#194: A Nice Little Life

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome back to another episode of Your Favorite You. I am still your favorite life coach and podcast host, Melissa Parsons.

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Today, I want to talk about a book that I read recently. This book was recommended to me several years ago by my friend and fellow coach, Olivia Vizacaro. If you're anything like me, your to-be-read list is miles long, and I am so grateful that Olivia recommended and that I chose We Are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen to listen to next.

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In the book, Laura talks and writes about getting sober. But here's what I want you to know before you tune out, because you may not have a drinking problem. This book is not really about alcohol. It's about the ways we leave ourselves.

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It's about all the things we reach for, food, wine, our phones, approval, people pleasing, pretending, when what we actually need is to come home to who we are. And that, my friends, is very much what we talk about on this podcast and certainly what we do at Melissa Parsons Coaching.

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So whether you've ever questioned your relationship with alcohol or whether you have never questioned it, I promise this episode is for you. When I look back at all of the episodes of this podcast, we are on 194 for those of us counting, mostly me, I can see a through line that I wasn't fully conscious of when I started.

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Episode three was called Tell People Pleasing to Suck It. Episode 32 was My Relationship with Alcohol. Then came freedom, accept yourself. We are all fucked up. You can't hide from yourself. Meeting yourself, becoming your own best friend.

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Stop rejecting yourself for acceptance, radical honesty, living in integrity. And more recently, seven years without alcohol, a celebration. I didn't plan that arc, but reading Laura McCown's book, I could see it so clearly for the first time.

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Every single one of those episodes was about pretty much the same thing, finding yourself, burning away what you are not, coming home. And that is exactly what Laura writes about. She says, in the ashes from burning everything I was not, I found her.

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I found me. And then I could finally be found by others. That's the whole episode right there, folks. But I wouldn't do that to you. So let's go deeper. Laura writes that many of us leave the center of ourselves in order to get love.

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We leave the center of ourselves in order to get love. And here's what she says next, the part I want you to sit with. You didn't do that because you are weak. You didn't do it because you're broken or you're wrong.

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You sought love because that is how we are wired. All human behavior is either love or a call for love, all of it. So when you people pleased your way through a relationship, when you said yes when you meant no, or no when you meant yes, when you pretended everything was fine, when you maybe poured another glass so that you could feel a little less than you did.

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That was not weakness. That was a call for love. That was a human being doing the only thing she knew how to do at the time. Back, way back in the way back in my third ever episode of this podcast, I told People Pleasing to suck it.

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I had so much fire about it then, and I still do. What Laura's book gave me was even more compassion for why we do it in the first place. We are not broken. We're just trying to get love the only way we know how.

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Laura names this so specifically in the book. She writes about the ways she was dishonest in relationships, not lying exactly all the time, but withholding her true thoughts and feelings, being a chameleon, anticipating other people's needs at the expense of her own, pretending not to be bothered by things that bothered her, overextending herself, acting like she wanted things she didn't want, even pretending to like people she didn't like because she was afraid of them or thought she needed them to be on her side in order to be okay.

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And she names it for exactly what it is. Not sweetness, not kindness, dishonesty, really dressed up as something more socially acceptable. I talked about all of this in episode 138 on radical honesty and in episode 133 about stopping rejecting yourself for acceptance, the exhausting mental math of managing multiple versions of yourself.

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Your body can tell when you're not being real. It keeps track even when your mind is busy making excuses. In the book, Laura asks a question that I think is one of the most important questions any of us can ask.

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She says, we're asking the wrong question. She said, most of us, when we look at our life, think, is this bad enough that I have to change? And many of us have spent years asking that one. How bad does it have to get?

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How many days do I have to wake up feeling like this? How many times do I have to promise myself I'll do it differently next time? The question Laura says we should actually be asking is, is my life good enough to stay the same?

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Is my life right now as I sit here good enough for me to keep doing the same things over and over and over and to stay the same? And then she says underneath that question is the real question, which she says is, am I free?

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Am I free? Not, am I okay? Not am I managing? Not is anyone complaining about me yet? Am I free? Are you free to have an opinion in the rooms you're in? Are you free to want what you actually want? Are you free to say no without a three-paragraph justification?

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Are you free to be exactly who you are? Not the pretty polished version, not the convenient version, but the real, unedited, specific, and glorious you. Back in episode 43, I talked about freedom, what it really means, and what it costs us not to have it.

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And then in episode 54, acceptance. Not the resigned, I'm going to settle for less kind, but the radical, life-changing kind of acceptance where you stop fighting yourself and you start working with yourself.

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In episode 70, I said, you can't hide from yourself. And that is still true. No amount of wine, food, overworking, scrolling, people pleasing, or pretzeling gets you far enough away from yourself that you stop feeling the gap between who you are and who you might be pretending to be.

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Let's go back to the sentence from the book because I keep coming back to this particular sentence. In the ashes from burning everything I was not, I found her. I found me. And then I could finally be found by others.

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That's it. That's the whole journey. You cannot be truly known by someone else until you really get to know yourself. And you can't be found if you've been hiding, especially if you're hiding from yourself.

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And so much of the work that I do with my clients, and honestly, so much of the work that I've done on myself, is exactly this, burning away what we're not, not dramatically, not all at once. It doesn't have to be like that.

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It can be more of a slow and honest accounting. So this is mine to take care of. This is not mine. This is who I am. This is who I was pretending to be. In episode 97, meeting yourself, I talked about the moment when you actually get still enough to hear yourself.

