As someone who deeply wants to avoid all the imagined possible fallout resulting from a vulnerable action, practicing the “right kind of hard” is challenging. But I’ve learned that not doing the hard thing doesn’t offer the reprieve I’m hoping for. Through all of this, one question has been supporting me to get through it - don’t get me wrong, it’s still a struggle, it’s more becoming a “doable struggle” and I’m finding that has made all the difference.

It occurred to me the other day that the stories I tell myself often have a genre. They tend toward fiction masquerading as non-fiction, as fantasy with highly imaginative dystopian plot twists, as mind-bending sci-fi filled with anxiety inducing suspense, darkness and intrigue; all of which does a number on how I perceive my immediate reality and deeply impacts how I show up in the moment.

And I asked myself: Without minimizing or disregarding what’s real and what’s hard, what genre of story do you want to tell?