@davidneuman asked this powerful question in his post today: 

What are you struggling with?

He goes on to say:

Vulnerability is a scarce yet powerful quality. By being transparent about your weaknesses, you help remind others that nobody is perfect. Oftentimes, it can feel as if you are not intelligent, strong, or courageous enough when you compare yourself to others…Sharing your shortcomings is a great way to alleviate these feelings that others may have. Plus, you pinpoint areas where you’d like to improve and open yourself up for others to help you do so!

I love the line about how vulnerability is scarce yet powerful. I’d been a big fan of vulnerability since reading Brené Brown’s book Rising Strong. Brené Brown is a reowned author and social scientist who kickstarted the whole movement about the power of vulnerability. Vulnerability is the willingness to show up and be seen with no guarantee of outcome, and to her, it’s the only path to more love, belonging, creativity, and joy. 

It’s strange how by baring it all, you can get it all back, and more. Another one of those oxymoronic, paradoxical truths of life. So in the same spirit of vulnerability with the same hope of getting some of that back, I’ll share some of my struggles of late:

• **My super ambitious goal of wanting to make a million dollars
  **I’d never tried reaching so high before. Am I worthy of such high aspirations? And it’s not even about the money, but what it enables - a beautiful dream life for myself, my family and our future. Am I over-reaching this time? Will I stress myself out so much that my health suffers, again? Having experienced serious burnout and health issues from working too hard, I swore never to go down that path again. So how do I make sure I stay ambitious but balanced? This is my life’s challenge for sure. I want to reach my goal, but with my health and sanity intact. No, not just intact, but better than ever before. The struggle to stay optimistic and strong despite being bitten once is real.

• Food, diet and body
  I’d recently decided to try out the keto diet to lose some of the middle age belly fat. I gained quite a bit of weight over the last 8 years, due to a potent combination of stress, junk food and lack of exercise. Initially I shrugged it off to being 40, but with all the recent life visioning I’d been doing, I didn’t want to just let it all deteriorate with a fight. I wanted to feel alive, fit and healthy again. A deep sense of well-being, for sure.

  There’s a useful tip regarding identity-focused habits from the book Atomic Habits: “Who is the type of person who has a fit and healthy body?” My answer: someone who organises work in such a way that stress is manageable, makes fitness a priority, and eats wholesome foods. My struggle is with the food. Food had always been more than just fuel. I live to eat, not eat to live. And over the years, my relationship with food had become somewhat dysfunctional. Stress eating, treating junk food as comfort food, are the few ways it’s gone sideways. I feel like I need to refresh my relationship with food and eat wholesomely, yet still be able to enjoy the taste and visceral experience of eating.

  Keto is really tough for me right now, because having to avoid carbs made me realised how most of my bad eating habits had been centered around carbs. And without my comfort foods, where can my stress go? How can I enjoy eating again? It’s tough tough tough. But I’m also grateful for this struggle because it made it plain as day that my relationship with food needs to change. So, onwards!

• Learning programming
  I picked up some basics in HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL a few months ago. Now, learning Ruby on Rails as I make my own product. It’s scary, to say the least. If designers and developers came from different planets, I definitely came more from design planet. Definitely not the most technically talented. Yet, here am I, trying to learn coding and to get people to pay me for what I make from it! The audacity! Imposter syndrome runs high in the initial days of embodying any new change. Most days, I just want to run away. Sometimes, I do walk away. But I come back. I hope this learning journey is just a series of walking away and coming back repeatedly… until I don’t have to.

So, what are you struggling with? Your turn.