Tag: Life Advice

Maybe You Don’t Need A Reinvention, Maybe You Just Need To Be A Little Kinder To Yourself

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Maybe you don’t need a reinvention.

Maybe you don’t need to change your life.

Maybe you are not seven steps, a move, a job, a goal, a relationship away from the person you’re meant to be. Maybe you’re not being held back by what you don’t have, but by not appreciating what you already do.

The truth is that you are a work-in-progress, but you are already complete. The person who showed up to your life today is the person who was meant to arrive here. The place you are at is where you are supposed to be.

There are no shortcuts in this life. There is no magic milestone you’ll cross after which you’ll effortlessly coast through. I know it feels this way. I know the most compelling notion in the world is the idea that the reason why you’re uncomfortable is that you don’t have every single thing you think you’re supposed to have.

Do you want to know the truth? Getting them isn’t going to shift you the way you think it will. You might have more comfort, you might have one less challenge to face or problem to solve, you may make things easier for yourself, but the breadth and depth of life is something we cultivate. It’s not something we find, it’s something we become.

Maybe you don’t need a reinvention.

Maybe you need to be able to look in the mirror and see yourself the way a stranger would. Maybe you need to stop waiting, and wondering, if you’re okay enough to begin. Maybe you need to stop over-evaluating. Maybe you need to stop thinking so much. Maybe you need to stop asking more questions than you allow yourself space to receive the answers.

You are a constant evolution.

You are a piece of the whole of what you’ll be.

There are many lifetimes in this life, and they are often defined by the people we transform into, shift by shift.

Those versions of ourselves — the people we have left behind and the ones we have yet to find — they are not in competition with one another. They do not need to be vilified. You are not worse off because one day, you’ll be better. You are not greater than the person you used to be, either. Every version of yourself is doing the best with what they have, and that’s all you can really expect.

Maybe you don’t need a new identity, maybe you need to start realizing that the person you are today is worth savoring the joy of this day, maybe you need to start seeing yourself the way the rest of the world does, defined by your features and your strengths, not weighed down by your contours and weaknesses.

You are so familiar with yourself, so intimately and acutely aware of all you have not yet become, all the ways you’ve sold yourself short, all of the thoughts you’d hope nobody would ever know you’ve had. You are so critical because you know the full, whole truth of who and what you are, but what you have to remember is that everyone is complex. Everyone exists with contradictions and layers, places where they are hiding and showing up. Everyone contains and infinity of different versions of themselves, because every person they come across perceives them a bit differently, and so everyone we know has a different version of us in their heads.

You cannot spend your life trying to decode this.

You cannot continue to piece together your identity through the shreds of what you imagine other people see.

Because in the very same way that you often see those around you one-dimensionally, you’re seeing yourself that way, too.

The version of yourself you are most excited or freaked out or scared or convinced other people see? It’s how you see yourself. And to be honest, that’s the only version of yourself that matters, because that’s the only version of yourself that’s actually real.

Nobody else gets to say what’s enough for your life, whether you’ve arrived or not, whether you’re beautiful or not, whether you’re good at what you do or not. That is not for someone else to decide, it is for you to decide. It is for you to unravel and piece back together. It is for you to discover and find and revel in.

Often, when we feel that we’re not quite where we should be, it’s because we’re seeing ourselves the way we imagine others would. We’re imagining that we’re on a linear track forward, and with each hit and missed milestone, we are graded and rewarded accordingly.

This is so far from the truth.

You are your own universe. You are your own home. You are your own safe place. Just because you will be different tomorrow doesn’t mean that you’re not enough today. Just because you’re hungry for growth doesn’t mean you can’t also be filled with the knowledge that you’re right where you’re supposed to be.

And more than anything else, the truth is that the deepest transformation is not the moment at which we have the courage to uproot our lives and change course, but the moment at which we gain the clarity to see that there is not a single thing we need to adjust in order to be worthy of feeling everything we desire today.

We just have to learn to see it that way.

Read This If You Worry That You’ll Never Really Get Your Life Together

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If you are someone who is worried that they will never get their life together, your fear is clouding your vision.

These words will bring you back to clarity.

If you are someone who is worried that they will never get their life together, it means that despite all of your disbelief, and through all of your confusion, and though you feel so lost in this moment, you still know that there is another life calling to you, and waiting for you.

You know you are meant for more, and capable of more.

If you are someone who is worried about getting their life together, the magnitude of this vision likely keeps you away from the actual work of bringing it together. In becoming so swept up in all that you know you desire, and all that you know you’re meant for, you overlook something vital.

The work of changing your life is subtle.

It happens in small moments — the ones you overlook, the ones that are passing you by right this second.

It means that when you realize you should wear SPF to protect your skin, you wake up and you put on SPF. It means that when you don’t have money to spend, you don’t spend it. It means that when you realize you’re acting irrationally and taking your feelings out on someone who doesn’t deserve it, you stop taking them out on someone who doesn’t deserve it.

It means that when you realize you need a glass of water, you drink a glass of water. It means that when you commit to only checking your email twice each day, you only check your email twice a day. It means that when you know something must be done, you do it, instead of waiting until it’s snowballed into a far bigger problem.

Getting your life together means that you stop avoiding the subtle discomfort of doing what’s not ideal in favor of being able to completely avoid the massive discomfort of realizing that you’re in yet another crisis.

So much of what makes our lives go off the rails is not what comes along and throws us off course, but how we slowly allow ourselves to fall off in the micro-moments that we don’t choose the right thing.

The right thing is very often not a heroic act. It’s never backed by movie music, there’s usually no victory lap, no recognition, and for a while, no reward.

It’s just you, and a choice, and how you make it.

For most of your life, you will be able to get away with not doing a lot of it. You will be able to slide by doing the bare minimum, resorting to what’s comfortable, denying what you need in favor of what you want.

You are a free being and you can choose that.

But then you cannot be surprised when the consequences choose you.

So instead of waking up tomorrow and feeling overwhelmed by how far you are from where you want to be, and how much has to get done, and how deeply you believe you are falling behind, what if you woke up and just figured out the next right step, and then took it? And then figured out the next right step after that, and took it again?

What if your life was no longer a picture you were trying to paint so perfectly but a collection of moments and choices you simply had to allow to build up upon one another? What if you’re not overwhelmed by the mountains you’ve yet to climb, but the fact that you continually delay taking the first steps?

The truth of that matter is that there is no such thing as really having your life together.

There’s no measure at which you’re an adult, at which you’re safe, at which you’ve done it all right.

There is only a life that you are comfortable with, and a life that you are not. A life that you are proud of, and a life that you are not. The difference often comes down not to the big facts about who you are or aren’t, but the little things you do within those ideas and identities that make up your character, the heart of who you are and the soul of what you are yet to be.

The way out is not overhauling your life one day, it’s waking up every day and choosing to figure out the next best thing to do with what you have and where you are, and then doing it.

You will not be able to avoid every challenge, mistake and problem this way, but you will be able to avoid a lot of them.

We spend so much of our lives wondering about the people we might be — how we appear, what we could change, whether we are good or not. We spend so little time actually being those people, actually changing, actually doing what we already know is good.

It’s not as complicated as you want to believe.

A good life is built of tiny, good decisions, made over and over again, until you’re reaping a full harvest of all that you’ve sown.

You are constantly in a process of becoming and unbecoming, but in each moment that we’re given an opportunity to choose differently, we usually revert to the same old familiar habits and choices.

What if, instead of reinventing ourselves from the inside out, we just decided to do one thing right, and then allowed it to unravel and transform the rest?