balance

So when I came on to the site to start my new post, I realized I havent posted since August 14th. I definitely didnt mean to take that long off, there just has been a lot going on. Both good things and rough things. Great end of the summer time with my family. Both sisters dealing with health issues. Mom getting into a car accident and on a seperate occasion ending up in the ER due to vertigo. What a month August has been. It also caused me to have some self doubts about myself and my running. It is slowly getting better. I mean I went for a workout this morning and really wanted to go for a run this afternoon too, but had too much stuff to do around the apartment and for work tomorrow. I dont know what caused me to doubt myself so much. I really wish I knew. I also lost my momentum on my weight loss journey, I did keep going down but only by .6 or 1. I am slowly getting back on track and am realizing that even though I want to make other people proud (I really do want to make them proud) The only person who really matters when it comes to making someone proud is myself. That is the thing that I need to keep reminding myself of. I also saw this quote today " When you stop expecting people to be Perfect, you can like them for who they are" -Donald Miller. When I saw that quote it kind of hit me in the gut, because I immediately thought of how I could change just a couple words and it could be "When you stop expecting yourself to be perfect, you can like yourself for who you are." I am still working on not expecting myself to be perfect. For some reason I have started expecting myself to be perfect every moment of the day. That expectation of perfection just isnt working. It is making myself even more stressed and makes myself even more discouraged in everything I do. This will be a challenge to me this year. The other thing that is a challenge to me this year is taking care of myself. I have always always put others before myself. It is just part of my personality, that I take care of other people. I love taking care of others. Somehow in the last few years I have lost the ability/knowledge of how to balance taking care of others with taking care of myself. To be honest, I have a very hard time even figuring out how to balance the two. But knowing the challenges I have coming my way this year I am going to have to figure out how to balnce the two. This next month I am really going to focus on myself and this 5k race. When I was doing xcountry I loved the feeling I got after completing a 5k race. I was one of the few girls in my grade to do xcountry (even in college the team was only 7 girls) so it helped to make me special. It also made me proud of myself. When I dont want to go for a run because I am tired I am going to focus on that.