What could I possibly know about love? What could I possibly know about life? Who am I to give any sort of advice when I still have an entire life of my own to live, mistakes to make, and lessons to learn?
We all have our own story; our own journey in finding love, happiness, and purpose in life. We all have a reason behind our “why” and how we envision our personal stories to unfold. But we all have one thing in common, without even realizing it, we put a timeline on everything. We put a timeline on finding love, finding our forever person. We put a timeline on finding true happiness and contentment. We put a timeline on grief and becoming a better human. We put a timeline on life, and we don’t even realize it.
So, what could I possibly know about love? What could I possibly know about life? Who am I to give any sort of advice when I still have an entire life of my own to live, mistakes to make, and lessons to learn?
I know that love is overwhelming, exciting, and empowering. But, I also know that love can be confusing, challenging, and even painful or temporary. What I do know about love is that it can be learned from and shared with a million different things in this world; people, places, and passions, none of which have an expiration date. What I do know about love is although immense, it can be taken away from us so unexpectedly.
We know this, yet time after time we continue to put a timeline on love without having a little faith. We continue to put ourselves in a position to hurt and break in ways that could easily be healed if we opened our hearts to let faith guide the way.
Sometimes it’s the realization that two people who care so deeply for one another can somehow manage to be on two completely different paths in life. Sometimes it’s the end of an “almost-relationship”. Sometimes it’s something as simple as not being ready, and sometimes it’s the temporary love that hurts the most. But what we fail to realize every time our heart aches is that every love, whether temporary or forever, allows us to grow as a human in extraordinary ways. That in the end, we will be just fine. Because maybe, just maybe, God has a bigger plan for us; that each heartbreak or failure is something as simple as a stepping stone to becoming a better version of ourselves. Because maybe, just maybe, God knows of our personal timelines and monumental milestones, far better than we do ourselves.
The same goes for life; we put timelines on milestones and beat ourselves up for not meeting our personal deadlines. If there is anything I have learned in my twenty-something years, it’s that nothing in life is promised. That’s what’s so tricky about it and probably why the majority of us always over-analyze and overthink everything we do; ultimately driving us to question everything that crosses our path.
What does this mean? Why is this happening? Why me? Why not me? What’s next?
It’s scary, not having a concrete roadmap of life to follow. But isn’t that what makes it so exciting? Isn’t that what makes life so much more worth living?
Think about it. Sit down and really, truly think about it.
We were brought into this world, not to hyper focus on one person or thing, but to live out a passionate and unbroken life; to re-write society’s norms and create a captivating story, one that God has given us the opportunity to make our own, unashamedly and unapologetically. To see the world, to share our stories with people who are hurting, to make a difference, to open our hearts to wanting more. The reality is, everything that happens in love and life happens unexpectedly. So, why do we keep putting timelines on either one? Because maybe, just maybe, God has a bigger plan for us; that when we feel lost or alone, it’s because through faith and time we learn our way around it. We learn to embrace every opportunity to share the love in our heart and our personal stories with the world around us.
Because maybe, just maybe, having a little faith will guide us towards the milestones that are destined to be ours. Maybe, just maybe, having a little faith will ultimately be our saving grace, allowing us to find our way.
At first it’s going to be uncomfortable especially when you’ve never made yourself a priority before. When you are the type of person who puts everyone else’s needs before your own. When happiness is defined by what you do for others and you’ve done it so long you forget to do things for yourself.
It’s realizing maybe the reason you aren’t where you want to be or feel the way you do is because you haven’t taken the steps to get there yourself when you’re constantly focusing on other things and people.
It’s looking yourself in the mirror and accepting the fact you made these choices and you can’t blame anyone if you aren’t happy or fulfilled.
It’s looking at your life and instead of pointing blame it’s finally taking responsibility.
It’s feeling a little confused because once you realize making other people happy hasn’t made you happy, you have to figure out what does and you might not even know that answer.
It’s sitting down and trying to figure out what you want while trying to evaluate and eliminate the things you don’t want.
It’s removing certain people from your life because you have to for your own wellbeing even if you love them and care about them and can’t imagine your life without them, sometimes distance and space is better.
