I hope you build a life that feels more beautiful than it looks.
I hope you come to see that real happiness is when you stop prioritizing someone else’s eyes over your own heart. When you realize that the more you like something, the less you will need others to like it for you; and the less you need others to like it for you, the more they genuinely will.
We are never so concerned with how we are perceived as when we are not firm in our own knowing. When we are looking to reimagine what is in front of us through the perspective of someone who would see some goodness inside of it — the accolades, the impressiveness, the things that would make it all seem right and whole and well.
This only ever leads us to a life in which we are only able to move through the motions.
A life where we are confused by the juxtaposition of how everything is right on the surface and everything is empty just beneath.
It takes a lot of soul to move from the well-worn ways of the world and seek solace in what really lights us up, that makes our days feel exciting again. Within that is our own small callings, the way life is asking us to reengage with what matters, to find our hope again.
If you really pay attention, you will find that the beginning of every great story was that someone had the courage to give themselves to what they knew, before anyone else could see it, or feel it, or affirm how good it might or would be. That self-knowing, that faith, is the engine and birthplace of creativity and love and everything worthwhile. It is the acknowledgement that there is a feeling within you that you cannot shake — and the bravery to say that you will follow it, even if it does not make sense to anybody but you, at the start.
I hope you give that to yourself.
A life that you’re actually living, not one you are engineering so as to win a game that only you are playing with your own mind.
