Today is the start of Carrie Hope Fletcher's May Vlog challenge May, Myself and I where I have decided to blog the prompts her Instagram followers suggested to her when she asked them for ideas.  If you haven't read my post from yesterday she invited her followers and subscribers to join in and tweet, write stories, poems, blog, make videos or whatever but to just create something based on the prompts that she shared.

The first prompt is running.  Carrie is currently training to run The Vitality 10k so her followers obviously wanted to know a little bit more about it.  I'm not one for going to the gym or exercising and the most I've done since leaving high school was the regular yoga practice that I had a few years ago, but there are other definitions of running besides physical exercise.  You can run from things, run a bath, run a red light...  There are many things that I have run from over the last ten years.  My ex.  My hurt from my time with him.  Opportunities. Invitations.  To name just some of them.

Sometimes it's easier to run from opportunities and invitations because if I say yes to them then I may meet new people and may end up getting hurt again.  It's a self-preservation method that helped me in the early days and in the short term in the early months and years of my recovery but long term it can be damaging because I then find it difficult to say yes to things.  It's 'safer' to say no because I won't be hurt by anyone else again, but I'm hurting myself by being so closed off.

Sometimes I've shocked myself and said yes to and done things over the last ten years; a tandem parachute jump for charity, a solo holiday to Edinburgh, starting a new public blog and Instagram profile to name just a few.  But there are many many more that I have declined or worse, made an excuse to say no to over the years.

I've become aware this year that I do need to start getting out of my comfort zone more and get out there, put myself into new situations, meet new people and therefore maybe make new friends and say yes to opportunities when asked.  Even and especially if they scare me or make me anxious.  The thing about being somewhere new or doing something new is I can always go home if it gets too much but at least I tried. It is definitely no longer serving me to keep saying no to things, and if anything it's having the very opposite effect. 

This year I am aiming to run towards invitations and opportunities that previously would have me running in the opposite direction.  I've got my second solo holiday booked for September, I've got a meet up planned for next week where I only know one person, with the opportunity to meet more and maybe make some new friends.  I will maybe write a blog post about the meetup, I've not decided about that yet, but as I'm now doing this challenge, it might not be until June when it goes up if I do write about it.

What have you run from, what are you may be running from and what would you like to run towards instead?