It’s stopping instead of running from your problems because you know you can’t escape the things you are denying to be the truth and you can distract yourself from what the problem is. But you are at a point where you want to find a solution.
It’s doing something you don’t want to because that choice is going to put you on a track you’re proud of not one you’re settling for.
It’s asking yourself am I doing this because I want to? Or am I doing this because I feel I have to and I don’t want to let other people down?
It’s not feeling guilty to admit you need a break or you’re tired and just need to relax for once.
It’s staying in on a Friday because you look at your bank account and you don’t even know what you spent stuff on but you know, you should have been more responsible.
It’s waking up early and not pushing snooze on your alarm 100 times because going to the gym, getting that run in, doing yoga is good for your mental health and well being. And even though you don’t want to do it, in that moment you know you have to.
It’s finally wanting to take full responsibility for how you feel about yourself and not allowing others to define your self worth.
It’s ending those relationships that linger and have loose ends because you can’t keep giving chances to people who don’t deserve it.
It’s not answering when someone from the past comes back because don’t care about what they say because they shouldn’t have left in the first place.
It’s not always being the one to make plans with everyone and go all the way to them every time. It’s realizing people should be putting as much effort into you as you have them instead of taking the relationship for granted.
It’s checking in on the people who check in on you because those are the people who matter.
It’s putting your phone down when you want to text someone because you are realizing the phone works both ways and the only person you should be interested in isn’t one who makes you question your self worth or question a simple text.
It’s holding back on dating because if you don’t know who you are and what you want you won’t know what to ask other people for.
It’s figuring out what you want and not being ashamed of it or feeling guilty for wanting something more than just a hookup.
It’s letting that really attractive person go even though you’re interested because you know you can’t turn them into the person you want them to be and you aren’t going to waste your effort.
It’s allowing yourself to breakdown and cry and fall completely apart because it’s okay to not have the answers. It’s okay to be unsure. It’s okay to be hurting and not know how to fix it.
Feeling through these emotions you might have repressed and it finally coming out isn’t a bad thing and it doesn’t make you weak.
Sometimes it takes strength to get to that place emotionally and feel through all the ugliness so it’s out of your system.
It’s realizing the life you are leading at this moment isn’t the one that’s making you happy so something has to change.
It’s taking a step towards a completely different lifestyle that you or others are used to. Even though there are going to be questions of why you are doing this and people who will doubt you and disapprove, you know you’re doing it for you. It’s not longer feeling guilty for disappointing people for living the life you want as oppose to the one they expect.
It’s realizing when you make certain changes in your life you’re going to lose people who are going to want you to go back to what you were doing and the person you were because it didn’t fit the mold of what they needed and wanted. But the real relationships in your life will support you.
It’s not selfish to want to be happy and want to have a life you’re really excited about. It’s essential.
It’s learning how to let something or someone go because you’ve outgrown it and even though good memories resided there you can’t keep looking back.
It’s evaluating your life and your choices and calling it exactly what it is. Your mistakes. Your failures. The things you did your ashamed of and instead of throwing a pity party, you learn. You grow. You forgive yourself because as much as other people deserve forgiveness you do too.
It’s realizing you can’t force things. Whether that’s relationships or a lifestyle.
It’s giving everything your best effort but accepting that some things aren’t meant to be even if you want them to be.
Then once you realize this isn’t where I’m supposed to be, you find the courage to change it because people aren’t meant to stay in the same place doing the same thing. Especially if it’s not making them happy.
When a plant doesn’t thrive and grow the way it’s supposed to, you don’t blame the plant you simply change the environment to one it will do well in. That’s how you should approach everything in your life.
It’s taking a step back and looking at the life you are projecting out to the world across social media and asking yourself is any of this real? It’s pulling back if that answer is no and trying to create a life you don’t need to fake.
And it isn’t wrong to want to be happy.
It’s saying no for the first time in your life and not explaining why.
“You’re wise beyond your years. You have the body of a god(dess). You’re a total badass.” These are the words that levitate us.
“You’re not clever enough, not skinny enough, not brave enough.” These are the words that obliterate us.
