Not Really Your Concern

Stop worrying about what other people think of you.

Stop wondering what they're saying. Stop guessing what they're thinking. Stop reading careless words that hurt. None of this is any of your business. None of it.

Let It Go

Let it all go. Let. It. Go.

The quality of your life will increase in direct proportion to the amount of time you decide not to "go there." Direct proportion.

Stop sticking pencils in your eye and you'll be surprised at how non-painful it is to open your eyes and see.

Each of us has a "there" and we each know the well-worn path to our there. We've walked it many, many times.

• Ran it sometimes

• Dragged ourselves on it other times

• Ventured there even after our friends told us not to do it.

We don't always listen.

That's okay. Nobody wants to hang out with the perfect people anyhow. The human experience is flawed for all of us.

And the crazy part is that's where the beauty often is: in our flaws, in our stumbles, in our vulnerability, in our recoveries, in our trying again, in our trying when all is hopeless. Beauty and freedom lurk in the frightening moment when we admit that we are all just making it up as we go along, that no one has the Magic Answer Book, that the Magic Answer Book never existed anyhow, that the people pretending to read from the Magic Answer Book are just another bunch of misguided, scared people with filtered photos and filtered lives.

And Let the World In

So many of us are messy, beautiful bundles of emotion and reaction, and we let the world in.

We flood the world in, painful and real because we ache to feel something, to be something, to mean something more than bones and blood and best intentions. We don't just want to live. We want to live.

Life is going to hurt. There's no way around that. But there is a way to give yourself a break, a way to save yourself from unnecessary pain. Stop sticking those pencils in your eye. Stop thinking so much about what other people think of you.

Think instead about what you think of yourself, and be unsparingly honest with yourself. If your behavior today is righteous-- and today only is what we're talking about, shed those thoughts of past and future (you can't live there so don't let your brain live there)--then this is enough. It has to be. And if your behavior isn't righteous? Improve. Don't make excuses. Fess up. Stand up. Own up. Decide what to do better and then do it.

Concern yourself with saving your soul, not with saving your reputation. If you take care of the former, the latter will take care of itself.