, and all the way through this holiday season. And every day and night after.

All it takes is one view to change your story. One. Beginning with your own.

You’ve been looking through a lens that hasn’t changed since the first time you believed in the power of love, and chose someone who only paid lip service to it before he broke your heart.

It wasn’t about him then either, but the hope he represented to you and who he represented to you.

Change that lens, and you’ll see it all differently. Take out the old lens, insert the new. It wasn’t up to him. But now you know, and now the power – your power – belongs to you.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, or something else - however you choose to celebrate, this year we’re going to celebrate YOU!

Love,

Jane