Working on yourself can really suck. It’s so hard…like sweaty, dirty, hot kind of work. Like gardening. I fucking hate gardening. I love to have pretty flowers and fresh vegetables, but the work it requires to get those things? Forget it! Much easier just to buy them and let someone else do the dirty work. But working on yourself doesn’t roll that way. In this line of work, you are the only gardener in town. Only you can create the harvest. Sure, you can consult some experts in different areas… maybe someone who specializes in weed control, or another who can teach you how to water your soil properly…but in the end, it’s really up to you to do the work. Every. Damn. Day. Seriously, it doesn’t stop. You get into your groove, sweating away, pulling up weed after weed, nurturing your garden with water, sun…building fences to keep pesky animals out, you know…the ones who want to steal your flowers, or even just stomp on them for no good reason. You get into that groove of sweaty work, even though it sucks. Weeks go by and nothing grows, but you keep toiling away, because that lady at the garden center promised you things would grow if you stayed the course. And just when you start thinking about quitting and going back to the grocery store, you spy a little flower. It’s tiny, and the average person might just walk right on by and not even notice it, buy you notice it. It looks so fragile to you, so you do whatever you can to protect it. You become a fierce guardian of this little bloom. You become badass. Next thing you know, the pesky animals know about this badass guardian, and they don’t come around anymore, so more flowers start to bloom. Before you know it, you’ve got yourself a damn garden! You feel empowered. Hard work really does pay off!

The problem is, you get kind of distracted after a while. The flowers are thriving now, and there’s no threat in sight, so you decide to sit on the deck for a bit and relax… you know, because you’re so badass. You start spending your weekends socializing instead of digging, because really…a garden this successful doesn’t need constant attention, right? After a few weeks, you notice a couple of weeds. You realize it’s because you’ve been slacking off, so you get right back into your work routine. At this point, it’s pretty easy to get rid of them. It’s hardly even work anymore. Before you know it, you’re right back to sitting on the deck with your friends, going out and living life…taking chances on things you’d never had the nerve to before. That’s what empowerment does to you…it makes you brave. And maybe sometimes, a little cocky. It doesn’t take much time at all before you find yourself in a situation you think you deserve, because hey...you earned it after doing all this work, right? And maybe you do deserve it, but here’s the thing…maybe you don’t. Or maybe you let your expectations get a little too high. Or maybe you think you’re ready for something big, but really… you’re just not ready. You want to be ready, but there’s just too much gardening to do. You took some time off from the hard work and got yourself into a really distracting situation…and you got yourself this really nice thing…and now the weeds are everywhere. They’re so overgrown, they engulf whatever it is that was distracting you from them. Like they are getting revenge or something. And this is why you can’t have nice things….

Or maybe it’s because all the work in the world is not enough to fix what is wrong with you…