Why is this dangerous? Because regardless of whether we’re being applauded or ridiculed we’re still putting all our trust in someone else’s judgment — judgment that has little to do with us in the first place. Words are powerful. They have the capacity to build empires, make us fall in love, and heal our wounds. Unfortunately, they can also sever alliances, drain our confidence, and make us wish we could rush ahead to our own funerals. But most of the time they’re nothing but a reflection of ego. They are the result of psychological projections and conditioned creeds. Hence why we mustn’t place anyone’s opinion on a pedestal no matter how much cheap flattery is thrown our way.
It’s impossible to absorb praise without also absorbing criticism. If we’re susceptible to one, by default, we’re susceptible to all. That is why gleaming from compliments can be just as dangerous as weeping from insults. Either way, we’re discrediting ourselves. We’re relying on someone else’s endorsement to feel worthy when our worth should always come from within.
As Marcus Aurelius once said, “It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people but care more about their opinion than our own.”
Needing approval makes us more likely to engage in behavior that contradicts our character. It can make us dissociate from our ethics and misplace ourselves in the wreckage — a slippery slope that’s hardly worth the fall.
Demanding the approval of audience members so vastly different from one another sets us up for failure. If we’ve gained approval from some, we very likely risk losing approval from others. If we are successful in our careers and generate more wealth than we can imagine, we may earn exclusive entry into some elite societies, but there are certainly some that will regard our success as gluttonous and our priorities askew. Women who decide to start a family later in life will be respected by some but terrorized by others, along with those who do so too young. We won’t win. And even if we did, it may come at the cost of our dignity, and with the stakes that high, is it even worth the gamble?
Perhaps we should aim to do the things that merit our own admiration instead. At least then there’d be no running around in circles, trying to oblige those who are still learning how to oblige themselves.
Be the kind of person who would make you proud, the rest doesn’t matter.
When was the last time you sat down in the discomfort of your silence? When was the last time you fell in love with your spirit? Not the spirit of another, but your own worthy energy. Your heart isn’t just a heart. Your heart is the source connecting you to everything here on earth.
When you’re disconnected to you, you’re disconnected to everything. It creates a blockage to energy and energy connects us all to all of life. Energy is God. Energy is Love. When you feel this blockage arise and it’s really uncomfortable to sit alone, begin with where you’re at.
Release judgment against yourself. “I do not judge you for thinking anything that you think.” Feelings and thoughts are just feelings and thoughts. The more time you sit in the discomfort of silence, the more comfortable silence becomes. Silence is always a reliable comfort.
Your heart is always a reliable comfort. Humans are unreliable. Within you is where you should always begin. We must make the effort to sit alone, because alone is where we discover the depths of us.
So when life feels lonely, sit alone. Even if it doesn’t feel lonely, sit alone. When sitting alone feels uncomfortable, move if you have to, but then go back. You must learn to rely on what’s within. It must be a practice.
It’s normal to become frustrated. Again, release judgment. You’ll begin to find your rhythm, your stillness, your creativity. Your rhythm will come and go.
If you feel like inspiration is distant, be patient. Sometimes your brain needs a break. Inspiration will show up when you’re ready.
Your spirit is always looking out for you and you are a spirit this world needs to experience.May you find patience through your process. Your process is yours to experience. Experience it.
Your glow up might not be something others can see. It might not come across as a shift on the surface.
In a world of revenge bodies and comeback relationships, a world that tries to tell you that your ultimate transformation should be splayed out across your Instagram feed, we’ve lost what it really means to heal, to improve, to move on with our lives.
Your glow up is not necessarily learning to draw your eyebrows on perfectly, though that is a perfectly fine thing to want to learn to do. Your glow up is not wearing tighter clothes, faster fashion, a relationship you can show others to prove that you are finally wanted, though all of those things are empowering and incredible if you choose them. Your transformation is not that you go out with your friends a lot, it is not that you make money now. It is not that you have earned goodness on the surface.
This kind of glow up is quite empty. That’s why it’s never enough.
The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.
When you want to change your life in order for it to look different, and only that, you are still orbiting around the opinions of people who didn’t love you, and didn’t have any intention to.
