On this episode of The Karen Kenney Show, I talk about how to stop abandoning yourself.

Self abandonment shows up in lots of ways, like:

When you say yes when you mean no (like going out even though you're exhausted), or by people-pleasing, joy sucking perfectionism, and always putting yourself last.

If you’re ready to build better boundaries, deepen self-trust, and practice more self-compassion, then this episode of The Karen Kenney Show is for you. ❤️

KAREN KENNEY BIO:

Karen Kenney is a writer, speaker, podcaster, certified spiritual mentor, and coach.

She’s known for her dynamic storytelling, her sense of humor, her Boston accent, and her no-bullshit approach to spirituality, self​-development, and transformational work.

Karen helps people to navigate this whole “being human” experience using a variety of resources - including practical tools, personal stories, and universal principles.

She's been a yoga teacher for 25+ years, has been a Thai Yoga Massage practitioner since 2008.

She's also a Gateless Writing Instructor, the creator of WRITE CLUB , and the host of The Karen Kenney Show podcast.

She coaches clients individually in her 1-to-1 program: THE QUEST and in her HEART-TO-HEART DAYS using Voxer. She also leads a group program and community called THE NEST.

CONNECT WITH KAREN:

Website: http://karenkenney.com/

Podcast: https://www.karenkenney.com/podcast

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karenkenneylive/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karenkenneylive/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@KarenKenney

Hey, you guys. Welcome to the Karen Kenney

Show. I'm so excited to be here with you today. And let's start

off with a little question or two. So, let me ask you this:

Have you ever said yes to something when, like, everything

in your body was going like, no, no, I don't really want to do

this, but out of guilt or shame or whatever weirdness is going

on inside of you, you say yes and you do the thing, okay? Or

how about, do you ever like suck it up and stuff it down like all

your feelings in order to keep the peace or not make other

people uncomfortable or to not seem like odd man out or

whatever, or do you ever just like continuously go above and

beyond, and you circus delay yourself into every kind of

position? You contort yourself, you show up for things, you do

everything for everybody else, you don't say no, you like

basically exhaust yourself in service to other people, but you

don't make your own needs a priority, because if that's the

case, you might be caught up in this self-abandoning kind of

behaviors, and I am no stranger to this myself, and I wanted to

talk to you about this, first of all, because I just think it's

important, and I think these kinds of behaviors, and I say

this kind of jokingly, but also I think there's an underlying

thing to this. This is the kind of shit that leads us to an

early grave, right? This is the kind of stuff that puts so much

stress on ourselves when we self-abandon, and we're going to

talk about this today, because of a couple of things that

happen. You know me, I love to do a little story time, story

time. So, two things happened that led me to wanting to talk

about this today, and the first thing that happened is I saw a

little story online, so I'm kind of fascinated, and I don't know

if it's because my mother was adopted as a baby, and she never

knew her mother. She never knew who her father was. She, you

know, she - her whole quote unquote, I would say, real

family. And we can, we can argue about blood relatives versus

whatever, but I mean her biological family - she didn't

know them, and this is always kind of struck me, in for

several different reasons, in several different ways. Is it

left a little ache in my heart for my mom, and I know on some

level it, it, it was distressing or bothered her too. We can get

into that another time, but just for the, for the point, I think

there's a tender, a tender spot in my heart for that. So I love

these shows when I see people getting reunited with their

family members, especially when they wanted to find each other,

right? Not like when it's awkward or weird, and then it's

like, but when people genuinely wanted to find their birth

parents or their siblings. I love that. So, it was a short

little clip, it was like three minutes long, and I saw this

story of a guy, and he's talking to the woman who runs the show,

who like finds the people and helps people reconnect, and this

one guy starts to find out that his mother is dead, that his

father is dead, but he comes to find out he has four biological

siblings that he didn't know anything about, and I assume

that he was like the first born. I'm like, okay, he must have

been the oldest, and maybe the mother or whoever gave him up

for adoption or sent him away, or whatever the thing was,

because I didn't have all the details yet. But come to find

out, here's the bottom line of this story. So, not only does

this guy find out that he had four siblings, but he finds out

that he had an older brother, and they're all biological, they

all have the same parents, so just think about what a trip

this is. So he finds out that is he has an older brother who's 10

years older than him. So apparently the mother and the

father had one kid and decided to keep this child, but then he

was the second born and he was given up.

