Episode 39: Clarity

00:00

Well, hey, everybody, welcome to the 39th episode of Don’t lose your balance. My name is Mallory Durrick. I had been thinking a lot about the topic that I’m going to talk about today, which is clarity. I don’t think I ever experienced true clarity in my life until I started to eliminate many of the things that were super toxic in my life, bad behaviors, alcohol, drugs, thinking that I had it together when I didn’t. Once I eliminated all of this toxicity, I started to think to myself, What am I very clear about in quarantine clarity happen quite extraordinarily. And I say that because it wasn’t as if I said to myself, Oh, well, let me stop drinking. And then I’m gonna have all this clarity in my life, it was a bonus that occurred as a result of it. And I think it’s important to mention my experience with clarity because everything that I’m experiencing now there’s there’s more clarity than there is self doubt. I’m not saying that I don’t doubt myself. Of course, as a human being, we all doubt ourselves. But there’s something very profound about being able to say, I’m really clear on how this situation is playing out, or how I feel right now, or how somebody else is making me feel right now. They’re not maybe making me feel a certain way, as much as I’m allowing myself to feel a certain way. And when I got clear about that, I realized I had 100% control over how to change it. When I wake up in the morning, even though I’m still maybe just for about three minutes, just a little bit groggy, I very rarely want to roll over and go back to bed, I get a good night’s sleep, because I am not filling my body with toxic poisons that caused me to get up through the night stay up through the night. And that includes, you know, the few glasses of wine that I had at night. I can’t, I can’t remember a time where I felt that way. When I was actually having alcohol in my system. This kind of like clean and open sense of clarity came with sobriety. And I want people who might be listening to me who you know, you may not have a problem with alcohol. But I would question anybody who has you know, a couple of glasses of wine at the end of the day and then goes to bed at night? Do you ever feel like you wake up maybe in the middle of the night, maybe in the morning, like you’re just a little sluggish? Yeah, that doesn’t happen. When you remove alcohol, it doesn’t happen. Even when you remove a lot of the sugar that you put in your in your body, I started to get super clear about what living a healthy life meant for me. And I want to talk about that, because it took me a very long time to get here. And I know that this is something that a lot of people strive for. Please understand, I don’t think I have it all figured out. In fact, I’m pretty confident that I don’t. But I have allowed myself to be very clear about many things. One of them is the way I listened to other people. I want to acknowledge that if somebody feels a certain way where I’m involved, yeah, I get it. But please don’t project whatever you may be feeling whether it’s guilt or anguish onto me, and hoping that I will own whatever it is that you’re feeling. I feel like this is something that’s hard to, I don’t know, maybe share without giving an example, but I’m very clear about my position in this particular scenario, which means I’m not struggling internally with the outcome, because I have the clarity. The other person may or may not like the way that’s working out for them, but I can’t help that and I’m very clear about that, when I think about my work, I think about how I got real clear about the direction that I wanted to take professionally. I don’t think I really ever thought much about, you know, what is the one year five year 10 year plan. And as you get older, your 10 year becomes less because you’re starting to think to yourself, well, it’s a 10 year plan, but is it.

