101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

of your life 
IS WHAT’S ACTUALLY 
HOLDING YOU BACK
You should try to make sense of your feelings. You should trace the
lines of your thinking, find the genesis of your innermost beliefs, and
make sure they’re really yours. You should make lists of the things
you do and don’t value, you should ask yourself what you most feel
you are lacking, then look at how little you’re giving them.
But you should stop trying to make sense of your life. Doing so is
trying to make sense of the trajectory, as though it’s something that
controls you, not the opposite way around. Doing so is applying the
life you have to the person you were.
Using logic and being mindful are not the same thing as “trying to
make sense.” The former is methodical: It uses a grounded
awareness to enact your true desires, while the latter is looking at
the product of those actions and wondering how they got that way.
There are questions to which answers may not exist. There are
answers that just create more questions, solutions that can only be
made from having lived something out, seen it through, tried.
The best things will not make sense—not initially, at least.
Love is not logical. Grace and joy and beauty rarely are, either.
That doesn’t mean you cannot use logic to work with them, just that
to fully see them, you need to use a different point of understanding.
All things in their purest state are confusingly, singularly standing.
They are magical because they are mysterious. They have unknown
origins and palpable endings and there is nothing to do but to live
them and to see.
People who waste their lives search for reasons to love rather than
ways to love. They try to create avenues through which they can
justify their happiness, rather than just letting themselves feel it for

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anything. They try to wield misguided logic to hold back from their
happiness rather than facilitate it.
There will be things you understand immediately, effects for which
the causes are entirely, consciously yours. There will be things that
happen in your life that you know you’ve chosen, and then others
that seem to be the opposite of what you’d want. Those things are
just as important, if not more so.
There are things that have reasons that will reveal themselves to
you immediately. There are things that you won’t understand for
years and years to come. There are things you’ll look back on and
say: “I never understood why that was.”
And yet that will not make it any less so.
Sometimes the point is to experience not knowing and confusion.
What is born of your uncertainty is sometimes more important than
not having been certain in the first place.
You may never know whether or not you’re “meant” to be in the city
you live in, but you will live there anyway, because you have chosen
to. You won’t know whether or not you’re meant to be with someone
until you try. You will keep seeking comfort in the things that hurt you
because you’ve yet to step into the discomfort of something new.
Something better. Something unknown and foreign and not aligned
with what you once thought you wanted.
That does not make it wrong or bad; it just means you didn’t
anticipate it. You didn’t know well enough to have chosen it.
Trying to make sense of your life is trying to see if the old story
checks out, if the person you once were would be happy with the life
they lead today. You’re looking for answers in people that don’t exist.
Clarity comes from doing, not thinking about doing.
A good life comes from choosing to work with what you have,
accepting that you don’t always choose what you work with, but
knowing you’re always given what you need to use, especially when
you don’t realize you need to use it.

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38
HOW TO 
DETOX YOUR MIND 
(without having 
to go completely 
off the grid)
Though we have miles to go in terms of learning what it means to
take care of our bodies, we’re even further behind on how to take
care of our minds. Our brains construct our experiences, and there
are so many factors that alter and shift our perspectives that are
completely in our control but totally out of our awareness. Here, a
few things you can do to detox your mind, deprogram, and wipe the
slate clean now and again.
01. Travel to assimilate to culture. Alter your base-point concept
of “normal.” What it will show you is how many
behaviors/values/beliefs you’ve unconsciously adopted from
your surroundings (and ways you can change them).
02. Create physical solutions for emotional problems. People
default on the idea that one emotion will cancel out or fix
another. If you’re upset, seek a high to eliminate it. But
negative emotions are just calls to action that are being
ignored through a little mental gymnastics and a lot of
justification. Detoxing your mind is letting go of emotional
highs in place of creating actual solutions.
03. Know that emotional toxicity is born of mental resistance.
Instead of trying to create a certain emotional experience for
yourself (if I do this and this, I will feel this way), try to practice
complete acceptance of whatever you feel in the moment.
Mental resistance keeps you in your emotional discomfort,
even if it numbs it for a minute.

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04. Identify your tethers. The problems that are in front of you are
actually behind you; they are cracks in your foundation that
are holding you back. Stop trying to dismantle symptoms; go
back and identify the causes.
05. Go for a long drive and let yourself get lost. Drive through
neighborhoods you never would have known existed. See
how other people live. See them come home from work and
what their living rooms look like from the outside. It will
comfort you in that you’ll realize how small you are in a more
practical way than just staring at the ocean. You don’t know
what you don’t know.
06. Rearrange your furniture. Your brain constructs your
experience through props and signals that those props fire
off. You are continually, subconsciously triggering negative or
stagnant associations because of how your brain processes
your surroundings—change them, change how you think,
change what you feel.
07. Do a mental purge. Just write down whatever weird thoughts
continually cross your mind or the little incoherent bits that
are clogging your head. Just getting them out will give you
relief.
08. Restructure your digital life. It’s not realistic (or desirable to a
lot of people) to be forever disconnected, but it’s also not
realistic to keep things that don’t serve you positively in your
social feeds and expect it not to affect you. Instead of just
unfollowing what you don’t want to see, follow positive
accounts/groups/organizations/publications that you do.
09. Notice your unconscious movements. Notice your feet
walking and how you are not deciding to lift each one up and
forward and yet because your mind said, “Okay, self, let’s get
to this point today,” you began to go. Consider your morning
intentions similarly.
10. Cleanse your space emotionally: Consider the emotional
attachment you have to the things you keep around you. Did
you buy those clothes to be someone you’re not? Do you

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have decor around your apartment that you got during a