A Non-Comprehensive List Of Things To Know About Getting Your Shit Together

1. It’s going to be, at times, very boring. It’s going to look like balancing your checkbook or keeping tabs on your money. It’s going to be in things like drinking enough water and going to work even when you don’t feel like it. It’s not going to be spontaneous or egregious or extreme in any way. In a lot of way, most ways, it will be boring. But boring will be what you need.

2. But having your shit together doesn’t mean that you’ll never have fun ever again. You will still have wild nights, you will still be allowed to go out. Getting your shit together doesn’t mean turning in your “fun” card and never staying out past midnight ever again. It just means that you don’t put fun above everything, including your own well-being.

3. You’re still going to fail. You’re still going to make stupid decisions and fuck up and have regrets and all that. Getting your shit together doesn’t make you immune to failure. But it does make it a hell of a lot easier to bounce back.

4. Being able to hold yourself accountable will be one of the best things you’ll ever do for yourself. There’s nothing less attractive than someone who doesn’t recognize that their shit stinks. Holding yourself to a certain standard, forcing yourself to be responsible, will be one of the most amazing ways you can change your own life.

5. People who truly have their shit together don’t need to brag about having their shit together. They just do. They don’t need to look down on people who are still figuring it out, sitting atop their perfect pedestal thinking, “Wow what a MESS thank god I’M not like that.” When you really have your shit together, you just do. You won’t feel the need to be the self-appointed peanut gallery on someone else’s journey. It’s not a bragging right, it just is.

6. It’s impossible to force someone to want to get their shit together. If people are comfortable in their uncomfortable, content in living chaotically, that’s their choice. If someone wants to continually spiral and repeat the same mistakes over and over and over, they get to do that and you don’t have a reason on this Earth to comment on it. The only life that you can control, that you can put together, that you get to mold, is your own.

7. There’s something very calming about knowing you can take care of your own life. Knowing that the unpredictable can’t really shake you, can’t take you down, it is incredibly reassuring. Stability outweighs a lot, and achieving it can be such an empowering way to take control of your mental health and ease your own anxiety about not only your present but also your future.

8. Getting your shit together doesn’t mean things are magically okay. But just because you get things together, you find stability, doesn’t mean that everything is peachy, sunshine and roses and rainbows. You will still have bad days, you will still feel defeated. There will be times when all you can feasibly do is get out of bed…and days when even that doesn’t feel like it’s in the cards. Getting your life together doesn’t mean bad days are obsolete, it just means you’re more equipped to deal with them.

9. Responsibility is actually an insane turn on. If you can take care of yourself it means you can also take care of other people. And even though someone might not NEED you to take care of them? It’s really comforting and lovely to know that you’re able to should that ever present itself.

10. You deserve to decide that things do not and cannot “just happen” to you. You deserve to take control of your own life, of your own destiny, of your own fate, of what happens to you. You deserve to stop waiting for things to happen to you and to make them happen instead. You deserve to wake up every single day and refuse to leave things to chance, but instead to be the captain of your own metaphorical ship. You deserve to methodically and purposefully control your own life.

11. It’s pretty remarkable how doing things like eating real foods, drinking enough water, and getting more than 2 hours of sleep will make you feel like a super-human. And it’s pretty amazing how when you actively decide to take care of yourself and your body and your well-being, your “self” will start to feel better. Your “self” will, in turn, take care of you.

12. Nothing feels as good as knowing that if something unexpected happens, the world will absolutely not end. There’s peace of mind in realizing that the world keeps turning. That the bad will not (always) outweigh the good. That even when things get crazy, they will balance out again.

13. There’s something to be said for being happy for other people. Instead of getting jealous, of thinking, “Why not me?” you’re just happy for them. You think, “Good for them,” when you see them achieving or succeeding. You don’t feel the need to try and leech off of their success or, even worse, decide they don’t deserve it for whatever reason. Instead, you’re just fine where you are. You don’t compare your journey and your trophy cabinet to someone else’s.

14. Really sitting with yourself, really getting to know yourself, is hard but necessary work. You’re going to go through a wild array of emotions towards yourself. You’ll be disappointed, embarrassed, mad at yourself while learning to forgive, console, and eventually, like yourself. Getting to know yourself, getting to know what you need is really difficult, exhausting, hard work. But once you do it? No one can take that away from you. Ever.