05:26

But one of the things that I think I started to get clear on in my profession, was what I wanted to do for my profession, I already had sort of this open clarity about how I knew I wanted to work, I didn’t really want to work in a big company, I didn’t want to work in a, in an office every day, I didn’t want to go to a job where I had a commute. I recognize that for a long time, I had to do that. I had to do that. Once my marriage ended and I was starting to go back to work, I had to do the things that I didn’t want to do. Because I had to figure out how I was going to get to the next step, or the next place, I should say, and I got really clear about that. What were the things that I was going to do, in order to make the things that I wanted to happen, how was I going to live was I going to have to live with less in order to have exactly what I wanted, which ultimately would mean that I be getting more, more of what I wanted. Not necessarily a big house and a fancy car and a whole lot of money in the bank. But just a simpler way of living. And that was a clarity that came to me within the last 10 years. But when I stopped drinking in 2019, and I and then quarantine happened in March of 2020. And I started to and I talked about this a lot, I started to go into the creative community, even though I knew that this is what I wanted to do. And this is what I wanted to be a web designer, I am one a graphic designer, I’m getting better to call myself one. But I knew that these were the things that I wanted. And I didn’t know really how to get there until I started watching others and surrounding myself with people who also did that. And I got real clear on that. And I’m very grateful for for things like Adobe live and Behance. And all the Facebook groups that I’ve put myself inside of and I got real clear that even though I may never be as talented or as good, I can certainly keep myself on a path of not destruction, or making the same mistake over and over and over again. But one of with a sense of clarity, one that I can approach my life with, this is what I want. What is it gonna take to get me to that place? What does it look like? What do I have to give up? What do I have to learn? How long will it take me to learn? You know, I recently joined the pro group for the future, which is with Chris Do, I talked about Chris Do a lot in in clubhouse, and I kind of missed this, unfortunately, I missed this window where I could have had a much greater connection to him for free, I still would have probably ended up paying for this particular pro group for the year and it was a lot of money. And I tell you that it’s a lot of money, because it’s something that I never would have been able to either think about, even if I could afford it. I would say I can’t do this. And there was something about the opportunity that I said, do it. And I’ll explain why. Last week, I got this weird opportunity to be featured in a magazine online CIO review and I’m still going to be featured. But for an additional amount of money. I could pay we call it my sister calls it pay to play. I could pay to have an editorial written on me and I vacillated over whether or not I wanted my picture online. And did I want somebody to write a professional story? Was it going to bring any sort of extra credibility about me about my business and about my offerings? And I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t have so much a problem with having to pay for, you know, a paid editorial, I understood what it was right off the bat. Because I used to sell this when I sold print ad space. The problem wasn’t the money. The problem was the value. And I started to get super clear about that. Because normally I wouldn’t I wouldn’t have been sure about what was my problem about not wanting to do this did a you know a lot of people were talking about, you know, in when I asked a couple of people about it. What about the return on investment? I was very clear that I wasn’t going to do it for the return on investment because there was no guarantee it might have been good. It might not have been good. What was clear To me was I didn’t want to spend the money on something that I wasn’t sure about its value for me. Even if it brought me 20 clients, it didn’t matter what did matter was spending half that money to spend a year inside of a professional group inside of the future with Chris Do and all of his people, because I want very much to be around all those creatives, because I’m a creative, I never knew that. That’s what one was called. And I started to get super clear on this, like, everything opened up for me, when I and I will attribute it to quarantine. But what happened in quarantine was right before I got sober, I just got clean. And then I got clear. And with sobriety. And I said this from day one comes clarity. So I cannot have a podcast that does not talk about clarity. I also want to mention that when I set out to to this podcast, I didn’t really have goals of monetization, or a lot of followers, or any followers, or anybody who would even mostly care about my life. And what I’ve been through. This is a just a easy way to share my memoirs. And I’m not sharing it necessarily for any kind of fame or fortune. And I understand that people do start podcasts with that goal in mind. That is not why I’m doing it. I am not even somebody who likes to talk a lot. I like to sit quietly at my desk and illustrate or play inside of a program and just build a website and do all of the wonderful things that I enjoy doing. But talking into a microphone, and sharing my life is not one of the things that I would put high on the bucket list. But something extraordinary happened as a result of doing this podcast in the last 39 episodes. And I guess it’s what, eight, nine months, everything got clear my approach to my work, my clarity of who I am and what I represent. And where I want to be, I set these goals for myself, like 52 episodes for this podcast, or 365 days on clubhouse in a row for gratitude that I share with others. And I don’t know what’s going to happen after those goals are met. I’m not clear on what will happen after I’m only clear that what will happen is that I will get there and I will say I did it, I got to that goal. It mattered to a bunch of people who share that space with me. And it mattered to me, and I’m very clear on that. I love how I feel. I love that when I do get up in the morning, there is a sense of clarity with what is my life gonna look like today. I don’t know what my life is going to look like in a year from now or five years from now or 10 years from now.

