Week 51. The festivities

One important skill, that not all of us acquire in our childhood is celebrating ourselves. We’re so eager to perfect and work on ourselves since that’s what we’ve heard from a young age: “oh, you should work on that”, “you have to try harder at school”, “your grades must be better or you’re not going to accomplish anything in life”, which was a complete bollocks, by the way. The lesser cultivated phrases about how we are lovable and how great it is that we’re around tend to become “a common sense” thing that rarely or never gets told out loud by the caregivers or other “all-knowing ones” in our lives so usually we don’t know that about ourselves from the young age, and sometimes even later. At times life teaches us that but sometimes it doesn’t so we don’t get to experience that we are actually quite enjoyable company and a quite alright one. That is why it is important to gather the evidence that we are lovable, that we have done some great, even magnificent things in our lives and didn’t even gave credit to ourselves for it, just checked it and moved on, as we were taught to be humble and not to shine too brightly. This week, please, take some time to reflect on things that you have done great, something you’ve achieved, some good deeds you’ve done that were run over by a truck of daily tasks, self-criticism, and thoughts of how you could have done the same thing better. Give yourself a small celebration, a dance party if you wish.

I’ve noticed that I have moved through my life not celebrating my wins, even when they were huge, generational, so one day I sat down with pen and paper, wrote down each of my successes, accomplishments, the things I’ve done that I’m proud and grateful to myself for reaching and after each entry I played an applause track from youtube. It's a small thing but it did help to boost that feeling of being proud of myself. This might seem shallow but the praise were well deserved a long time ago, I just leaned into it at a different, later time. At at time of our accomplishments we might not get the praise we think we'd like or we could just minimize it ourselves so it's nice to know that whenever your win happened you can celebrate it today because why not? Give yourself what you need and crave, maybe in the privacy of your own company if you're a little shy about it.

And it doesn't need to be something big you've done or achieved. Sometimes we can simply celebrate ourselves, our company, or anything that feels important to us. The other day I just felt like celebrating life so I got a small glass of champagne, a box of chocolates and danced my heart away, and I can’t dance so it was even more fun and hilarious to me. Funk and groove tracks were busting in my room for a good half an hour while I was gratefully celebrating all the times I’ve won in any lottery in my life. That was a strange thing to celebrate but I just felt like it and shamelessly enjoyed it. You see, we don’t have to get an Oscar for our life’s work to celebrate life. We can be grateful and proud of being the best pancake makers in the neighborhood, for being attentive and caring friends, for doing our job darn well, for doing the best we can even when we’re going through a really rough patch in our lives. There’s always something to celebrate so let this week it be you and your amazing life.

Cheers!