101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

the kind of person who
DESERVES 
THE LIFE 
YOU WANT
We’re conditioned to believe that there is only so much happiness to
go around.
Beginning at a young age, we’re almost pitted against one other in
the race for superiority. That mindset still seeps into our daily
interactions and is certainly a pillar of the me-centric media culture
we’ve created. We’re taught that there are winners, there are losers.
There are people who make it, there are people who don’t, and you
need to be someone who does. There are only so many positions,
so many success stories, so many opportunities to make the life you
want. You need to choose from the human catalog of physical
success and fight for a limited-edition lifestyle.
We settle ourselves into the idea that happiness and success are
things that somebody else bestows upon us—bosses give jobs,
lovers commit to “forever.” No wonder we constantly feel out of
control. No wonder we suffer so much at the hand of what we
assumed we wanted.
Wanting is the ugliest thing you can do. It keeps your experience in
a state of “not having.” It keeps good things at a distance. You get
what you most want when you don’t want it anymore. When you shift
your mindset and your experience to that of “already having,” you
naturally create and attract things that align with your idea of
yourself. Acceptance is the root of abundance.
The things you genuinely want rarely have to be thought out.
Putting labels and words and ideas to them is creating an image of
something that’s pure and essentially yourself. The way we get the
most tripped-up is when our ideas don’t evolve as our beings do, and
we create what we want while still being attached to an old idea.

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This is how you let go of those ideas. These are the things nobody
will teach you about doing so.
These are the ways you carry yourself out of the life somebody
else constructed for you, how you stop fighting and tearing apart old
ideas, and start creating new ones. These are the things you need to
know to become the person who deserves the life you most
genuinely want—not the life that somebody else wants for you.
There are ways to pay the rent. There is no way to make
somebody love you if they don’t. Creating the moment-to-moment,
day-to-day life you want, with the people you want, happens one job
and month of rent and load of laundry and sink of dishes and electric
bill at a time.
Adults don’t do these things just to do them. These things are
freedom. They are holding your own roof above your head. They are
reducing yourself to the single notion that nothing matters more than
your peace of mind.
Leave if you have to leave. There is rarely an excuse to remain
with people who don’t love or accept you. There are ways to survive.
There are second jobs and extra hours and rooms that kind people
are willing to rent or share. But these things are reserved for the
people who place their mental well-being over immediate
convenience. These are reserved for the people who deserve them
and who know they deserve a space or room or home or apartment
in which they decide what is and is not acceptable for their lives.
You are not supposed to always be happy and certain and stable. If
you were, it wouldn’t be such a struggle. Transcending the pain of
humanness is one thing and one thing only: allowing yourself to be it.
The struggle is trying to escape that which is inevitable.
Surrendering to it is not accepting defeat; it’s being honest. It’s
being real and messy and gorgeous and tortured and darkly
nuanced and glimmeringly hopeful. That’s what we’re meant to be.
The only thing we really want to transcend is the inability to be what
we are, as we are it.
There is just as much value in the negative space. Not every
second of your life has to be filled. A packed agenda is not success.
Living to work as opposed to working to live is not a quality of life.
Things are not split into “times in which you’re doing something that

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other people can quantify” and “times you’re doing nothing.” It’s all
important.
Your deepest revelations happen in silent moments with yourself.
Being crowded with people and appointments and ideas and creative
outpourings wouldn’t be so profound and stunning if there weren’t
also moments of aloneness and nothingness and mental drought.
The context of things matters just as much as they do. The focal
point of a piece of art wouldn’t exist without the negative space to
frame it.
Unfortunately, nothing and nobody can hand you your happiness.
Fortunately, nothing and nobody can take it away. You’d want to
write that one off as the oldest mind trick in the book, and yet. But
still. We’re still seeking, even though we know better. We’re fighting
our nature to grow and expand and enlighten and seek and create in
place of the idea that it’s just meant to come to us. It’s as though we
apply the ideas of “wanting” and “trying” in completely wrong
directions.
Time is not linear in the way we perceive it; everything is
happening at once. You call into your experience that which you
need and that which you are. You’re never with and you’re never
without. You’ll never receive and you’ll never lose. You always were,
you always are. That knowing is the foundation on which the real
magic occurs.
Happy is boring. Beautiful is boring. People aren’t interested or
attracted to just “happy” and “beautiful.” They’re interested in people
who are interested in things. Who are different-looking. Who have
stories, and ideas, and mindsets that mirror and complement their
own. Nobody wants a person who gets mad if they convolutedly
believe somebody insinuated that they’re “fat.” They want a person
who says: “Fat is not a thing you are, it is a thing you have, and even
if that weren’t the case…even if I were fat, who gives a fuck?” Love
is more than pretending you look and behave and live a certain way.
The universe whispers until it screams. Your body whispers until it
screams. “Bad” feelings are not meant to be staved off. They are not
meant to be inconveniencing. They are you, or something greater
than you, telling yourself: Something is not right.

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Your gut voice will never go ignored. It will project out and
eventually turn into big, loud external voices that demand you pay
attention.
Learn to listen while it’s little.
The most hilariously ironic thing of life is that you have the most
success doing what feels right. Following our genuine happiness, our
internal peace, is our only real responsibility. The people who love
what they do are always, always more successful than the people
who “work hard” or claim to. There’s an X factor you can’t mimic
when you do something you’re genuinely passionate about. You tap
into an otherwise untouchable energy.
Your identity does not have to be cohesive. Your story doesn’t have
to flow. You don’t have to be neatly packaged in a way that other
people understand.
You have to stop living for your synopsis, the summary we try to
piece together in our minds when we imagine people explaining us
or evaluating who we are. It doesn’t have to make sense. You’re
allowed to be great at a lot of things that don’t necessarily relate to
one another. You’re not limited to just one purpose, one talent, one
love. You can have a variety of jobs, each of them meaningful at the
time you have them. You can be good at a lot of things without
lacking in others. You do not have to be a novel; you can be a book
of stories. You don’t have to merge your coexisting truths and dull
your shine just so it makes sense to a small-minded person who
wants you to fit into a narrow understanding of what they’re
comfortable with.
You do not have to only be what other people are comfortable with.
You often do not know what’s best for your life. Predicting your
future does not make it more guaranteed to happen. It just closes
you off. It gets you attached to an idea that you only want to be
reality because you’re attached to it. The content of our attachments
matters little in comparison to just wanting to be correct, to be in
control, to feel as though we know what’s best and we’re succeeding
by virtue of living out that which we just knew would happen.
Nobody in the history of the world looks back on their life and says,
“Yes, this is exactly what I thought would happen.” But many, many

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people look around one day and say: “Yeah, I knew this is what I was
meant for, but the details always surprised me.”
Things will work out better than you could have chosen or designed
them. In your unknowingness, however, it will seem as though
everything’s been shot to shit. In the moments before you realize
something better than you can fathom is coming to fruition, it will
seem like every plan you made and hope you had has been
completely disregarded by whatever higher power you do or don’t
believe in. Have faith that you’ll get more than you think you deserve.
You have to become the kind of person who deserves the life you
want. Nobody ever got what they wanted by wanting it badly enough.
Your life will unfold in direct proportion to how much you believe you
deserve. Not how much you think you should have. How much you
believe you deserve.

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61
THINGS WE 
EXPECT OF OTHERS