The House Of Identity

If you were a house, what kind of house would you be?

Would you be a pristine mid-century modern home with minimalist features?

Maybe an eclectic Frank Lloyd-Wright home with cozy furniture?

Or a dilapidated fixer-upper with species hidden away?

No matter what kind of home you have, over time, appliances, floors, and walls give way to nature’s wear and tear, requiring that home to be redone. Like any home, we need to rebuild and reinforce ourselves as we journey through life to continue standing tall and strong.

When was the last time you had an inspection?

When was the last time you inspected your home to ensure the structure was safe enough to thrive in and everything was working? Life is busy, so most of us never can take the time to properly inspect our lives to make sure we have what we need to thrive. So many of us are focused on surviving that survival is all we are good at; we just get by. We live to make it to the next day, making decisions that patch up “this hole” for now so we can do something else. We live in emotional houses filled with shotty patch jobs and cracking paint. When was the last time you inspected your foundation to make sure your home was even safe enough to live in, or are you just waiting for the day the wall buckled under the weight of your life?

Like a home, we are highly susceptible to poor foundations and building practices. We weren’t really “present” when our foundation was initially laid. We had to trust that our parents were skilled enough builders to properly install a foundation strong enough for us to build our lives on. Many of us aren’t lucky enough to have an expertly laid foundation, so we are forced to deal with the repercussions in our later years. This is why inspections are so necessary; the reason we live in survival mode, act out of emotion, and self-sabotage all stem from our foundation. It is time we revisit our lower levels and figure out exactly how much work needs to be done.

How to inspect and repair your foundation

When you inspect your foundation, you need to first be willing to accept the things that have happened in your life and understand that those events do not define you. The only thing that can define you is you. You decide who you are, you choose who you want to become, and you determine what the past means in the present moment. Your current perspectives frame how you remember the past. The events may not have changed, but their meaning in the overall story of your life can change.

Once you can accept the past, you must look for your cracks. The cracks in your foundation are your triggers; these show you the soft points in your foundation where the outside world can seep in and begin to cause harm to you. We do not want to patch these cracks by avoiding them; we want to dive deeper into them and figure out how they were formed and why. Then, we can determine how to learn to accept them and work to minimize their effects on our lives. Without properly tending to these trigger cracks, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the inevitable pressures life will put on our home.

Inspecting the home

While we tend to trigger cracks, we must also keep questioning everything we see about our home’s construction. Some of our construction was also done by our immediate environment or due to an emotional response to it, so there may be structures that no longer serve us. We may have built defenses into our homes during difficult emotional periods of our lives that now prevent “natural light” from pouring into our homes. Certain rooms may be boarded up like a zombie apocalypse, providing a perfect environment for depressive molds to grow instead of those hopeful house plants we can never seem to keep alive. Those defenses may have been needed at one point in time, but now they are destroying our ability to thrive. Limiting beliefs, Fixed mindsets, and pessimistic thought patterns are all results of emotional discomfort transformed into inconvenient fixtures. These fixtures do not serve you, so take note for the remodeling process. We may even have habits that exist in our homes that clutter our space, making it hard for energy to move freely; we must also start to look at these habits as projects to be remodeled in the future. When you begin to inspect your home and foundation, you may see plenty of things you’d like to change from decor to entire room designs. It is important to remember that your home was built over the course of many years, so it will take time for you to rebuild it in a healthy, sustainable way. You must be patient and willing to take things at a sustainable pace because your home is where you live; you can’t just demolish it and start over.

Remodeling your Home

By now, we have a good idea of what parts of our foundation and housing structure need to be updated, reinforced, or replaced. So we can begin to work on our foundation and work our way up to the house. Odds are you aren’t an expert builder yet, so you will need “contractors” or guides to help you through this remodeling process. Luckily, people have been rebuilding their homes for generations, and plenty of people have figured out exactly how to tackle your exact problems. We just have to be willing to spend a lil’ energy (time, money, or effort) to receive their help. These contractors, like therapists, life coaches, and people who have done “it,” can guide you through the steps needed to work on your unique home. You can go further with books, podcasts, videos, and refocusing your consumption habits for growth-focused media.

The Materials you will use to reinforce and rebuild your home will be just as important as those who help you build. As you work on the structural aspects of your home, you will want to redecorate. You should make sure you don’t get redecorating confused with remodeling. Changing your current interests and relationships isn’t the same as remodeling why you make decisions and your personal discipline. This is the difference between Hard Change & Soft Change. Redecorating your home is important for your personal image and confidence, but make sure you prioritize your structure; if not, you will just be painting over walls that will soon collapse.

Redecorating Materials:

• Fashion

• Rhetoric

• POV

• Finances

• Relationships

• Hobbies

• Desires

• Strong building materials:

  • Values

  • Disapline

  • Health

  • Spituality

  • Perpectives

  • Habits

  • Purpose

  • Mindset

It’s not fair that you didn’t have a choice in how your home was built, but it is a part of life. You now have the power to go back and strip away all of the things that hide the beauty that your home has always had, whether you could see it or not. You may redecorate and remodel your life as much as you need, whenever you need. Your life is yours, and you can decide how to thrive and squeeze all the wonderful experiences out of life.