13:13

But I know that if I continue on this like incredible course that I’m on, which is recognizing that super healthy eating, and I’ll talk about that in a second and not drinking or smoking, or putting any kind of toxic chemicals in my body. Does it feel nice? Of course it does. You can’t talk to somebody like me with addiction issues, who don’t think that? You know, that was a great feeling at the time. What wasn’t a good feeling was how far I took it. And I’m very clear on that. I’m very clear that an occasional glass of wine will probably be okay. But am I willing to take the chance that it might not? And the answer is no. And I’m very clear on that because my sobriety has said nothing but wonderful, favorable things for me clarity. It’s given me clarity. There’s a friend of mine that reached out to me today, and I hope they listen to this podcasts. I know they’ve struggled a lot in their own sobriety and they have physical pain, and they have surgeries that are in their lives and their life, I should say and of all those things. The one thing I can say and categorically to them was you know, if you stopped drinking and you do not smoke, even though it’s being recommended, you know, marijuana, and you’ve really clean out your body, your body’s gonna say thank you, your body is going to do what it did for me. So when I talk about toxicity, I discovered something really interesting in the last I’m gonna say last year when I started to add sugar in it natural form in my diet. And what I did not have clarity on from a nutritional perspective was what sugar does inside the body and insulin, I didn’t realize that not only would it cause me to gain weight, and we’re talking about watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, apples, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, grapes, oranges. On an occasion, these are okay. You know, it sounds like an occasional Oreo. But when I was eating fruit, because I was craving the sugar, I didn’t realize that I was adding just sugar, which is toxic for the body, and it causes inflammation. So in the last, I’d say month, I cut it out completely. And, of course, the goal is some weight loss. But I cannot believe how much physical pain I was in from eating all that sugar, even though it was healthy sugar, meaning your body can break down fruits differently, then they would process sugar and refined sugar. Yes, of course. But sugar sugar, your body isn’t going to always know the difference. And I kept craving it. And I kept wondering Why is every joint in my body hurting me. And then I got clear, after doing the research, you need to eliminate the sugar from your diet so that you can feel as good as you felt before you started eating all this sugar. And after you got rid of the wine, and I did. And I’m very clear on the positive impact that not eating all of that has on my body. And I hope that it continues to work for me, because I used to talk about how I hated walks. And then I got clear that I needed to get moving and to get out of my office move away from my desk and I started going for these walks. But in the beginning, because of the sugar and the fruit, my body was hurting. So the walks would be difficult and painful. But once I got rid of that my walks made me feel better. And then when I would go for these walks, something else happened, I started to have clarity about where I want to be and how I want to live and what can be some new goals that I’m going to set for myself, I haven’t put them down as this is what I’m going to do. There’s just things that I’m thinking about.

17:26

But you know, when I talk about joining the pro group of the future and making sure that I grow professionally, which is going to only help me grow personally, these are the things that I’m very, very clear about. These are the things that I’m striving to continue to be clear about. So one thing begets another sobriety, you know, created clarity. And I continue to stand at the top of this mountain and say, Be really clear with who you are and what you want. And then you’ll be able to find a way to get there. Get clear, the more you lie to yourself about all the things that you don’t want to look in the mirror and own up to is not going to get you any closer, you have to get clear. And that’s what I wanted to talk about. And that’s why I wanted to say on this episode of this podcast, don’t lose your balance. Why clarity is such an important topic. And I hope that for anybody who’s listening, they look in the mirror and they ask themselves What do I need to get clear on and own it and then continue to move forward to get whatever it is that you want for yourself. Okay, well if you’d like this or any other episode of Don’t lose your balance. You can download it you can share it you can even write me a review. You can also follow me on Instagram. I have two accounts. One is Mallory underscore Durrick. And the other is Don’t lose your balance. M S D That’s Mary Sam David, I also have a website, which is Don’t lose your balance the.com I hope today tomorrow and always you don’t lose your balance and I look forward to hearing how you didn’t lose your balance along your life’s journey and we’ll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Hi, I am Mallory Durrick. I am a creative. A Marketing Strategist and Web Designer with a small and modest boutique Marketing Agency living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am the creator and narrator of this podcast, Don’t Lose Your Balance. This is a culmination of decades of self-help books, countless doctors, numerous hospitals, including rehabs. Once a wife, now divorced, a mother, a grandmother and an addict in recovery. These are things that I am and have experienced.

I’m sharing it all. Baring it all. Hoping to help others; not lose their balance.