Places I used to look for happiness: alcohol, ecstasy, weed, cocaine.

Places I looked after sobriety: sex, romance, desire, junk food, unhealthy attachment to “fitness,” social media.

Places I looked after that: success, money, achievements.

Places where I find happiness now:

What’s already here.

Not more.

Not less, either. 

I’m noticing that there’s no fear around things ending anymore. 

Because there is always equilibrium.

The process of “cultivating happiness” is taking an honest look at what needs to be removed, what needs to be added. And that adding requires removal.

Patience isn’t an outward expression. It’s an inner dialogue that requires utmost honesty.

It is hard work that requires softness when we want to attack tension with aggression.

It requires us to stay here, to act out love - in precisely the moments when we don’t feel we deserve it.

Shame for allowing it to go on so long. Shame for laughing it off and even making a joke out of it to ease the tension I felt. To hope to dissolve any sexual tension so that it’d make it easier for both of us to pretend it was harmless.

Saying to myself, “It’s okay,” when it wasn’t.

For my fixers, caregivers, helpers, and overachievers - this is the hardest lesson we'll ever have to learn:

How to relax when it comes to those we love. 

The liberation didn’t come from deleting the app as I thought it did originally. It came from realizing all the ways I still let something outside of me determine if I was going to let myself feel worthy.

This is for my carers, givers, helpers, fixers, and doers out there.

The ones who make it a point, who make it their job, to know everything.

To be the most prepared.

To have all the answers.

This week, give yourself this:

The luxury of knowing nothing.

It felt like if I made the other person uncomfortable, then I would be the bad guy. 

So I’d swallow whatever was coming up – be it annoyance, anger, confusion - and tell myself it’s okay, it’s in the past, I’ve accepted it.

But I hadn’t. I had just resigned to it. 

Anxiety hates space.

It looks to fill every space with words, thoughts, and reactions.

It looks for what’s wrong, so that it can fix it.

It looks for uncertainty, so that it can attempt to create certainty.

But certainty does not exist outside of us.

For a long time anger was my strength. Then it was my weakness. It was my ally. Then it was my enemy.

Discipline doesn’t always mean pushing harder.

Be disciplined enough to know you have nothing to prove.

Be disciplined about where you put your energy. Burnout is not a badge of honor.

Be disciplined about how you treat yourself. Be disciplined about how you let them treat you.

One of the hardest things about being an addict is you learn not to trust yourself. Because while you might say what you know to be “right,” your actions tell a different story.

When our words and actions don’t match up, it creates a type of suffering that only self-hatred can make sense of.

We need courage to feel joy. Because anything that is worth having faces the possibility of loss. Grief, again. Pain, again. 

And the clarity to realize that one could not exist without the other. 

Some of us have suffered so long, to feel relief would be a betrayal.

Boundaries don’t guarantee that they’ll change. It guarantees that we will.

We have no control of what happens. Only our thoughts about it when it does.

What keeps us stuck is how personally we take it.

Balance isn’t about doing all the things. It’s about doing the one thing that’s going to make the most difference in how you feel. 

We don’t learn mindfulness to stop the thoughts.

We learn mindfulness to learn how to advocate for ourselves, no matter what the thoughts are.

Our desires will consume us if we let them.

Because the relief will be immediate - then damningly fizzled, gone, before you know it. And even before that happens, you’ll have already started thinking of how to get more. 

See the story through. Watch it til the end. Because you know how it ends. Even if you’ve never tasted this, you’ve tasted ten thousand things just like it. The name may be different. The ending is the same.