Okay, so this is all we know at this point. He's given up, and

then he comes to find out he has two younger sisters. So, imagine

being this guy and finding out, okay, well, they chose to keep

my older brother. They went on to have two youngest siblings.

Why did they like get rid of me, and so you're watching this

story, and you find out from the host that his siblings want to

meet up with him, they want to get to know him, he's overcome

with emotion, the whole thing, like, I cry every time I watch

these things, he's like balling, right, oh my god, crying over

strangers, but that's my daily existence, so he ends up meeting

with the siblings, and it comes to find out, and I'm sure he had

so many questions about, like, why me, and there's a whole

story as to why, right? The father was in the army, and he

was gone a lot, but I guess the mother hid her pregnancy with

him, so the older brother. Never even knew that the mother was

pregnant, and supposedly, as the story goes, is she had the baby

in a public restroom somewhere, and then she took him and she

dropped him off. I don't know if it was at a fire station, but at

a public place. So he is what you considered being a

foundling. You are a baby that is given up anonymously. Nobody

knows who your parents are, and he was taken in by whoever,

like, ended up finding him or taking him into the fight of

whatever it was. So, when he's meeting with the siblings, and

the older brother says, I feel so guilty because I didn't know,

and I'm thinking, oh man, you were 10 years old, man. Your

mother could have just worn big dresses or hit her belly, or

what? Do you know? You know, and so this woman delivered this

baby, unbeknownst. And then the two young assemblings, the two

daughters, two young, you know, his sisters didn't know about

him. But when they're all talking about him, the older

brother says, "I feel really guilty. And one of the youngest

sisters just starts to cry, and she says, and when I found out

that you were a foundling, she's like, it just broke my heart,

and she started to cry, and I just kept thinking about this

idea of being a foundling. There's something that is.. I

don't know, maybe I'll write a story about it someday, but it

just really moved me, this concept of being a foundling,

and that made me think, and we're going to talk about

abandoning ourselves, but I want to set this up as to why it's on

my heart and my mind. So the very same day, and this is how

it works, right? My spiritual team always has, I always say

they have a wicked funny sense of humor. So the same day, my

sister sends me a video in, like, on Facebook in private

messages, and all she writes is maybe you are related to him

with a question mark, and I'm like, oh my god, I already

probably don't know where this is going, but the fact that she

sends me this video on the same day that I'm crying about this

guy being a foundling makes me laugh. So, in this video,

there's two - I wrote down the dialog back and forth between

these two younger brothers, so it's an older brother, I'd say

he's probably about 12, and a younger brother, I'd say he's

probably about like nine or 10 or something, and the older

brother's in the front seat, and he's looking back at the younger

brother, and the older brother says, We found you in a garbage

can, and whether you're an old assembly or a young assembly,

you might be able to relate to this, but in this scenario, I am

the youngest sibling, right? So he says, "We found you in a

garbage can, like dead serious. And the little boy in the back

seat goes, "I wasn't found in a garbage can. And then the boy in

the front seat says, "But you was adopted, and that's why you

don't look like none of us.

