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Plus, don’t we all, deep down, carry an inextinguishable longing for our parents to be proud of us? Even long after we’ve given up?
“You’ve been tragically failing at life for years and years! We have to celebrate!”
No matter how alone you ever are in life, you always have yourself, right?
You always have that goofy, imperfect face that forgets to take off its mascara before bed and wakes up with raccoon eyes.
Of course those aren’t the only things that make you you.
“Our thoughts create our emotions. So if you fixate on your worst-case scenario, you’ll make things harder for yourself.” “You want me not to fixate on the worst-case scenario?”
“I want you to start practicing the art of self-encouragement.”
“You’re very in your head,” she said. “I’d like to see you dip into your heart.” “I like it in my head.” “But that’s not really where we live.”
Did it make me miss my mom? You bet. But the delight of it—the absolute, blissful, embodied pleasure of it—made it okay somehow.
That’s the dark underbelly of hope that nobody ever talks about. How it can skew your perspective. How it can keep you in long past when any reasonable person would’ve been out.
Isn’t it lucky when we’re drawn to people who can teach us things we need to learn?
Seeing the world differently helps you see things not just that other people can’t—but that you yourself never could if you weren’t so lucky. It lets you make your own rules. Color outside your own lines. Allow yourself another way of seeing.
But I find the antidote to that is just keeping a sense of humor. And staying humble. And laughing a lot. And doubling down on smiling. We’re all just muddling through, after all. We’re all just doing the best we can. We’re all struggling with our struggles. Nobody has the answers. And everybody, deep down, is a little bit lost.
Sometimes we really are the best versions of ourselves. I see that about us. And I’m determined to keep seeing that about us. Because that really might be the truest thing I’ll ever know: The more good things you look for, the more you find.