You can always tell the difference, too. People who have truly transformed are not concerned solely with how things appear. Their lives are now focused intently on how things feel, how they really are underneath it all.
A real glow up is authentic. It is lifting off all the cover-up bullshit and addressing the real problems. It is healing. It is changing for good. It is, for the first time, prioritizing your heart over someone else’s eyes.
Anyone can piece together an image that looks better. Anyone can edit and filter and lay picture after picture, side by side, to create a narrative, a story, a semblance of the whole. Anyone can buy their way into beauty, anyone can look nicer if they really try, anyone can convince you that they are doing better than they really are.
If they are so intent on trying to prove that, it is probably because they are still so empty inside.
What if you weren’t worried about whether or not you looked bigger or smaller or nicer or better than you did 10 years ago?
What if you were more concerned about whether or not you gained self-respect, real relationships, emotional freedom, mental clarity, a job you appreciate, work you respect, a kinder and more empathetic disposition?
What if your accomplishments were not something you could photograph or measure, nothing you could loosely try to communicate across some pixels and status updates. How are you feeling today? Better than you did yesterday? More whole, more confident?
The truth of the matter is that there is no before and after in life. We are always in a process of shedding and becoming. That snapshot moment you’re waiting for, that instance in which someone dares to look you up again and sees, finally, that you are thriving… is a game for you, and you alone.
Nobody is looking at you the way you think they are. Nobody is thinking about you the way you wish they would. They are looking at themselves. They are thinking about themselves. They are reading themselves.
This isn’t sad though, to be quite honest, it can be truly freeing. This should be the crux of your ultimate liberation.
The truth is that you have nobody to prove wrong but yourself. The people from your past probably didn’t disapprove of yourself nearly as much as you feared they did.
This closure is for you. This growth is for you. This change is yours. This is you vs. you, you meeting you, you seeing you for the first time. This is about you becoming who you know you can be. This is about you finally living up to your potential.
But mostly, this is about you recognizing that you were not your very best self before.
You didn’t behave the way you wish you would have.
You didn’t do what you should have.
You weren’t what you hoped you’d be.
Whenever we want desperately to prove someone else wrong, what we are really trying to do is quell our own lingering disappointment that we didn’t live up to our own expectations.
So remember this, the next time you’re trying to craft a glow up story that is compelling to others, ask yourself why you are still waiting for their approval.
The answer, almost always, is that you still do not have your own.
It was not something you asked for, it was not something you deserved.
What happened to you was not fair.
You were merely collateral damage on someone else’s warpath, an innocent bystander who got wrecked out of proximity.
We are all hurt by life, some of us from egregious wrongdoings, others by unprocessed pain and sidelined emotions. No matter the source, we are all handed a play of cards, and sometimes, they are not a winning hand.
Yet what we cannot forget is that even when we are not at fault, healing in the aftermath will always fall on us — and instead of being burdened by this, we can actually learn to see it as a rare gift.
Healing is our responsibility because if it isn’t, an unfair circumstance becomes an unlived life.
Healing is our responsibility because unprocessed pain gets transferred to everyone around us, and we are not going to allow what someone else did to us to become what we do to those we love.
Healing is our responsibility because we have this one life, this single shot to do something important.
Healing is our responsibility because if we want our lives to be different, sitting and waiting for someone else to make them so will not actually change them. It will only make us dependent and bitter.
Healing is our responsibility because we have the power to heal ourselves, even if we have previously been led to believe we don’t.
Healing is our responsibility because we are uncomfortable, and discomfort almost always signals a place in life in which we are slated to rise up and transform.
Healing is our responsibility because every great person you deeply admire began with every odd against them, and learned their inner power was no match for the worst of what life could offer.
Healing is our responsibility because “healing” is actually not returning to how and who we were before, it is becoming someone we have never been — someone stronger, someone wiser, someone kinder.
When we heal, we step into the people we have always wanted to be. We are not only able to metabolize the pain, we are able to affect real change in our lives, in our families, and in our communities. We are able to pursue our dreams more freely. We are able to handle whatever life throws at us, because we are self-efficient and assured. We are more willing to dare, risk, and dream of broader horizons, ones we never thought we’d reach.