He says, "Somebody just left you on the front porch, and Mama

just took you in, and the little kid in the back seat goes, and

he goes, all right, just go ask, right? This is what the older

brother says, and I was just like, I was cracking up

laughing, although it wasn't that funny to me when I was a

kid, but when I was a little kid, my sister used to say to me

that I was found on the side of the road, that I was adopted,

that my mother found me on the side of the road, and they felt

bad for me, so they took me in. Then she would tell me that the

police were my real parents, that I didn't belong to this

family. The police were my parents, and they reached out to

my mother, and she felt bad for me, so she took me in, and while

you're denying it as a little, little kid, some part of you is

also like thinking, like, but is it true, it can't be true,

right? And the funny thing is, is that I have a biological

sister, my sister Kim, we have the same parents, but then I

have two half brothers, and we all have the same father, but we

have different mothers, right, except for my sister Kim and I,

we have the same exact parents, but BJ and Chris, they have the

same dad as me, but they have different mothers, right? And my

sister Chris, so it's like Kim, Chris, and BJ, they all have

what we jokingly say is like these pumpkin heads, they have

bigger heads, they have rounder heads than I do, and I have this

picture one time, of the four of us together, we were out

watching my sweetie play. This was years and years and years

ago, because my brother BJ lives in Illinois, and I like never

see him, so he was up visiting, or whatever, and we're all out

at this bar, like watching my sweetie gig, and there's a

picture of the three of us, and literally, when you see this

picture, you can just start singing that song from like

Sesame Street or Electric Company, it's just like one of

these things just doesn't belong here. One of these things just

doesn't belong. Yeah, it's me. I look different than them because

I have a lot of my mother's DNA, right? Like the adopted side of

the family DNA. It's this whole funny thing, so I start to think

about this, though, about how you know my sister told me this

story of me being abandoned as a child. I wasn't wanted by my

original family, but that I was taken in out of sympathy, or

whatever, but this idea of abandonment, of being a

foundling, like this. Stayed with me like throughout my whole

lifetime, and there have been so many times where I didn't feel

like I belonged or I didn't feel like I fit in, and that's a

story for another day, but I want to come back to this

concept of abandoning, because I think so many of us walk around

with like this wound of feeling abandoned, and whether it's

because your parents got divorced when you were a kid, or

you were adopted, or you were in the foster care system, like

literally abandoned, right, physically abandoned, or

emotionally abandoned, like your parents were not emotionally

intelligent, and they didn't know how to hold you tenderly,

they didn't know how to be compassionate, they didn't know

how to see you, and really care for you, and love you in the way

that you need it. There are ways that we are physically

abandoned, emotionally abandoned, mentally abandoned,

all of these things often because our earliest caregivers

and caretakers did not know how to love us and care for us and

nurture us and nourish us, but there's also a point where it

comes where we stop feeling right, it's not so much as

important about what the other people did growing up. It's

about the patterns that we keep perpetuating to ourselves as

adults, and I know when we think about this concept of

self-abandonment, it's like, well, what do you mean, K.K.

like I am with myself all the time, like, how can I abandon

myself? Like, I don't really get it.

But the thing is, is that when we start to do things, let me

give you an example. I'm going to give you a bunch of examples

of how we don't trust ourselves, but one of the biggest ones is

when we diminish or discount our own feelings because we think

they don't really matter, because that's kind of the

conditioning that we came up with, right. We especially, I

always say, like little mass hole kids, we like learn to suck

it up and stuff it down, right? What we wanted, what we felt,

our tender feelings, those those parts of us that were sensitive

in, you know, tender, and needed more mercy and compassion. They

were not nurtured and nourished, right? It was like, suck it up,

stuff it down, this is just how it is. I'll give you something

to cry about, stop your belly ache, and all that stuff, right?

Weren't allowed to feel our feelings. They were not welcome.

