Life isn’t always black and white, It’s the spaces in between, it’s messy and in those messy areas the black and white lines merge to form these gray areas. These are the places where the normal rules don’t always apply, where we wander without direction, just feeling our way through it. I’ve learned throughout my life that this life isn’t black and white or defined by a right or a wrong, with these clear lines that are drawn to distinguish those sides.  It’s so many shades of gray. Things come along and challenge your views and change what you thought was the correct answer. People are messy, and we all carry different messes, that’s just part of life. What matters is how we deal with our mess. In these messes is where we find the gray and where we begin to feel. Sometimes that’s all we can do is feel, there is no right or wrong, no yes or no.  It’s in these spaces that I’ve found that I should try my hardest to get quiet and to listen to myself and intuition, she always knows before the rest of me does. The challenge in listening to her starts in quieting my chaos. In all honesty, I tend to be an over thinker with anxiety, believing every situation will produce a worst case solution.  My mind screams all the things that could go wrong and never the things that could go right, it plays out scenarios that haven’t happened and probably never will.  I wasn’t born like this and it didn’t just appear one day.  Over time this is how my brain has chosen to respond to the events surrounding me, and each time they were bad, it got a little bit worse. Now here I sit as an adult trying to reverse these processes my brain started and find my balance. In finding that balance and my quiet, I have to listen to my body. It’s exhausting some days trying to quiet down my screaming, racing thoughts. Meditating is usually a good place to start and with each meditation I take away some breathing exercise that I can apply to help me find the quiet.  When I find this calm in the storm, I can listen to me. My gut is where I start, if something is wrong or off there will be a ball of tension festering in there, trying to throw up a warning like a flare gun going off into the night sky.  When I get the warning, I must sit with it and observe it, give it a name and acknowledge its presence. What is she trying to tell me? However if there is calm and quiet then I know that I too must be calm. In this calm there is still something to observe and listen to, but these musings aren’t stories, they don’t provoke emotion, they feel different and I know these come from her, my intuition. I’ve ignored my body’s intuition enough times to understand when she’s telling me to jump ship or hold on for calmer waters. We all find ourselves in these gray areas, where no book can give us the answer, your best friend in all her infinite wisdom doesn’t have the answer and your magic 8 ball can only just guess. There is a reason why life didn’t come with an instruction manual. Each person’s path is different, we all have different lessons to learn at different times in our lives. It’s when things go wrong that a person’s true character is revealed and there is bravery in admitting that something is not okay, that we are not okay, because it gives us the opportunity to grow from the ruins. Sometimes a clean slate is the best place to start. And sometimes this start is in a gray area feeling our way through a blurry line that we at one time in our life believed that we would never cross. I get quiet and I look at this blurry gray line and I can see the beauty in it, the opportunity that it presents to broaden myself and step outside of my limiting beliefs and into a place where I can learn and grow within it.  There is bravery and curiosity here in this gray place and it reminds me of a small child experiencing something for the first time, with all the awe and wonder being expressed so vivdly on their face.  This gray area is where the colors of the rainbow lives, like the one that appears in the gray sky after a rainstorm, signaling hope. Hope that what we are supposed to find in this gray area will be the key that leads up to the next step on our journey and the next chapter in our life. My perfect is not everyone else’s perfect, and it shouldn’t be. My perfect embraces the messy and the gray and sits quietly with herself while she learns to grow and evolve. She learns to see the beauty in the blurred lines and she loves them. This is the place where she becomes the next version of herself and like the rainbow after the rainstorm she sees hope. She’s messy and she owns it, it’s made her who she is and it will continue to shape her. She doesn’t want to be inside the black and white lines that have been neatly placed around her; she wants to sit quietly with herself and in the blurred gray space and embrace all it has to offer.