Not everyone will understand your journey. That’s fine. It’s not their journey to make sense of. It’s yours.
Author | Photographer | CG Artist | Filmmaker
Every lifeguard is trained to understand that the deceptive thing about drowning is that it doesn’t look like what most people imagine. The same thing often applies to depression.
Just because a person isn’t flailing their arms in the water doesn’t mean they’re not drowning. And just because a person smiles doesn’t mean they’re not battling depression.
Anger is easy. Try harder.
There are real problems and then there are the things people choose to focus on and respond to in anger because they’ve fooled themselves into believing that anger is a sign of strength. When in actuality, it’s a sign of weakness.
There is a time for anger, but rarely does it involve things that could easily be dismissed & totally forgotten if one just took a deep breath and moved on.
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In most cases – under normal circumstances – discomfort always fades. If, over a prolonged period of time, you find yourself increasingly uncomfortable with any aspect of your life – from your relationships to your mental or physical health to your career – that is a sign that something needs to change and it’s important to take action and do something about it.
While ventures beyond your comfort zone can be very rewarding & healthy, ignoring warning signs and subjecting yourself to long-term term physical or mental pain & suffering is not.
“If I were you.”
When giving advice to those who ask for it, remember that what you would do isn’t always in the best interest of the person you’re giving advice to.
Often, the most effective advice involves revealing pathways & illuminating doors and letting the person you’re providing advice to decide for themselves which one is in their own best interest to take.
If you want to be a positive force in people’s lives, you don’t need anyone’s acceptance or permission to do that. Nor do you have to follow anyone else’s standard on how to do it.
There will always be people critical of how you choose to make a positive difference in the world, but the fact is, those people are not your target. Your target is the one person whose life you make a little bit better by being a part of it. And after that person, it’s the next one.
And over time, you can touch many people’s lives in a positive way. And that is something you can do in any way you choose. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be you.
If people want to appreciate you for something you’ve created – even if you see flaws in it – let them. It is entirely OK to be appreciated & recognized for the things you create even if you’re better now than you were when you created them.
Don’t disparage your work just because you can see flaws in it. If it’s obvious to you what you could have done better, that’s proof you’ve grown. And that’s something to be proud of. And if you created something that people admire, that’s something to be proud of, too.
Don’t deny yourself the recognition for previous accomplishments just because you’ve improved in the time since you accomplished them.