Nobody was asking us to sit down and express ourselves until,

tell them how what we thought and what we felt, right, like

that was not a big thing growing up, right, my generation, Gen X,

but also just in certain cultures, right, in Lawrence,

Mass, or Boston, wherever you grew up, right, I know a lot of

East Coast kids have had this experience, especially Northeast

Coast kids, you know, and I think about that song by Noah

Kahn, where he says, you know, like, please forgive me, I was

born in little light, or with little light, right? And I think

about that, it's like, yeah, that northeastern kind of

coldness and toughness, there's a beauty to it, don't get me

wrong, there's a beauty to our resilience and our strength and

our fortitude, our loyalty, these things, they were forged,

right, but there's also something where the sensitivity

gets lost, and we get lost to ourselves and our own needs. We

start to abandon them. So, here's some concepts, right. We

can abandon ourselves when we don't value ourselves. We can

abandon ourselves when we don't know how to comfort ourselves,

to support ourselves, to encourage ourselves. We can

abandon ourselves when we make choices that aren't actually in

our own best interest, because we become people pleasers,

because we want to serve other people, because other people's

needs have become more important than our own. So, here are some

examples. I have a list here, because I wanted to make sure I

like to make notes, just, you know, sometimes, so I can be

effective here, because I never, ever, ever want to waste your

time, and if you're listening to this, I want it to be helpful in

some way. Okay, when you don't speak up for yourself, when you

don't take a stand for yourself, when somebody is like saying

things about you that aren't true when somebody's being kind,

when somebody is, you know, just not making your needs a priority

at all in a relationship. So, when you don't ask for what you

need, when you let other people take advantage of you and your

kindness or your capacity, right? Like, some of us are able

to work long and hard hours, and so people will kind of just

start to go like, oh, she'll do it, she doesn't mind, or they'll

take care of it, because they always do it, because a pattern

has been established, right. So, when we let other people take

advantage of us, when we don't enforce healthy boundaries, good

boundaries, learning to say no, when we don't ask for what we

need, that not speaking up for ourselves is one of the ways

that we can abandon ourselves when we suppress our own

feelings, when we like suck it up and stuff it down, when we

don't allow ourselves to feel the uncomfortable feelings, or

the ones that we label bad, like anger or rage, or whatever. I

never want you to be inflicting that stuff on other people,

right, but to. Able to have a safe place to express our

feelings when we push them away, and we don't allow ourselves,

when we deny ourselves to, as I say, taste the rainbow of your

full emotional experience, right?

When we, you know, start to do like the drinking and the

drugging at extreme levels and stuff like that, when we start

to alter our mood out officially, because we don't

know how to express ourselves or take care of ourselves. When we

avoid feeling big feelings, all of these things are ways that we

can abandon ourselves when we don't acknowledge that our needs

matter too. Now I'm not saying you have to put yourself first

all the time. There are just times in relationships where

it's a give and take, but when you don't recognize that your

needs matter, that they're valid, that you're allowed to

have them. When you don't take good care of yourself, when

you're constantly maybe feeling not just that like you don't

deserve it, that you don't feel like you are worthy of self care

and caring for yourself and putting your needs first. These

are all signs, sometimes, of like maybe abandoning ourselves

when we do things. So, in the nest, we were just talking about

the big three, our core values, and how important our values are

when we find ourselves start to agreeing to things or doing

things that are not in alignment with our own values, when we do

things to please other people, but end up kind of injuring

ourselves. If it's going against your true beliefs and the things

that matter to you, that's a form of self abandonment. The

people pleasing we know about, right? That's when we just,

like, we're always trying to, like, seek validation outside of

ourselves, and we want to be good, and we want the reward of

them, like giving us attention, or whatever. It's like you, when

you, when you give up your own self interest, like to please

other people, that's a red flag. We want to look at that.

