Crooked Smile

There is a certain kind of power that comes with having confidence. As a child growing up that continued on as a young adult the only thing I was confident of was the confidence I lacked.. Back then I had an unbelievably crooked smile. This carried on until shortly after I graduated high school. My family could not afford to pay for braces and I do not ever remember asking for them because I already knew it just wasn’t financially possible.

I look back on all my photos growing up and see a very unconfident girl with a closed mouth smile or a partial smile. I remember absolutely hating picture day because the expectation was a smile showing your teeth..and I was terrified of having to see that memory captured and hung on a wall.

Just before college started I remember going to our local dentist and asking her if I could setup a payment plan for her to fix my smile. Looking back I was a risky bet.. but she without any hesitation agreed and changed my life on the outside. Little did I know I still needed quite a bit of work on the inside…

I sometimes feel myself going back into that space of not being confident especially with the things we are now tackling at the farm. To me it is so unbelievably uncomfortable to walk into a room full of farmers or joining a farmers market and just be at the beginning stages of the game while it feels everyone else is well beyond that point. It almost feels like an exhibit full of pictures and the only one’s hanging are my crooked smile. These are my inner fears resurfacing of not being good enough..

I think this is where the art of comparison tags itself in and takes a seat at our already full table. I start to compare what we have accomplished to others who may or may not have been in the game longer. The feeling of suck less do better consumes me. It always seems to happen at the most inopportune time.

What I started to realize is that I was going through life fixing my outside thinking it was fixing my inside. I would buy the fanciest things we could afford and move us to areas across the country that I thought would create happiness. If things looked great on the outside they must be great on the inside right… It wasn’t until we moved back home and I started to realize that I didn’t really have a need for fancy things anymore and where we lived the truest value comes from your character and grit.. boy what a wake up call to realize you have to dig a little deeper and realize it’s time to work on the inside that actually fixes the outside to build that true confidence.

For us we have had to learn everything on this farm from a brand new perspective. This meant we were starting over. It was quite literally a new beginning for us. Our son graduated and moved out. Ryan and I were navigating life as empty nesters and embarking on this farm journey. In the beginning it was extremely difficult to not give up.

One of the biggest things we had to understand was that we could not compare ourselves to others because we would 100% lose every time in our eyes. We were and still are our own biggest critics. For example.. it took us quite a bit of time to build our goat paddock we just couldn’t get it to meet our perfect. So we just continued to work at it even on days we felt less than mediocre. Six months later we finally finished it, and without a doubt it may not meet some folks standard of perfect but it is perfect for us. Or spending months learning how to use a commercial vinyl cutter Ryan purchased when we moved to this farm because he had more faith in myself than I did to use it to create a potential income for the farm. That thing sat for two years until I was finally sick of looking at it and told myself I was going to figure it out. It took me months to learn it it. I am actually still figuring out the things I can make with it. I would go to bed at midnight only to wake up at 3 AM to get back at it to make farm merchandise. Then mustering up all the courage I had to post about it to only learn now we need to work on our marketing game! So now that is what I am working on these days.

It is difficult not to fall back into the comparison game and come up with a million reasons why the outcome isn’t as we predicted it to be and give up but we don’t. We don’t because we are different than what we were as two young adults meeting in the lobby at Kirkwood Community College who had absolutely no idea what we wanted out of life and have grown in ways I can’t explain nor would have ever imagined.

Don’t get me wrong there is a lot of fixing to do.. I mean a lot but there is nothing more humbling to look back and say we did that and then grab each other’s hand and say come on we got a ways to go.

So yes when you get caught up in the merry go round of comparison you need to work the courage up to jump off while that thing is still spinning.

Moral of the story..Crooked smile or not.. own your confidence even on your most unconfident days. Trust me…even the most confident people aren’t as strong as you think.

✌🏼-Jamie