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And in episode 123, becoming your own best friend, I talked about what it means to be on your own side. Not the side of whoever you're trying to impress, not the side of your most critical inner part, but being on and unapologetically on your own side.

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Laura also writes about loneliness in a way that surprised me. She says, we think we fear aloneness, but what we actually fear is not having a home inside ourselves. The loneliness that most of us have felt, the kind that creeps up when you're surrounded by people who love you, that loneliness isn't about being alone.

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It's about being disconnected from yourself. And you can't fix that from the outside in. You can only fix it from the inside out, which is why episode 145, Living in Integrity, matters so much to me personally.

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When your actions match your values, when you stop betraying yourself in small moments, something shifts. You start to feel like you can trust yourself again. And when you can trust yourself, you might be able to finally rest.

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Now, in this book, Laura does not in any way sugarcoat what it takes to heal. She says it plainly. In order to heal, we need to face what needs healing. That sounds obvious, but most of us have spent enormous amounts of time and energy not facing what needs facing.

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Because facing it means you have to admit it. And admitting it means you have to feel something. And feeling something is the very thing that most of us have been trying to avoid. Laura also talks about finding people who will hold you tenderly and without question.

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People who will witness you, the messy, scared, trying her best version of you and stay. She calls it being held in undeserved favor. I love that phrase. Not because we're actually undeserving, but because in the thick of it, it feels that way.

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It feels like, ooh, if they ever really knew, if they ever really saw the real me, they would leave. And I'm here to tell you that the right people won't leave. The right people will stay if you start being you.

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And in episode 61, We Are All Fucked Up, that is exactly what I said. Every single person in your life is dealing with something. Every single one of them has fires burning. We are not uniquely broken.

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We are, however, uniquely human. And the sooner we stop spending energy on the performance of being fine, the sooner we can get to the actual business of being known. And I think that's what I love about coaching.

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I mean, I love a lot of things about coaching, obviously. But one of the things that I love about coaching is being able to be the person that gets to see the real human in all the messiness and love her and root for her and help her find her way out of her quagmires and just help her be in her quagmires.

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And then I also love group coaching because there's a whole group of women that are holding you and giving you undeserved favor. In episode 149, I celebrated seven years without alcohol, July 21st, 2018.

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And now that I'm saying that, gosh, we're coming up on eight years. And I want to revisit something I said there because Laura's book gave me new language for it. I didn't quit drinking because it was destroying my life in obvious ways.

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I quit because I had just started asking the right question, not the, is this bad enough question? Because it wasn't bad enough, but the, is it good enough question? And am I free? And the answer was no.

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The answer was that I was using alcohol in addition to food and shopping and people pleasing and pretending, all the things underneath all the other things, to manage the distance between who I was and who I thought I needed to be in order to be loved.

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Laura writes about how often we can only see what we'll be losing when we give something up. We can't possibly see what we'll gain until after we give it up. So of course, at the beginning, the losing feels bigger.

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Of course, it's going to feel like a sacrifice because you can't see the other side from where you're starting. But she offers in the book that there is a life calling you forward. Behind all the no's and all the things you're giving up, there's a much bigger yes.

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I want to tell you what my bigger yes looks like. If you've read the book, you'll recognize this phrase. But right now, I have a nice little life. I love taking care of my garden and my plants inside when it's wintertime, my flowers outside when it's summer.

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I love strength training. I love yoga. I love snuggling and walking with Frank or Frank Costanza Parsons or Frankie, for those of you who know him. I love being with my hubby Jon and my boys, Jack and Owen, and the people that they love.

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Simple things, quiet things, things that are entirely, completely, unperformably mine. And not one bit of it, not a single flower, a single verbena or petunia or vinca or morning walk or easy Saturday would have been possible if I was still seeking validation and gratification from other people or from food or from alcohol or from any of the other things that I was using to take myself away from myself.

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This is my bigger yes. Laura worried that getting sober would make her life smaller, boring. She worried that it would make her life a B version of what she'd imagined instead of the A-plus version. She thought the big life required the thing she was giving up.

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I thought the same thing about drinking, about people pleasing, about the version of me that could be everything to everyone. And what I know now, what I know in my bones, in my garden, in my nice little life, is that the opposite is true.

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The things we use to make ourselves feel bigger are actually the things keeping us small. The wine wasn't expanding my evenings or my weekends. It was numbing them. The people pleasing wasn't building my relationships.

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It was hollowing them out. The performing and the pretending wasn't making me more lovable. It was making me less findable to my people. Laura writes that this is what sobriety, and I would say this is what any real healing forces, a closeness to yourself and to life that at first might feel a little bit excruciating because you have to feel it all.

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The discomfort, the uncertainty, the realness of being an actual person with actual needs and actual limits. But in those ashes, you find her. You find you. And then you can finally be found. So if any of this landed for you today, I want you to do a few things.

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Go back and listen to the episodes I mentioned. I'll link them all in my show notes because together they tell the story of what it looks like to slowly, certainly imperfectly, tenaciously come home to yourself.

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And if you're ready, if you're sitting with that question right now, am I free? And the answer is making you uncomfortable, this is exactly what coaching is for. Head to melissaparsonscoaching.com. Go to the Work With Me page and book a consult.

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We can find out together what your bigger yes might look like. We can find out what your nice little life could be. Of course, you should also read Laura McKowen's book, We Are the Luckiest. She and I both believe that you have a life calling you forward.

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I genuinely believe that, and I would love to be the person to help you find it. Thank you so much once again for being here, my beautiful humans. I will see you next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!