Feb 7th, 2024
EVERYTHING CHANGED
I had a choice ......I could except what I could not change
or
I could spend the rest of my life unhappy
The External Shell. The Internal Lining.
It sounds pretty abstract when you say it out loud, but the truth is those four words hold the story of each and every one of us.
The external shell is what everybody sees when you walk out your front door in the morning.
The internal lining is who you know when you go inside and close the door to your four-wall sanctuary every night.
Who you really are versus what the world sees.
Their viewpoint of an image.
Who, even without trying, you portray yourself to be.
The truth is that most of us spend our lives living somewhere between those two places.
The person the world believes they know.
And the person we meet in the mirror when no one else is watching.
Sometimes those two people are very close.
Sometimes they are worlds apart.
The longer I live, the more I realize that nearly every misunderstanding, every disappointment, every broken relationship, and every triumph can be traced back to the distance between the external shell and the internal lining.
Because what people see is rarely the whole story.
And what they don't see is often the part that matters most.
It took me 59 years to see things clearly.
Well, actually, it took 59 years of living, a ruptured aneurysm one month after my 59th birthday, and more than two years of recovery.
Funny how those few words, spoken so quickly, contain so much of a life.