How do we ascend from “being” something to being something. From saying the words to believing them to be true. Because you write your list of self contentions and I’ll write mine. Even if we shred them to confetti they’ll still rain down upon us seemingly without end.

Its just masterful, the way we can take something that is true and work so hard to prove that it isn’t. Like arguing that a field isn’t really, actually green because we spot one yellow dandelion. That’s what we do to ourselves.

A simple, baffling place for me to jump into this subject is the fact the I “live” in Jackson. Rather than the fact that I live in Jackson. Is this where I reside? Yes. Do I reside anywhere else? No. But sometimes the scope of that identity seems too big. I just moved here 9 months ago. I was a city girl before. I’m different from a lot of people here. It can feel like I need to have these facts printed on little business cards, to hand out every time I ask for the locals discount.

Another one– that I’m a business owner. Don’t I have an LLC? Aren’t I my own boss? Yeah… but if I don’t make X amount of money, have X number of clients, work X hours… can I really make that claim? I find when someone asks me what I do, I give a slightly different reply every time. As if even I am not privy to my daily tasks and work efforts, which of course I am.

Even the other day someone visiting town asked me what my favorite hikes here are. And I was like oh man, I don’t know, do you seriously want my reply on this? As if the fact the I haven’t summited the Grand Teton nullifies the fact that I hiked like 4x times a week all summer and fall.

So who tells us when we’ve stopped “being” something and started being something? OUR DAMN SELVES. That’s it. Because all the tactical, quantifiable steps– we’ve already made them. There aren’t any more exams we need to take, or rules we need to memorize. If we DO something, then we ARE something.

Moment of Gratitude: So you write your list of things that you are and I’ll write mine. We’ll light them on fire and blaze a trail neither of us can ever doubt.