The thing is that when someone else does something wrong and it affects us, we often sit around waiting for them to take the pain away, as though they could come along and undo what has been done.
We fail to realize that in that hurt are the most important lessons of our lives, the fertile breeding ground upon which we can start to build everything we really want.
We are not meant to get through life unscathed.
We are not meant to get to the finish line unscarred, clean and bored.
Life hurts us all in different ways, but it is how we respond — and who we become — that determines whether a trauma becomes a tragedy, or the beginning of the story of how the victim became the hero.
You feel painfully ordinary, worried that you’ll never be enough as you internalize messages that you’re not as special as you hoped. You worry that you’ll remain stagnant, that you’ll never achieve great things, that your life will forever feel dull and hackneyed. But never stop believing that you are magic, a manifestation of stardust and dreams and the universe itself.
Never stop believing that you can transcend the ordinary. You were created to brim with untapped potential, a burning desire for change, a limitless capability to manifest the world you want to inhabit. You can rise above expectations and defy convention, turning your desires for change into a tangible reality. You can achieve far more than you believe because you were born with magic inside of you — the ability to overcome, aim higher, and lift yourself to the heavens.
Never stop believing that the magic of your presence can change the world. You were born to be one-of-a-kind, created delicately but deliberately to share your own brand of magic with everyone around you. Every bright smile towards a stranger, every radiant laugh at a joke, every sparkle in your eyes spreads traces of your magic out into the world. You may believe that you are too insignificant to make a difference, but the magic within your heart will help you create a better world — as long as you’re open to recognizing the power of your magnetic kindness.
Never stop believing that your magic breeds magic. You may think that you are disillusioned, that your belief in your own magic is nothing but a mirage. But your loved ones see the magic of your unapologetic kindness, care, and empathy, and lust after your brilliance, boldness, and zest for life. You inspire everyone who surrounds you to discover their own magic, reconnecting with the pieces of themselves they left behind, encouraging them to release their magical spirit into the world. You are the reason that the world’s magic multiplies day by day.
You may believe that others possess a certain kind of magic that you’ll never grasp — a magnetic presence in the world. But I hope you never stop believing that you are magic, too — that you have the enchanting ability to manifest your dreams, heal others, and change the world around you.
I want to let you know that I think you are so brave. I really do. It takes an incredible amount of strength to pour your heart out for others in spite of the possibility of being completely and utterly wrecked by another human in return.
It takes an unbelievable amount of vulnerability to open up your heart completely to another person, whether or not they do the same for you. It is both such a blessing and curse to feel so deeply for others. To continuously crash your heart into a person you feel a deep connection beginning with. Because where does it get you to stay guarded? Where does it get you to hold back your thoughts and feelings? How do you progress your relationships with others if you do not try to get to know them on a deep level?
Fuck being scared of feeling like you are too much, like you are trying too hard, like you should be playing the game in order to win somebody over. Because you get nowhere when you attempt to hold back all of who you are in fear of what somebody else might think.
I want to let you know that I love how much you are. I love that you have the capacity to pour out for others. I love that you want to make genuine connections. I love that you want to find a love that is entirely inspiring and freeing.Because if you hold yourself back, then you are not being all of who I know you are capable of being; you would not be true to your soul.
I love how you do not keep your guard up for long. You do not weigh things out logically before jumping in. You simply feel—you feel everything all at once and want to keep feeling everything in spite of potentially getting hurt. How wonderful of you.
I admire how you want to live your life without regrets and without holding back your endless thoughts and sincerest feelings. Too many people are so afraid of living and are so afraid of rejection, but not you. You would rather feel everything and get rejected instead of holding back your energy for somebody. Do you even know how much strength that takes? Promise me that you will hold onto your vulnerable heart, because I want you to know that you are so rare and do not even realize the impact of that yet.
The love you find within yourself will be yours forever. However, I know that the journey back home to yourself, the journey towards being comfortable, and at peace, on your own, and learning how to hold your own heart, and hold your own space, in a way that doesn’t scare you, but rather, in a way that empowers you, isn’t easy.