Sometimes perfectionism is a way that we abandon ourselves,

because we don't allow ourselves to be human, we don't allow

ourselves to have to have flaws, or we don't allow ourselves to

sometimes have character defects, and when we have those

character defects, of course, we want to work on them and stuff,

but you do not have to be perfect, it's not realistic, and

it sucks the joy out of life, and if we don't allow ourselves

to feel worthy, unless we're accomplishing certain things,

right, that can be a way of self-abandoning,

self-abandoning. When you put, I did an episode one time called A

You, a high ba jumper, where you don't ever let yourself see

yourself for what you've actually already done or

accomplished, when you set these really high expectations for

yourself, where you can never actually meet your own level of

expectation, so that's kind of that's not soothing, when you're

a wicked hat on yourselves, when you're wicked self-critical,

when you're highly over, like, judgmental, when you tear

yourself down, when you say what's self-deprecating things

to yourself constantly, like as a joke. When you say mean things

to yourself, when you don't ever just acknowledge yourself and

love yourself, and you abandon parts of yourself, right? Like,

we have these younger parts of ourselves that just want to know

that we made it, that we're now in our 30s, 40s, 50s. We

survived it. We're doing well. We have friends, we have people

who love us. We have these younger parts of ourselves that

have been burdened, they've been exiled. Right, it's just like

you are not allowed to show up here, you and your old stories,

and your pain, and your trauma, and your suffering. We just like

stuff it down into this corner until some illness, some

therapy, or some coaching, or mentoring, right? Like, happens

where we're allowed to let those exiled parts of ourselves have a

voice, but up until that, we can really self-abandon a lot of

different parts of ourselves, and we don't trust ourselves.

That's another form of self-abandonment, when we

overthink and we second guess everything, and we ruminate, and

we let other people tell us how we should live our lives, and we

ask them to make the decisions for us, because we don't trust

ourselves when we give away our own power, and when we assume

other people, everybody from your friends, your siblings,

your parents, doctors, whoever, right men, people outside of

you, you give them the authority, and you think that

they know what's better for you than you do. That's a way that

we self-abandon our own brilliance and our own

intuition, and stuff like that. And, like, sometimes we can hide

parts of ourselves. We start to feel like this is why I always

say, in the nest, like, all parts of you are welcome here.

You don't have to show up perfect. You don't have to show

up as a know-it-all. You don't have to show up like not having

any history or flaws. It's like all of your parts are welcome,

right? And when we feel like that's not true, we will hide

aspects of ourselves, and a lot of times, you know, I just want

you to hear this. Even though, as adults, we might still be

grappling with this, a lot of this behavior stuff. In

childhood, it starts when our parents, again, they didn't meet

our emotional needs, our mental needs, our physical needs. We

felt abandoned, and we learned, we learned at a young age that

we didn't feel worthy, we didn't feel lovable. And so then our

actions over time start to be a representation of the beliefs

that we have, and this is how we kind of create identity and all

this other stuff, because we tend to repeat the things that

we learned in childhood. This is why I often say that, as a

mentor and a coach, like, yeah, I work with adults, but really

I'm just working with little kids in adult bodies, because

we're just basically repeatedly repeating the patterns, and

sometimes those patterns turn out to be the relationships that

we also choose, right, because they're mimicking like what we

knew when we were little kids, and as we get older, it's like

we start to just do the things that other people did to us, but

we just start doing it to ourselves, we take on that role,

and it's a learned behavior, and this is wicked good news,

because anything that we learn we can also unlearn, because the

brain has neuroplasticity, and we can put like new neural

networks in place through repetition, through kindness,

and compassion repeatedly over time, right? So all those times

when we like make fun of ourselves, or ridicule, ridicule

ourselves, or put ourselves down, or we become chameleons. I

was a fantastic chameleon when I was younger. I could, like,

again start to slay myself into whatever I needed to be in

whatever situation, and I'm not saying that that sometimes isn't

a skill set that is beneficial, right? But we don't want to

abandon the truth of who we really are, and I'll often say,

what you see is what you get with me. You might see me on

stage, that's still me, or you might see me on a podcast, or

doing something. I'm like, that's still me. It's just my

personality is dialed up a little bit louder, or bigger, or

whatever, but the core of it is still me. I'm not interested in

circus laying myself or being a chameleon anymore. I like, I

know that there are times, like I talk about it, like with

swearing a lot, right? Like, I'm not gonna probably get in front

of your grandma and start dropping F bombs all the time,

you know? I try to be respectful, I'm not an idiot,

hashtag evolved mass hole, but if I'm just with like people in

my PS, I'm gonna be who I am. Do you know what I mean?

