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I’m slowly learning that discovering your self-worth will aggravate a lot of people who seemed to profit from your insecurities.

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It’s not a blessing to not want to settle, because I will live in my car and my life will fall apart. It is hard to tell yourself that you’re doing important things when you’re not doing what you want to do.

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Run from the sad and painful stories that tell you that there’s no way out of this hell, run from the stories that feed you all the lies about why you can’t accomplish something amazing or how you’ll never find that old-fashioned romance you’ve been wishing for or how you’ll never be able to have the best of both worlds.

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Love is not something that should be on that list of things we settle for.

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But here’s what I learned about settling and staying quiet when you should speak up, it doesn’t win you any more friends, it doesn’t make you a likable person and it doesn’t make you a cooler person, it only makes people take you for granted.

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I want my own life, and I want him to have his life, and I want our lives to come together and for us to share our journey. I want to share everyone I love with them and I want everyone he loves to share it with me. A world I can share with somebody else.

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You don’t want to change them, but are happy to continue to fall in love with whoever they evolve into over time.

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For having more faith in what’s possible as opposed to what’s true right now.

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When you’re not the one who settles, you ask a lot of questions with answers that might hurt you and you look for the truth; the truth that others evade, the truth that others shove aside to live a lie and the truth that others are afraid of. But you ask for it because you know it will set you free even if it’s ruthless. Because it takes courage not to settle, it takes strength and it takes resilience.

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Took a few really awesome road trips. I worked three jobs after college (so if you assume people who didn’t go full-time right out of school are lazy, you’re mistaken), but it’s a lot easier to take a random Monday off when you’re working mainly in the service industry.