We live in a world where we are constantly being fed so many distractions. We don’t have to learn how to be alone with ourselves, because we never really are. We can fill our lives to the brim with other people, with being busy, with work, with scrolling, with so many energetically and time consuming things, that we never really have to sit with ourselves and be alone with ourselves if we don’t want to.
I always ask myself: “Who are you when you’re alone with your mind? And are you happy? When the world is quiet, and the distraction and the noise is stopped, what is asking to be felt? Do you feel at home with yourself?”
Often the answer is no. And that is why alone is considered something that is uncomfortable, and something that most human beings avoid. It’s difficult, it’s hard to be alone. And that is something you don’t have to be ashamed of. You don’t have to vilify yourself for maybe finding it hard to love yourself, or to be okay on your own. At the end of the day, we need one another. We need meaningful relationships, we need that interaction. It is why we have evolved and survived for so long as a species. Learning how to be alone does not mean that you need to shut out the world, that you need to never ask for help, that you need to be closed off and removed from connection. It’s beautiful to want to love, to want to experience so much at the hands of life with the people who make you feel seen and heard and at peace within this world. But when we focus so much on finding that feeling externally, sometimes we forget that we can give it to ourselves as well. Sometimes we forget that the love we have always sought in others can first, and foremost, be found within ourselves.
This is your reminder that alone is not synonymous with not good enough. Alone is not a weakness, it is not something to be ashamed of. Alone is a gift. It is a foundation, a steady ground within yourself that will be there whether or not you are in a relationship, or you get a good morning text. Alone is knowledge, in yourself and in your hopes. Alone is a ruthless dedication to understanding your heart and fighting for what compels it after years of allowing for it to be loved in halves. Alone is not lonely. Alone is not broken. Alone is an anchoring, a healing — a reminder that the love you find within yourself will be yours forever, a reminder that you have the capacity to be your own home.
I believe so deeply in learning how to be alone, because often when we are afraid of being alone, we tend to keep things in our lives that are not meant for us. When we are afraid of being alone, sometimes we settle for less than what we know we deserve, or need, or deeply desire, because we would rather have something than nothing. We tolerate behavior, or things that do not inspire us, or encourage our growth, or love us the way we have always dreamed of being loved, because we do not want to lose what we have just in case something better does not come along. And if something better does not come along, if we don’t have another human being or their attention telling us that we are loved, that we are worthy, that we are valid, then who will? Learning how to be alone teaches us that even if everything external leaves us, even if the home we have built within so many things in this life suddenly shatters, or disappears, we will always have the ability to step into the home that is our own heart, our own soul, our own mind.
Learning how to be alone is important because it is in our capacity to be alone that we no longer settle for things that we have outgrown. We no longer grip. We no longer seek external validation as a means of feeling loved, or worthy. We have done the work to love ourselves. We have done the work to be okay within our quiet, within our calm, within our minds. We have broken up the dirt within ourselves, we have looked the scary things in the face, we have no longer swept them under the rug, we have no longer allowed for fear to allocate our energy to things that are not deserving of it. Instead, we have faced the fear. We have grown within it. We have learned how to be strong on our own. How to build that foundation.
And it is within that, that we start to see the things that come into our lives from a place of self respect, and self love, rather than fear. When you are comfortable on your own, the things that you allow into your heart, into your life, are only ever going to be adding to it. You are no longer allowing yourself to accept things that ask you to settle, that ask for you to be less of yourself, that make you feel like you are hard to love, or like you just have to accept them because they are there. Instead, now, the things that you allow into your life, are things that are growing you, and inspiring you, and helping for you to stay true to yourself. It is no longer a question of if someone likes you, if you are good enough. It’s a question of if you like them, if they can give you what you need, what you desire. There is no longer this worry of being without, because you are never without when you know you have yourself.
