Honor Your Future After Abortion
This episode is part four of a four part series. Should you choose to participate, by the end of the series you will never think about your abortion the same way again.
Happy listening and as always feel free to send me your reflections and questions.
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Show Notes:
Week four! I’ve enjoyed these four weeks so much that I think I’m going to turn them into a workbook and expand on some of the concepts a bit more. Until then, jump over to my website amandastarkingsley.com/honoring-abortion and print out the worksheets. You could fill out the same worksheets 100 times and learn something new about yourself every single time.
This week we’re talking about Honoring Your Future. If you take away one thing from this week let it be this question, ask it every day, multiple times a day. Ask it at every crossroad, in every new decision you face, every challenge and every celebration. Ask it when your eyes open in the morning and when your head hits the pillow at night. Keep asking and this last step in the four part series will inevitably fall into perfect place.
”In light of who I want to be in the world,
how do I want to show up in this moment?”
Ask it when you're about to snap at your partner, friend, or mother.
Ask it when you reach for the drink to push away your feelings.
Ask it when you are about to press play on Netflix instead of writing your resume.
Ask it because you matter, and if you can’t believe quite yet that you matter, ask it because I believe you matter. Borrow my belief in you, borrow my wish to see all your desires come to fruition.
If you’ve participated in the past three weeks of this series, you’ve felt the feelings, you’ve honored your decision, you’ve taken the time to see your own wants, and now it’s time to step bravely into your future: one brush stroke, one word, one paddle at a time.
It doesn’t matter where you are now or how many ways you’ve self-sabotaged or lost your footing along the way. Every single moment is an opportunity to ask yourself “Who do I want to be right now?”
I’m not sure what stirred the pot, but just this week, three years past my own abortion I’ve been thinking about babies. I’ve been thinking about how much I love babies, and how amazing it is to be capable of bringing life into the world. I’ve been longing for the feels of early motherhood and the pure joy of expanding your heart to new life. Ironically, this week I’ve also been thinking about what an enormous task it is to raise children. I’ve been thinking about the reality that no matter what I say or do, no matter how I show up it will be my natural human tendency to wonder if I did it right, if I could have done better. I snapped at my son this week. I gritted my teeth at my middle school daughter. I wanted to tell my highschooler to snap out of it, and go do something fun. In every single one of those moments I had a choice and I took it. I chose to remember that none of this frustration was about them, all of it was about me and my opportunity to learn and grow.
Life is 50/50.
50% awesome or as some would describe “positive”, and 50% shitty or as some would describe “negative”. In other words we’re supposed to feel shitty 50% of the time. That means I’m supposed to think parenting is a load of really hard stuff half the time, and the other half I’m supposed to love it so much that I even daydream about more babies. I’m supposed to love myself for having chosen ME when I terminated, and also occasionally wonder what it would have been like if I’d picked a different path.
50/50- 100% of the time.
When it comes to abortion here’s what seperates me and my clients from millions of women out there. We start by allowing the 50/50 that is:
I did what was best AND It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
I love myself and I question myself all in a day’s time.
THEN, and this is the really important part, after we’ve accepted that we are allowed to feel all the feelings, we realize:
If life is 50/50 I can choose a new 50/50.
I can choose a 50/50 that leads me toward growth.
I can choose a 50/50 that leads to an evolution of humanity.
I can choose hard and I can choose love.
Yesterday I recorded a podcast episode with a woman who was black-listed by Planned Parenthood. She held space for me to share my story with her audience. I feel so good about the episode we recorded, but if I’m being honest, it was hard for the first 50% of the conversation before we hit record. It would have been so easy for me to walk away; it would have been so easy for her to walk away, but we both chose love; we stepped into hard not away from it. We chose to see that we were both somewhere in the middle, and that in the big picture what we both really wanted was evolution. What we both really wanted was to serve, and to serve we had to get through the tough stuff first. We had to ask ourselves “How do we want to show up? Who do we want to be in this moment? How can we both become more of who we are and not less?” To Honor Our Futures, we had to choose love.
If I had walked away from the conversation it would have been 50/50. I would have walked away feeling frustrated and disappointed, and gone on to find joy in what already was, my family, my own beliefs, my comfort zone. It would have been a perfectly reasonable choice, but it would not have been in the spirit of growth and evolution. So instead of walking away feeling frustrated and disappointed, I walked forward feeling frustrated and disappointed. I walked right through it. Right through the hard and into a future I felt good about. I left the podcast recording feeling so proud of us both for having navigated really rocky waters and sculpting them into something beautiful and powerful for both of our communities.
50/50
No matter what it’s 50/50. We can choose our 50/50 in the spirit of growth and evolution, or we can let them happen by default and get more of the same. Just like there was no right or wrong when you made your decision to terminate a pregnancy, there’s no right or wrong here either. You can choose to Honor Your Future or you can choose more of the same. Your power isn’t in your results, it’s in your choice.
Personally I feel SO much better about everything when I’m an active participant in my outcome. Even if I fail I’d rather fail trying than walking away and giving up. I’d rather surrender with hope than succumb in defeat. So if you’re like me, if you’re ready to live in Honor fo Your Abortion stick with me. I’m about to walk you through some more of the tools I use to be the creator of my beautiful story.
I used to hate goal setting. It felt like the creation of one failed dream after another, and I spent a lot of time beating myself up because everyone else seemed to be able to follow through when I kept falling flat. Then I started to understand that goal completion wasn’t an indication of my worth or my value, it was simply a map for me to navigate. Having a goal gave me a curriculum to learn important life lessons. Without a goal I was riding someone else’s dream; with a goal I was building my own.
I also learned that the size of a goal is irrelevant. Whether I plan to cook a meal, or to launch a podcast, both have equal opportunity to face my resistance and understand my own mind and heart. Deliberate and intentional action is our best teacher, reflection is how we learn and grow.
To honor your future and your abortion in the coming week, I invite you to choose one thing you want to accomplish this week, one thing that represents you living the best version of the life you made your choice for.
You can ask yourself, “How am I going to honor my future self this week?” Your answer might be: look for a job, tell my partner the truth, play with my kids, start the project...
Make a list of all the steps and parts to completing this task:
What do you need to “do”?
What do you need to think?
Who might you need to connect with?
What obstacles can you prepare for?
And most importantly how will you feel when you’ve completed this thing?