I try to like hashtag read the room, you know what I mean, but

we want to break out these out of these ideas that we aren't

deserving of love and compassion, because it can be

self-destructive, and it can contribute to all kinds of

things, like low self-esteem, right, not feeling like we're

enough, for some people it can, it can cause, or it contribute,

that's a better way to say, contribute to anxiety or

depression, or being choosing partners, or friendships, or

relationships, or jobs, or gigs that are just not in alignment,

and so it's not helpful to do the self-abandoning thing

anymore. So we're going to talk about, let's talk about some of

the ways that we can stop doing this, and I'm going to make

these pretty brief, right, but we start by starting to have a

better relationship with ourselves. And when I think

about what a relationship really needs, it needs trust, right? It

needs trust, it needs love, it needs compassion and kindness.

There needs to be room to grow, there needs to be room to make

mistakes, right, all the things that we might naturally extend

to other people, the freedom to express yourself, the freedom to

be who you are. You know, you got to start showing up for

yourself, and it's like, how do I do that? Like, one day at a

time, man, like, pick one thing, it might be you start to pay

attention to how you talk to yourself, and you're like, "Wow,

I'm really hashed towards myself, I don't want to do that

anymore, right? So you catch yourself, you allow yourself to

have feelings, and you allow yourself to have needs. It's not

selfish, it's not selfish for you to have feelings and needs.

It doesn't mean the whole world has to stop and fulfill those

needs, that they now become like, oh, well, let me, let me

wait on you hand and foot, right? No, it's like everything

with balance, everything with reason, like you know, be I'm

like be a reasonable adult and think about this, but you want

to listen to your feelings, you want to acknowledge that you

have them, then you want to try to meet them in a healthier and

happier way. All right, so just identify your feelings when

they're happening throughout the day. Oh, I noticed that I'm

feeling sad, I'm feeling excited, I'm feeling anxious. I

like anxious is visiting me, as I like to say sometimes. Right?

Treat yourself with compassion. Oh my god, please don't be so

hot on yourself. Everybody, everybody deserves to be seen

and heard, to be met with great care, to be met with, you know,

comfort when they're suffering. Just be kind to yourself, do

your best to do that. Don't judge or criticize yourself so

much. I wrote these down for myself. We weren't taught a lot

of times self-compassion. We were taught compassion for other

people, we were sometimes taught compassion for animals, but we

aren't, weren't a lot of times taught compassion towards

ourselves. Of except if you watched mr. Rogers and if you

watched Bob Ross, some of my heroes. So, here's the thing: we

want to, we want to be kind to ourselves and allow yourself to

be who you are, flaws and all, as they say, warts and all. You

get to be a full picture of a person, not like your mistakes

are not the total sum of you, so you get to be flawed, you get to

make mistakes, you get to make amends, you get to apologize,

you get to grow, and you get to be better, right? But don't be

beating yourself up all the time, okay? It's really

important. So, here's the thing: we got to be paying attention,

notice when we're struggling, notice when we need help, notice

our feelings, notice our bodily sensations. We got to stop

numbing things out and sucking them up and stuffing them down,

right? So start to notice these things. Be kind to yourself.

Recognize that everybody suffers, and you're one of them,

right? So you get to be kind and extend the compassion that you

would naturally extend towards others, also towards yourself.

Okay, learning how to have more self love and self trust.