From this space, your capacity to love others also increases. When we love from a place of fear, from a place of being so worried that we will lose someone, from a place of being so scared that we are going to end up alone — that is not love. That is attachment. And we know that attachment will never turn into love, because attachment is the kind of dynamic that makes us think we have to possess something in order to be happy, that we need it in our lives in order to feel fulfilled and at peace. When we can be our own peace, when we can fulfill ourselves, when we can be our own happiness — we love freely, and openly, and with ease. We can be fully present, we can love from a place deep within ourselves, from a place of deep understanding of our hearts, and our worth, and we can give so much to those in our lives from a place of compassion and empathy, rather than giving from a place of fear, which is often just us trying to possess something.
However — this kind of growth is so incredibly difficult at first. Studies have shown that people would rather administer an electric shock to themselves than be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. There is such an aversion to being alone, because we are so stimulated, we are so convinced that we always have to be seeking our happiness outside of ourselves. But there is a lot of beauty that can be found from committing to yourself and to committing to working through that discomfort. On a biological level, when we work through things that are creating a stress response like discomfort within us, when we commit to a task or achieving something, and ensuring that we are pushing ourselves along, it actually creates a dopamine reward system within our brains. We are literally learning how to reward ourselves, not externally, but within the act of committing to something deeper for ourselves, within the act of committing to being better, to doing the work — that act of self-love actually creates a happiness response within ourselves. Slowly alone becomes something that feels less uncomfortable. Slowly, our alone becomes a beautiful place to be.
And so in understanding that — no matter how difficult it is, this is your encouragement to commit to yourself. To start leaning into your own soul. To finally sit with yourself and listen to your needs and know yourself. To do the work.
If the idea of being alone scares you, that is when you know that you need to remind yourself that you are your own home. That is when you know you need to start learning how to give yourself the same love you seek externally. That is when you know you need to quiet the distractions, you need to be okay in your own company. Because it is better to be alone than to be with someone who makes you feel lonely. And it is better to be alone than to be settling for things that you know deep down are not for you. It is better to be alone than to make love into something you feel you have to grip at, something you have to possess, instead of something beautiful and soft. It is better to be alone than to lose yourself in the need for external validation. It is better to be alone.
When we think of kindness, we often confuse it for niceness, and the two are not the same.
When we are being nice, we are being placid and non-responsive. We are not aggravating, we are not triggering, we are not pointing out anything important, we are not addressing what needs to be said. We are washing over our natural and essential reactions for the sake of not disrupting someone else’s waters, even if in all honesty, that’s exactly what they need.
We behave this way because it’s not always our place to tell someone what they need to hear.
It is always our place to maintain that type of honesty with ourselves.
Being kind to yourself is often doing the thing you least want to do.
It is very often prioritizing your future needs over your current wants. It is awakening yourself to your destructive habits, it is recognizing your self-defeating patterns, it is learning how to self-heal, it is setting boundaries first with ourselves and then with others, it is recognizing our power and remembering how we have neglected to use it.
That is kindness.
Everything else is a distraction.
The kindest thing to do is not always the easiest thing to do.
It doesn’t always come with a sweet smile and a comforting hand. It doesn’t always soothe us to sleep. True kindness is a fire that wakes you in the night. It’s a calling that you can’t ignore. It’s tough love, it’s seeing reality for what it is. It is acceptance, it is choice, it is reclamation.
When we are truly being kind to ourselves, we are actually in a process of reparenting ourselves.
We are doing for ourselves what we always relied on others to do — and we are doing it for the sake of our long-term and overall wellbeing.
We are taking ourselves up on an opportunity to do what is right as opposed to what is easy. We are choosing to do what is important over what is yet another way to numb and cope with the discomfort.
When we start solving problems, the discomfort goes away.
Kindness is loving ourselves enough to do that.
It is believing in our potential enough to choose better. It is caring enough about ourselves that we decide we’re going to stop accepting a life that’s less than what we deserve. It is fighting for who we are, and who we might one day be.
There is nobody in the world who can show you the type of kindness that you can show yourself.
Yes, through understanding and empathy and compassion, and then through the unending commitment to see yourself to a type of life in which you can do what you were born to do, be who you were born to be, and create what it is your ultimate destiny to create.
You are meant for that.
The only thing you have to do now is decide whether you’re going to choose it.
