Fellow humans, I’m going to give you the whole truth because I’m done giving less. I’m done holding back, holding out, holding in. I’m done containing the hurricanes inside me. The truth: I’ve spent a lot of my life hating myself. Sometimes it was a loud internal voice driving my mind into obsessive downward spirals of darkness. Others, it was a low-pitch humming just below the surface of my days. Always, I was terrified. Of being judged. Of being ugly. Of screwing it up. I’ve spent years trying to pour the sun-shaped expanse of my soul into a box made of Photoshopped fantasy. Waiting for permission, listening for my cue, struggling to be something special, grasping for anyone who might justify my existence. You know the feeling?
I think most of us do. We were all born into cultures with customs that tell us what’s important, what’s normal, what we deserve. We learned the rules and we believed them. The problem is that we forgot that those rules are just ideas some dude made up at some point. We forgot that they’re just one tiny story in an infinite sea of possible stories. The real truth: you and I weren’t made to fit into the expectations of others. We weren’t made to follow anything but our own beating hearts and breathing lungs, that symphony of sensation, that reverberating reality wild with desire. Breathe for a moment. Notice what it feels like. Slow down. Notice how they’re like waves on a shore, doing their thing since the moment you were born, and they won’t stop until you leave here. Take that in. The simple act of turning our senses toward sensation can be enough to bring us home to the actual facts…the raw materials of wonder embedded in life. That’s too miraculous to waste on bullshit.
So I have a proposal: let’s quit trying so hard. Let’s stop struggling for power and instead unwind, making room for something more deserving of our attention. Let’s choose a better story than the ones keeping us so small. Let’s choose to believe that this magic life is an adventure. Let’s not keep life to ourselves…let’s set existence on fire and light up the whole world.