Hey. Hi. Hello. Howdy.
This week I lost my credit card but found a new, important piece of myself. Sometimes when I lose—or gain—something, I start to think about the intricate balance present in life. The way we feel at any given moment is dependant on an infinitesimal number of factors. How our physical bodies are working, our mental states, our emotional stabilities, how we are being treated by and interacting with others, the weather, whether we are hungry and hydrated, etc. When we think about all of these elements, it’s almost difficult to believe that we ever find moments of peace, much less moments of happiness or joy.
So, next time you lose something, think of it like this—we can only hold so much at once—so much happiness, sadness, responsibility, stress, etc. Sometimes we have to lose something good to gain something better—an idea I can’t claim as my own but find comfort in any way.
The 5-4-3-2-1:
5 things I read, listened to, watched, or otherwise consumed that made my brain less smooth:
“They Fell in Love after WWII and Japanese Incarceration: At 98, He’s Published Tribute to His Beloved” by Hailey Branson-Potts in The Los Angeles Times. A complicated story with a simple message—love.
All of Bridgerton, all in one week.
Episode 3 of the Amazon Prime series Modern Love, titled “Take Me as I Am, Whoever I Am,” a painfully beautiful exploration of trying to give and receive love while suffering from mental illness. Each episode of the series is based on a true personal essay from The New York Times column “Modern Love.”
The “Sad Bops” playlist on Spotify because it’s the playlist I’ve been waiting for all of my life.
“There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing” by Adam Grant in The New York Times. Languishing, defined by the author as a “sense of stagnation and emptiness” or “muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield”—a feeling that I think all of us have felt in the strange expanse of the last ~13 months.
4 lessons I learned:
When you put down your phone, you can pick back up your life.
Don’t use salicylic acid and retinol on the same night.
The more you love you give, the more you receive.
How important using a VPN can be.
3 questions I asked my therapist, Mom, or best friend:
What’s your birth time, date, and place?
What are you grateful for this week?
Wasn’t that few months without football so nice?
2 things from the world-wide-web that made me laugh-out-loud:
1 photo I took, saved, or was sent to me that feels imperative to share:
And finally, this week, On: Intuition
Intuition, your gut, that little voice in the back of your head—whatever you want to call it, we all have it. Our intuition exists to guide us to what serves us and keep us away from what doesn’t. When we are born, our intuition guides everything we do—think of how quickly we are able to learn as children. But more importantly, think fo how much easier it was to experience joy as a kid compared to now.
The reason that it gets harder and harder to experience joy, learn new things, or dream big as we get older is because our the volume of our intuition is constantly being turned down the more Life with a capital L we experience. We are conditioned to be scared, careful, and realistic instead of curious, excited, and hopeful.
Yes is an answer equally as available to us as no, so why do we default to telling ourselves no? The best possible outcome is just as likely as the worst, so why do we assume the worst? We tell ourselves no, encourage ourselves to shrink, and assume the worst out of fear. Fear that we don’t deserve a full life, we will fail to meet our lofty goals, or we will get our hopes up to only be disappointed. But what if none of that was true? What if you do deserve a life beyond your wildest dreams? What if your biggest, scariest goals are just a starting point? What if your hopes are guiding you to your highest and best self?
The truth is, we have a choice. A choice to listen to our own, intuitive voices or to the voice of our ego. Our ego functions in good faith—it thinks it exists to protect us, so it constantly tell us things like hope but not too high, love but not too hard, dream but not too big. Our egos do the furthest thing from protect us—they stifle us. They keep us small. They keep us complacent. They keep us afraid.
When we stay small, so do our lives. How heartbreaking is that? But, when we expand into the highest, best, and biggest versions of ourselves, our lives follow suit. Our confidence, joy, and love become contagious. We create a domino effect—perpetuating light and abundance to everyone around us. How good does that sound? When we are able to realize there is a separation from us and our ego, we create space for possibility. The more closely we identify with our egos, the less space there is in between who we are and we want to become—the ego takes it all up, filling it with fear that keeps stagnant.
So, how do we do this? How do we flip the switch from ego to self, from fear to love? The answer is one step at a time. We have a choice in every move that we make, every thought that we have, every decision we choose. Instead of telling yourself that you can’t, tell yourself that you can—over and over until you do whatever you are being called to do. Instead of living in fear of what might happen, choose to be curious about the possibilities of what could happen. Instead of setting no goals, set huge ones—then break them down piece by piece, and start moving along.
Our intuition never lies to us, misguides us, or is mean to us. Our intuition is the voice that makes us who we are. No matter how quiet it may be right now, it’s still there. It might be drowned out by the voice of your ego or a million other external things you consume each day. But that doesn’t matter—all that matter is that it’s still there, just waiting for you to turn up the volume.
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