Learning to Live

"Focus on you, not the future." Bless my mother for her beautiful words of wisdom. It's no secret that one of my "things" is stressing unnecessarily about literally everything, especially the future. Obviously this doesn't make me special as we all tend to stress about the future from time to time, but some of those times make me unable to eat or sleep or think straight.  The thing is, I shouldn't stress. Life is great. Life is beautiful. Life will always be okay and if I've made it this far, I will likely just keep on keeping on, but sometimes I think too much about timelines. I look at the people around me and their timelines and then I think about where I should be on mine. But here’s the thing, timelines are bullshit. My friend Luke and I like to yell this a lot. We laugh about it, but it's true. We all gotta do what we gotta do on our own time. I'm so happy to see my friends getting married, buying houses, or bragging ab...

A lot of my writing comes from reading first, so it's no surprise that this post will bring you to an essay by Mary Laura Phillpot that is featured in her book I Miss You When I Blink.   This particular essay starts out by reminding the reader to put down the phone and Post-it notes and stop rewriting the to-do list in your head. WOW. RELATE. The moment I wake up I have a to do list in my head and that list just gets modified as the day goes on. I wish this was just a daily thing, but I find that I do it for my life all the time. And it is EXHAUSTING. It's exhausting to feel the need to do it all and do it well and be kind to others along the way. I find myself in a state of "simmering, low-grade resentment" at times and it's sucky because it's not even anyone else's fault. It's all mine and my stupid brain. I see myself the way I think the world sees me, which means that I only feel worth when I'm getting something checked of my list. It do...

I've been busy procrastinating on pretty much everything productive and spending a lot of time in my own head as I work on enjoying silence and simply being by myself. This is not one of my strong suits as I am constantly go-go-go, but it's a work in progress. Anyway, at the urging of one of my very best friends (sup Kel), I took an Enneagram personality test . Before you roll your eyes about how personality tests are maybe a load of crap, this one is special because Ryan O'Neal of Sleeping At Last has taken it upon himself to study all of the personality types and write a song for each type . I love to learn about myself and I LOVE music, so this is truly the best of both worlds. O'Neal also hosts a podcast  where he breaks down each song and the lyrics within it. If you made it this far, I recommend that you take the test and listen to your song. I hope that you can get as much out of it as I did. Not only does this particular test tell you your strengths, but also ...

Like most people, I went into 2018 with a lot of goals. The biggest one was to write more, but the thing about writing is that it can sometimes be scary. Taking my thoughts and feelings out of my brains and putting them on paper makes them real, and sometimes I try to avoid that. This avoidance led to a whole lot of reading. What better way to avoid writing about myself than by reading about others?! I did continue my tradition of documenting these books with writing down memorable quotes and I used these to define my 2018. "Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you." - Celeste Ng in Little Fires Everywhere 2018 was a good reminder that it's easier to forgive people than to hold on to the mistakes that they have made. I don't have the time or the energy to be angry with others for something that they may have done to hurt me, so I forgive them and take a lot of comfort in...

Last August I opened up to social media about something that I had been dealing with for a long time. It has been a little over a year since I came to the realization that I needed to make a decision to get help and within that year I realized the true power of our decisions. For a long time I was terrified of making decisions because I was always scared that I would make the wrong one, but as I have gotten older, I realized that the truth lies at the heart of every decisions. That truth is the life that we want for ourselves. This year I was fortunate enough to travel to a lot of beautiful places with some of my favorite people. That is mostly because at the beginning of 2018 I made a list of places I would go and I made it happen. Simply making the decision to live the life that you want is all it takes to get that life. People will often comment on my fun and adventurous life and forget the work that it takes to get there. We tend to believe that the grass is always greener ...

Hi everyone! I promise I'll be back with something soon... Just reminding myself how to write! Thanks as always to Brian Andreas for capturing my feelings about EVERYTHING.  http://www.storypeople.com/2013/12/16/how-to-write/