Giving Myself Time to Grow

One thing I am learning is that giving yourself grace does not mean giving up on your goals. Sometimes, it actually means taking your goals seriously enough to realize that you cannot accomplish everything at once.

This next school year is going to look different for me. I have decided to focus more of my time and energy on building my independent motor skills. My goal is to become as self sufficient as I possibly can, and I know that is not something that will happen overnight. It takes practice, repetition, patience, and probably a lot of frustration along the way. It also means that some other things have to take a back seat for a while.

For me, that means sacrificing some creative writing and the more in depth educational structure I have been doing. I love learning and I love being creative, so those things still matter to me. I am not leaving them behind forever. Right now, though, there is something else that matters more to my future.

I think sometimes we feel like we should be able to do everything at the same time. We see other people reaching certain milestones and wonder why we are not there yet. It is easy to turn someone else's progress into a measurement for our own lives. But that does not really make sense when you think about it.

We are all starting from different places.

The things that are easy for one person might take another person years of work. Something I accomplish easily might be incredibly difficult for someone else too. Our struggles are individual, which means the way we work through them has to be individual too.

I am trying to stop looking at progress as a race.

There is no prize for learning something before somebody else. There is no deadline for becoming the person you want to be. Sometimes progress might even mean temporarily doing less in one area so you can give more attention to another.

That is what I am choosing to do.

I want to give myself the time to work on skills that could give me more independence for the rest of my life. If that means writing fewer stories or doing fewer complicated lessons for a year, I am okay with that. Those things will still be there when I am ready to return to them.

No one can do it all, especially not all at once.

I think giving yourself grace is realizing that your timeline belongs to you. We spend so much time worrying about where we are supposed to be that we sometimes forget to ask ourselves where we actually want to go.

I know where I want to go.

I want independence. I want confidence in my own abilities. I want to know that I gave myself the time and space necessary to build a future that works for me.

So, for now, I am choosing to focus on that.

It might look like I am slowing down in some areas, but I do not think I am.

I think I am just choosing which direction I want to grow.