Making A Commitment To Ones Self

Seven years ago I made the first commitment I'd made to my self in my entire life. That's right! I was forty-five years old and had never paid much attention to the commitments in my life. If things didn't work out, oh well! I had that attitude since my teenager years. My parents never taught me the meaning of the word commitment. I had no idea that commitments were important things to learn about. I can remember my mother asking me what was going to happen when my first marriage wasn't going to work out as I was getting married at age eighteen. I just shrugged my shoulders and stated, "I'll just get a divorce, oh well!"

All those years being a parent and a wife as well as a friend to many and a daughter and a sister, never making any commitments; can you imagine? This might be superficial, but I never knew the difference. I was very naive and had little or no input from my parents about life skills. My parents had a theory that they taught us and I just went with it not knowing how silly it was. Everything in our family was always, "fine." No matter what was really happening, everything was just" fine."

Well due to my lack of knowledge or common sense my life wasn't easy. I didn't have that commitment thing going with my marriage so I ended up married three times. I never thought of being a parent as a commitment either and while I loved being a mother; I could have done a better job. I loved some of the jobs I had but I never made the commitment to one type of career so I had quite a few short term jobs. But most importantly, I never considered my self as an entity to be concerned about therefore I never made any commitments to myself.

After living thirty some years in domestic violence, unhappiness, custody issues, mental illnesses I wasn't aware of and complete relationship dysfunctions I woke up and decided to make some life changes. It was time for me to figure out what I needed to do to cause personal growth and development. Commitments ended up being very important and once I got myself diagnosed with PTSD and depression as well as an eating/sleeping disorder I took some time to think about what to do next.

After some thought I chose to design a website on the Internet that would help other people who grew up in the baby boomer generation and had the same problems I had experienced. I felt totally renewed and realized the meaning of a personal growth and recovery journey. After studying a very short period of time the word commitment came to be known. I was in a position of knowing the importance of commitment in ones life and especially important were commitments to ones self. I was also discovering the importance of helping others at this time. Thus, my first commitment to myself was to continue my personal growth and recovery journey but to share it with whoever needed to hear the same information I was learning. I would never quit on the site and I would continue to take care of it and nurture it as if I was nurturing myself as well; which I was.

Talk about AHA moments! Seven years later I can truthfully say that I've kept my promise to myself and kept my commitment. Now that one website has grown to over thirty websites and it's no longer one website, it's a network of sites. I continue to work on the sites as I can, but usually donating four plus hours a day working on them. As I answer the e-mails that come in from others who are experiencing difficulties, I promise to answer personally and I do. I continue to email people until they no longer need my shoulder to lean on. That's all I do, is to allow someone to have an ear or a shoulder for a short time, but I know it's a valuable part of personal growth.

Seven years later it occurred to me that although my life hasn't gotten much easier yet I am much more secure in my own self. It has also occurred to me that I need to expand my number of commitments now that I've acutally kept one to my self for seven years. I'm overdue for realizing this, but believe me, getting to this point has been miraculous after all I've endured. Now I'm in the midst of understanding that prioritizing my goals so that I can make future commitments is an important step in my decision making processes. After evaluating what needs to be done first I realized that I've attended to my mental health needs continuously for seven years, so now it's time to concentrate on my physical health.

I've concentrated so hard on my mental health, my personal growth and recovery, my commitment to my network of websites that I've ignored my physical health which isn't a good thing. I have experienced the realization that enough is enough, just as I did seven years ago with my mental health, with my physical health. I've wondered why I'm stuck in my journey and suddenly I experienced the insight that I have been working on a mind/body connection and have been leaving out the work for the body. How crazy is that? It has just flowed that way though. So now I can see that life isn't one crazy race involving one subject. There's a bunch of concerns we must concentrate on by prioritizing our needs and making a plan to reach our goals.

While I had my eye on physical needs throughout the past seven years, I just kept on saying, "I'll get to it!" but I never did. I couldn't feel a sense of accomplishment like I had hoped to feel because I wasn't attending to more than one commitment to one factor of my journey. I had the knowledge that my physical needs had to be attended to, I just never made the same kind of commitment to my physical health as I did to my mental health. AHA! People who are busy concentrating so hard on keeping a straight and narrow pathway with their mental health can easily forget the rest of the equation - the body!

So to those of you who are new to your personal growth or recovery journey, make you commitments to your self first; just don't stay with one commitment over a long period of time. Sit down and realize what your goals are and then make a list of goals and prioritize them. After you know that you are taking care of your self first - body and mind - make a plan to achieve your goals. Otherwise, you'll never feel complete. You'll be so committed to your one goal that you'll lose your perspective and get bored or begin to wander from where you want to be. Taking on new commitments will seem overwhelming to you. Imagine putting 110% of your efforts into several goals instead of just one - it's too overwhelming.

Instead start out at the beginning with several goals and commit whatever you need to each goal so that you can become successful at achieving all of your goals. It's simple really. No one ever explained it that way to me. I just kept reading about different factors, but never put it together that I was just concentrating on one thing. Although I was learning about many things, I was only achieving one goal. Don't make the same mistake that I've made! It's a long road and believe me, I'm all for accomplishing as much as I can with what's left with my life!

Make those commitments and keep to them with everything you have within you and you'll be a very happy person in the end. I'm just realizing how happy I can be while accomplishing a few very important tasks that will allow me to meet some goals for my physical health. It's a different feeling to achieve a balanced program! You'll love it!