Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who's Been There

by Tara Schuster

“above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

You can be the version of yourself who wears a dress made of all the night’s stars like it ain’t no thing, who floats above the petty little annoyances of life and looks back down on Earth with clear, peaceful perspective. You can’t control the narrative of the outside world, but you can control the story you are telling yourself in your journal. I suggest you make it a good one.

In middle school, I lived in perma-dread of the annual Presidential Physical Fitness Test. (Did you have this at your school? Was it nationwide?) It was a series of tests meant to gauge our fitness level through arbitrary assessments that we students never trained for.

I would be forced to demonstrate all of the things I could not do in front of all of my classmates. Pull-ups? High jumps? Sit on the ground, place a weird metal box on top of me, and lamely push a slider over my legs with my fingertips to show how close I could get my fingers to my toes? Spoiler: I could not touch my toes EVER.

“Busy” is worn as a badge of honor these days; the busier we are, the more important we feel.

busy doesn’t mean important. Busy just means you are preoccupied.

Busy likely means you are not paying attention to the current moment but instead are hustling around in a fog of things you “have” to do.

Life is not a series of crises to be endured. Life is to be enjoyed.

Sure, there are issues along the way to deal with, but part of learning to savor your life is learning to see the process of figuring things out as pleasurable.

But my point is that there is profound satisfaction in really working on the tough shit.