The Kindness of Not Making Yourself Small

"Today I choose life.  Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain...  To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices - today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but embrace it."
― Kevyn Aucoin

This week, on more than one occasion, I have found myself having conversations with people about how we make ourselves "small" or "less than."  It is so easy to let our minds wander down the path of all the reasons why we are not "enough" at any given moment.  For women especially, it seems that we can go from neutral to beating ourselves up over something in a nanosecond.  At any given moment, we can kick ourselves for not having been assertive enough or for being too assertive (aggressive even?), for not being attractive enough or thin enough, for not making better career choices, for not being the perfect parent...  Just as with My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the movie ads smartly slotted in other nationalities for Greek, we can slot in all kinds of things to get us to a place of feeling small.

But what if we try to retrain our minds and go down another path?  What if we let go of the "less than" replay and instead remind ourselves of all that we are and let ourselves dream about and plan for all we can be?  Surely there is kindness in that.