1. No matter how tight you hold on and how much you feel in control, everything could still fall apart. You could plan everything until there’s nothing left to plan and it could still all go to shit. Life is not about creating the perfect circumstances, but is merely about how you are able to persevere beyond the wreckage of a life you thought you’d have. Your most valuable skills are your flexibility, resiliency, because as you face the rubble of a life you thought you’d be able to curate, you’ll have to create a new vision and that could either be a beautiful or horrific experience depending on how you approach it.
2. You are entirely responsible for how your life turns out and how you react to what happens in your life. The most useless of all emotion is indifference. You must fight for the life you want. Nothing is going to change in the speed in which you prefer it change, so waiting on the world to change to better fit your worldview is not going to work out. You need to fight. Keep fighting. And, do whatever it takes to let in, heal, and then move past whatever is holding you back from the life you want. Life is not about standing still; it is about sprinting toward your own corner of the world that makes you feel alive.
3. Whenever you think you don’t have a choice, you do. Your life is filled up with the consequences of the choices you have made and is open-wide toward the choices you have not made yet. It may seem more comforting to believe that life is happening to you, because it easily explains away the shit you might be feeling, but essentially, you can retrace your steps back based solely off the choices you made in your life.
4. Expending energy to avoid a breakdown is fruitless. It’ll happen. You will hit your version of rock bottom and, the heartbreaking part of it all, will be that it will serve to be the most cleansing, detoxing, freeing aspect of your life. Once you’ve been to the bottom, you fear less. You’ve seen the depths of your darkness, what else is there to fear from that point?
5. The beautiful thing about how others perceive us is that an insult or a “negative” label is just a label. The heartbreaking part is that so are the compliments. Just labels. Merely these words people have thrown at you that you now have to shake off, because the moment you adhere a label to yourself too heavily is the moment you have imprisoned yourself to having to either break out of that label or keep up that label. Either way, it’s pressure. Either way, it’s living within the constraints that others have forced around you. Keep labels around as little identities to live inside for a time and then shed those often as you grow and change and learn more about yourself and the world around you.
6. Everything you are experiencing right now is temporary. You are existing in a temporary world. This is why they say to live in the present and why it has become a cliche to say that, because, simply, there is no use to project into the future. No use at all! And, while this might be wonderful for the parts of your life that you want to be temporary it is heartbreaking to think that the things you love and want more than anything are as fleeting as the things you don’t.
7. An essential part of humanity is bestowing the love and kindness you wish to have onto yourself. Paradoxically, this is almost impossible to do. You will search your entire life for the proof of your worthiness and will continue to come up short. There is no proof. It’s heartbreaking. That proof just does not exist. The beautiful part? You create that proof for yourself. You blindly and without evidence to the contrary, teach yourself of your worthiness and, at some point, you will wake up in the morning feeling more deserving of the kindness you are giving yourself and it will go like that every day and it will get easier, but you will never fully accept who you are and maybe that’s not the point. Perfection has never been the point. You are here to live and, the human experience of living is a multifaceted, dynamic approach, and you are owed nothing, but everything is available to you. You can embrace the beauty of this dichotomy or you can resist against it.
8. There is no right or wrong way to live. There is, simply, just living and existing and being. The beautiful aspect of this is that it is the most intoxicating, limitless freedom. The heartbreaking? There is no road map, no rules, no guidelines. You are on your own in the great big beyond of this life and it is up to you, solely, to take this life in your hands and thoroughly accept the neverending dichotomy of it all. And, if you can learn to accept it and lean into it, then, perhaps, you have found what this whole living thing is all about. 
