So what is Flannels and Heels Personal Encouragement? What’s our purpose here? How can this blog help you?
Let us start by saying what we’re NOT. We’re not people sitting with our heads in the clouds unable to relate to life’s hardships.
We’re not impossibly positive.
We don’t discount or throw out emotions.
We aren’t perfect in our own lives. We have hardships. We struggle in our emotions.
We aren’t professionals. We aren’t counselors or therapists. (And if you need one, please seek one out.)
We are two regular, down-to-earth girls in their thirty-somethings who know two things about life: Life is hard. Ugly. Deadly. Deceitful. And life is beautiful. Full of gifts. Art. Nature. Love.
Both of us at Flannels and Heels are passionate about finding that wonderful balance between loving yourself and letting yourself feel difficult emotions—validating them, understanding them—but yet not letting yourself drown in them forever. Not to be overcome by them. To experience difficult life circumstances and difficult emotions and eventually overcome them and live and experience a beautiful life again despite pain. To have joy and enjoy life. To have gratitude.
And, let’s face it. Sometimes we haven’t even experienced a trauma but we still feel bad about ourselves or find ourselves in depression. We still find ourselves paralyzed, not enjoying life.
So many of our life battles happen not only in our physical circumstances, but also in the thought life of the mind!
“The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
—John Milton
We know we are not alone. You are not alone.
Sarah and I want to learn to keep processing life and emotions in a healthy way, and we want to help you do the same. And it is just that: a process.
So, let this blog be a place we can process together, and not alone!
We want to help you process even as we ourselves process. We don’t want to be long-winded and heavy, but we want to walk alongside you as friends over a cup of coffee, commiserating with each other about life and laughing about our foibles! To help you have joy again. To help you be intentional with your thoughts.
Learning to Be Intentional
To get the most out of this blog and the most out of life, we have found that the process to healing and joy is very intentional. We feel we can’t always just sit back and let “time” heal us (though it does take time). I have a hunch “time” doesn’t do as much of the healing as much as what we do in that time, in our minds and hearts. In fact, sometimes when too much time goes by, it can feel like that is just the way of life and nothing will change. And that is not the truth!
Sometimes strong emotions, wrong thinking, or wrong processing can have a way of deceiving us and keeping us down. Our goal is to help bring you truth so you can be free!
“Don’t believe everything you think. Thoughts are just that—thoughts.”
—Alan Lokos
But it’s going to take you doing the work. We can’t do it for you. Sometimes it’s hard and doesn’t feel very good at first (we know firsthand). Sometimes it feels easier to continue to wallow (we know this firsthand too). But it’s so worth it in the end!
It’s like going to the gym for your mind! It will feel hardest to do at first. We’ve got to exercise a muscle we haven’t put to use in a very long time…if ever! But if we spend as much time concerned about our minds as we do our physical appearance or physical health, I can tell you we will be much healthier emotionally than we are now!
I think sometimes we think a healthy mind is listening to our every thought and emotion that goes with it as if it were the deepest, highest truth. Emotions do tell us when something is wrong and needs to be fixed, but they don’t always tell us the truth of how to respond and deal with it. Our minds need to be trained to be really healthy, just like a physical body is healthy when trained to only intake healthy foods and proper exercise. We need to train our minds to intake God’s truth no matter our circumstance, and we need to work at actually believing it and living it—because it doesn’t come naturally!
It’s not easy. And it’s not necessarily supposed to be easy. But it’s exercise with a goal in mind. For a purpose! If you can keep your eyes on the prize, you can keep going. You can do it! Sometimes, because we’re not accustomed to the flavor of a healthy food or a beneficial medicine, we want to spit it out. But don’t! Become accustomed to the new flavor of healthy thoughts and your life will never be the same! It might even seem painful at first, but later it will yield great peace—and you can hold onto that!
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
—Henry David Thoreau
Everyone’s process will be different, but we can tell you the truths, thought processes, and things that have helped us and hope that it helps you in some way, too.
If you feel like you could use some friendship and understanding, if you feel like you could use some help processing your sticky emotions and stop being paralyzed to live life, come on the journey with us and find a safe place to process your thoughts and emotions.
Put on that comfortably soft and safe yet durable flannel with us, roll up your sleeves and put in the work, and find yourself dancing again, enjoying life in your proverbial (or literal) heels!
What’s something you really struggle with that you hope we might address? Let us know in the comments below!