Celebrating Being Different

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Curves.

My meeting  with  my  new  mentor  went  quite  well. Among many other things, we were able to decipher this lifetime’s purpose, with a tiny bit of tweaking yet to come:

My life’s purpose is to celebrate being different by connecting with the energies around me and sharing my experiences with others.

This resonated  on many  levels,  absolutely  fitting  in with my  writing  / publishing / speaking  / consulting/ learning /teaching plans of the future and my career transition, and there was yet another epiphany.  During this process, it became so clear to me that sharing my feelings and experiences with others (giving and receiving sharing) is extremely  important to me. Duh.  The experience  of connecting and sharing—not  so much teaching as sharing, yes—is vital in my relationships and in anything fulfilling I do. So is being accepted and cherished for my being different.

That level of sharing was missing in my marriage. So was the acceptance of me being me. No wonder things were so hard sometimes.

No wonder, when I feel cut off and not able to share with friends what’s important to me, do I feel wounded and  unappreciated.  The sharing and the acceptance  are fundamental to me. The same with my job. It’s why I’ve often given away so much, sometimes too much. I love to share what’s happened to me, but I love, too, to be  on the receiving end of hearing  about  others’  experiences, especially when we’ve formed a connection, a bond.

And when I bond, I tend to accept flaws and foibles and quirks,  up to the point of a loss of integrity, and I, too, want to be accepted right along with all my flaws and foibles and quirks.

The thing I like best about this life purpose statement is                its           anchor: celebrate             being   different.               I’ve                  been “different” all my life, painfully so, and often very alone in it, especially in a small town in the Bible Belt. But not just to be different or accept that I’m different but to celebrate it.

And that’s probably my greatest joy in a relationship: when  someone celebrates—not  accepts or tolerates, but celebrates—that I’m different.