Gratitude for my Own Personal Flurry

Figuring out that I suffer from anxiety was the most important lesson of my life. I started to acknowledge myself as a soft soul, to be gentle with myself, to reflect on the fact that I have a tendency to overreact, even though it always happens inwardly, so much so that even I often don't notice. Since then, it's been a journey. I have always been a perfectionist, too, and it dawned on me as I was going through the process of self-discovery that perfectionism and anxiety so often go hand in hand. For instance, in order to care so much about attention to detail, you have to be one of those people who naturally hyper-focuses. I explain this to my students a lot using the selective attention test video where someone in a gorilla costume walks through a shot of two teams passing a basketball. Either you're someone who notices the gorilla right away (big-picture seer) or you're flabbergasted to learn that you'd missed it completely (hyper focuser).

Both have their merit, but since I'm a hyper focuser, I have trouble seeing the bigger picture; zooming out and taking in what I might be missing or what's really important (overall, long-term, in the grand scheme of things...you get the idea) is not one of my strengths. So, this officially marks my journey towards balance. For, as we all know, the best way to lead a healthy, joyful, and fulfilled life is to fall somewhere in the middle on all of these balance scales of contemporary existence (life vs. work, self vs. others, gratitude vs. ambition, hyperfocus vs. big picture). It's only fitting that I write this at a point in my life when I feel like I've experienced a loss that will undo me, because the whole point is to realize just how much I have already and not feel like I've hit a dead end in my late 20s. This fact is not even remotely true, and also a little sad, since I probably don't know the first thing about loss in its extreme.

Anyway...here goes. I am first and foremost eternally blessed and grateful for the abundant love that surrounds me like Olaf's (from Frozen) little personal flurry. I just know that I have more than enough to lead a life of fullness and happiness in this one simple but powerful thing. I don't face any heaviness alone; everyone else is always there to take on their small percent of the weight, without being asked. When I feel stressed or hopeless, I take one giant leap back, soak this in, and ask myself if this is everything I could ever need in life. The short, and easy to miss, answer is always yes. Yes it is.