An Awareness Award

I received an award from Katie at Sharing Our Spaces. This is an Awareness Award, which makes it very special to me. If there is one word that could sum up all that I’ve achieved in the last few years, awareness would be it. Along with the award, Katie created this lovely image:

And asked this question:
What does awareness mean to you?

Here is my answer:

Awareness is what is needed to be active in my life.

In the past, there was a bubbling undercurrent of feelings and lost memories that swayed every stroke of my brush as I painted my life. If I was asked what I wanted, felt, thought, preferred, I would be stuck for an answer. A blank space would appear on my canvas and I would quickly cover it with the black. I didn’t want anyone to know about the blankness inside me. I didn’t want to know it, myself.

By facing that darkness, by seeing the roiling feelings and thoughts and pulling those memories out of the black hole inside me, I have learned who I am. I have learned that those things that happened to me as a child do not have to define who I am today. I have begun to understand why I have been who I’ve been, behaved as I have, and how to move forward in an active way.

Without awareness, I lived reactively. Everything I did was a reaction to the past. By living reactively, there really was nothing of me in my life. My focus was still on people from the past. My entire life revolved around the powerful and passionate desires left by a childhood in which I didn’t get what I needed most.

Awareness is knowing where I’ve been, who I am and what I am capable of in the future.
I don’t want to live my life reacting to the past. I want to smile when I’m asked for my opinion and actually have an opinion to express. I want the portrait of my life to look like me, the real me, and I want to be able to love what I see on that canvas.
I want to be active in my own life and today, I am.

Thank you Katie, for the award and for being you.

I would like to pass this award on to Gail at Know Your Its
And Middle Child at Anybody Listening?

Congratulations!

Here is the award:

Please paste it on your website to accept the award and then answer the question, “What does awareness mean to me?”