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Even if it wasn’t your fault, it is your problem, and you get to choose what you do in the aftermath. You have every right to rage and rant and hate every iota of someone’s being, but you also have the right to choose to be at peace. To thank them is to forgive them, and to forgive them is to choose to realize that the other side of resentment is wisdom. To find wisdom in pain is to realize that the people who become “supernovas” are the ones who acknowledge their pain and then channel it into something better, not people who just acknowledge it and then leave it to stagnate and remain.
Those relationships didn’t actually hurt you; they showed you an unhealed part of yourself, a part that was preventing you from being truly loved.
We realize how we blindly or naively said “yes” to someone or gave them our mind and heart space when we didn’t have to.
Truly coming to peace with anything is being able to say: “Thank you for that experience.” To fully move on from anything, you must be able to recognize what purpose it served and how it made you better. Until that moment, you’ll only be ruminating over how it made things worse, which means you’re not to the other side yet.
Trying to make sense of your life is trying to see if the old story checks out, if the person you once were would be happy with the life they lead today. You’re looking for answers in people that don’t exist.
What do you think you’re here for? What’s the point of it all? Explore what you most inherently believe, and then determine how you can live that out to the best of your ability.
The recurring thematics of your daily daydreaming represent what you’re actually seeking from others in various areas of your life.
This is your subconsciously motivating factor, because it’s the thing you have yet to give yourself. Whatever it is, it’s a projection of the thing you most feel you lack—and, therefore, subconsciously seek from others.
Figure out what you crave, and figure out how to feed that need yourself.
What you most dislike in others is, in some variation, true of you: You just haven’t been able to acknowledge it yet.
You are not your thoughts. You are not your feelings. You are the being that observes, reacts, uses, generates, and experiences those things. This is to say: You can’t control them, but they don’t control you.
(And when you can’t allow yourself to let things go, you’re trying to tell or show yourself something. Pay attention.)
You love in others what you love in yourself. You hate in others what you cannot see in yourself.
The point of anything is not what you get from having done it; it’s who you become from having gone through it. It’s all about growth at the end of the day. The bad things grow you and the good things do, too.
The easy way out is to stay.
If you are making a choice that you can only feel good about when you back up with a list of “because,” you’re not really listening to what you want.
If your little, inner voice were telling you that you weren’t interested, or you were on the “wrong path,” it wouldn’t say anything at all…you’d just let it go.
There’s no difference between the things that pain you and the things that please you—they are both intended to teach you something. You have brought them into your experience because you want to learn from them.
The process of unlearning the reasons to justify the illusions is how you reacquaint yourself with the voice that doesn’t use words. It’s ultimately why you choose to get lost in the first place.
Never realize that bit by bit, you created the life you never really wanted with the pieces you never really chose.
You aren’t clear on your intentions about what you want, and that’s because you’re still trying to edit and enhance them to appease, impress, or elicit someone else’s approval.
In other words, you can’t be honest about what you want because you aren’t comfortable with the truth of who you are.
A quick cheat sheet for you: The heart will tell you what; the mind will tell you how. Let them stay in their corners of expertise.
The love you really want is your own. What you’re seeking in someone else is what you aren’t giving to yourself. What angers you is what you aren’t accepting and healing; what gives you joy and hope is what you already have within you.
Whenever there is a problem in your life, there is a problem with how you are thinking, reacting, or responding.
It seems the task of the generation (century, maybe) will be radically accepting ourselves in a society that feeds on the opposite.
Making kindness cool and humility humor. Forgiving the way things are, knowing the only way to reinvent anything is not to destroy what’s present but to create a new, more efficient model, one that renders the other obsolete.
We’re more nostalgic for things that never happened than we are grateful and present in the things that are.
The things that don’t leave your head are not the ones that show you what’s “meant to be”; they’re the things that show you what you’re still not okay with on your own.
If healing is just acknowledging pain, then maybe living is just acknowledging life.
There are so many anxieties and frustrations and terrible things that cease instantly when we just say them out loud.
We’re not supposed to be better than our humanness. Doing so is overlooking the point of the body in the first place. We can choose happiness, but we choose the full spectrum of experience instead.
inactivity and inactivity with failure. We’re trained to be overworked and to believe that if, at any point, we aren’t doing something that contributes to our goals, we’re not doing anything.
It makes us unable to just be with ourselves—our purpose only legitimate if it's serving someone or something else.
When overworking is our identity, we lose track of who we actually are, and in the process, we stop living actual lives.
Notice how we only feel we are doing “something” when that “something” can be externally measured…by other people?
When you do not sit and allow yourself to reflect, reconcile, and acknowledge what you feel, you actively give said feelings more power.
suppressing negative feelings only gives them more power, leading to intrusive thoughts, which can prompt people to be even busier to avoid them."
Either way, you’re more in your head than in your heart, and you’re letting your life be guided by what you’re trying to avoid, as opposed to what you’re trying to achieve.
You’re indecisive. You don’t trust that your thoughts or opinions or choices will be “good” or “right” the first time, so you overthink.
You procrastinate, which is just another way to say you are fairly regularly in a state of “dis-ease” with yourself. (You can’t simply allow flow, which is a product of suppression.)
You suffer a “spotlight complex,” in which you feel that everyone is watching you and is invested in how your life turns out. (They aren’t. They’re not.)
But your 20s are about unlearning, too.
Your 20s are about undoing as much as they are anything else. Choosing new. Deciding otherwise. Shedding layers that have muddied your idea of who you think you are.
I hope you ask yourself: “What do I want now?”
Don’t only think of what it makes sense to do. Think of what it feels right to do.
The things you genuinely want rarely have to be thought out.
A packed agenda is not success. Living to work as opposed to working to live is not a quality of life.
Your deepest revelations happen in silent moments with yourself. Being crowded with people and appointments and ideas and creative outpourings wouldn’t be so profound and stunning if there weren’t also moments of aloneness and nothingness and mental drought.
Unfortunately, nothing and nobody can hand you your happiness. Fortunately, nothing and nobody can take it away.
