Seeding My Own Garden

It comes as a surprise for many people when I tell them that I am only now coming into my own. My own me. My own something, that doesn’t have a qualifier – someone’s partner, employee, friend. I’m just…me.

It’s an interesting and scary experience sometimes, because when you’re often defined by how you enhance someone or something else, you tend to get lost in the shuffle.

But I’m learning that my soul, my person, is mine to sow. It’s mine to color with the things that make me, well, ME. The things that aren’t part of someone else but that rather are definitively Amber, for better or for worse.

I’ve had my moments like everyone else, wondering if I was a brilliant enough light to shine on my own. Wondering and hoping that I had something of value enough that a person knowing me only for me would find me and know that I enriched them somehow, at some place in their journey.

But I find spots every day. And they’re not always huge, not always transformational. But I’m learning things about the very fabric of me that are turning even my deepest-seated ideas on their heads. I’m not even who *I* thought I was. Perhaps that’s the way it’s supposed to evolve, after all.

I still, however, catch myself staring a bit wide-eyed at myself, asking me if I know exactly what I’m doing or where I’m headed or just what I’m in for.

I don’t. I have no idea. But that’s the fun. Or the adventure, anyway.

I’m seeding my own garden, now, and it’s different and more diverse than it’s ever been. I don’t know who I’ll be tomorrow. I know that there’s something churning just beneath the surface, a part of me that’s borne of some heartache coupled with reality checks, and a good dose of acceptance and peace. It’s not about how I help define others anymore, but rather how I can lift up the world around me while finding my own definitive spot upon which to settle.

Instead of following footprints, I’m determined to sink my own, gently into the wet and giving sand and let the tide tell whose follow next, and when.

Photo credit: randysonofrobert