John R. Miles

Your friend not texting you back fast enough, spiral city.

You wake up and your self-worth is basically a group chat vote.

You feel good only when everybody else is happy with you.

You feel like trash the second somebody's quiet or pissed.

or distant, you have outsourced your entire emotional operating system to people who don't even know if they have the password.

And I'm here to tell you, take that damn remote back today.

Pattern number four, and this one pisses me off the most, learned self-minimizing.

This is the voice in your head that still sounds like your third grade teacher, your mom, your ex, whoever telling you, don't be loud, don't want too much, don't take up too much space.

So we get really, really good at making ourselves small.

Earlier this week, Susan Grau talked about banging her head against walls, trying to force life to look right.

And Libra talked about how creativity dies the second you start playing it safe.

Same energy.

Choosing yourself again is deciding you're done folding yourself up to fit somebody else's box.

Those four things, they're not character flaws.

They're survival strategies that we picked up because at one point they kept us safe or loved or accepted.

The problem is they don't expire on their own.

You have to fire them.

And one day, maybe on a random drive, maybe at 2 a.m., maybe in the middle of another fight you're too tired to have, you finally feel it.

Staying small is starting to hurt worse than whatever happens if you stand up.

That's the moment.