Here's one of the big ones: having healthy boundaries, not

saying yes when you mean no, not doing things out of guilt and

shame and blame, doing them because you really want to do

them. So, not showing up out of resentment. You're going to get

there, you're going to do the thing you didn't want to do, and

then you're going to resent it, and then you're going to be

like, I abandon my own self, I abandon my own needs once again,

and I know we can be afraid, especially if you've been a

people pleaser for a wicked long time. We can be afraid to say no

to people or to offend them, or we're afraid, like, oh my god,

if why, if I do this, they're not going to love me anymore. So

we become a little doormatty, we kind of let people like walk all

over you a little bit. We don't want to do that. Other people's

needs matter too, but they don't have to be more important than

yours. We get to consider all paths. We get to say, like,

yeah, I'm willing to do this, but not on Wednesday. I'm able

to do it on Thursday. You don't have to keep abandoning yourself

to make other people happy, and if other people are going to

leave you or dump you or not want to be friends with you,

because you put some healthy boundaries in place, that's a

really good red flag, because you start to realize, oh, it was

only a good relationship for them when I kowtowed and did

everything for them and allowed them to take advantage of me,

and usually when you put a boundary in place with a person

who has been benefiting from your lack of boundaries, they

will not like it, and they'll be like, "You've changed your

moment. Yep, I have changed, because I'm having more

self-love and self-trust, and showing up for yourself,

prioritizing your needs, not saying you just, you know, make

yourself number one and become incredibly selfish and arrogant

and all that. I'm not saying that balance people, nuance,

nuance, here, you know what I mean. Use your smarty pants

brain, right? But can you comfort yourself? Can you take

good care of yourself? Can you stop abandoning those younger

parts of yourself, those parts that you've exiled, and give

them a voice, and give them a good listen. These are all of

the little ways that we can stop abandoning ourselves. We don't

want to pick up where people earlier in our life, like, left

off, right? And maybe you had, you know, your family again,

your father didn't show up when he was supposed to pick you up

for visitations when you're in a two, you know, divorced family,

or whatever. Maybe people let you down, maybe you again. We

get conditioned at a young age, but this is such an important

thing. I've always kind of loved this little quote: become the

adult that you needed when you were a child, and self-parent.

This is about re-parenting yourself and really learning

that you matter, what you feel matters, what you think matters,

your experience matters, and we want to stop abandoning

ourselves. You, like I always say, like foundlings, like let's

refined ourselves and let's take extra good care of ourselves,

going back to the beginning, right? I have a soft spot in my

heart for foundlings who, you know, get, get, get, get found.

First of all, and then are taking good care and go on to

lead beautiful lives. So, it's not too late for us. I always

say, if I'm above ground and I'm still conscious and I'm still

breathing, there's an opportunity for me to grow and

change and get better at loving myself and loving others and

loving the animals and stuff. So, don't give up on us yet,

guys. We're still in the fight, we're still in the race. So I

hope this was helpful to you in some way. I hope you have a

fantastic rest of your day. Thank you for listening. And you

guys, I have so many cool things going on right now. I'm doing a

three part series of it's called Podcast Summer School. I'm doing

it with Emily Aborn. It's happening in Concord at the 11th

letter. We're doing a workshop in June, July, and August, all

about starting a podcast.

And then the next one is about growing your podcast, and the

next one is about, do you want to be a better podcast guest and

host? I'm wicked excited. And, of course, we have Right Club

coming back also in June. It's Saturday. June, I think it's the

27th from one to 4pm That's also happening at the 11th Letter

Writing Gallery in Conchid. But if you want to find out about

all these things and get the podcast sent to you directly

into your inbox every Thursday morning, then you just go online

to Karen kenney.com/sign up one word, and you can get on my list

and find out when all the shenanigans are happening. All

the events you can find pretty much online, the Pad Podcast

Summer Series. If you want that direct link to sign up, just

shoot me an email or go to the contact page on my website,

Karen kenney.com/contact You'll find it all. I'm really easy to

find. Shoot me a message, send me a DM online, and I will get

you the link or links, all right. Thank you so much for

tuning in. Wherever you go, may you leave the animals and

yourself and the people around you and the planet and the

environment better than how you found it. Wherever you go, may

your energy, your love, your presence, and your good care

towards yourself. You're no longer abandoning yourself. That

energy you show up with when you are acting in that way, in a

loving way, towards yourself. May all of that be a blessing.

Bye bye.