Live your best life

The Sunday gospel according to Alice: Have you noticed how we carefully tread through life hoping to 'safely make it to death'? We second guess and over analyze what we are naturally drawn to and make excuses to maintain the things that don't satisfy us. We say we are unqualified or undeserving of happy fortune and shoot ourselves in the foot before we have a chance to prove ourselves wrong. We try to simplify the multitudes contained within each person by unfairly labelling them based on momentary feelings. We say we are constantly exhausted and wish we could escape while over-complicating our daily lives with busyness that drains us. We grieve because of the depths of our love while wishing it could be erased from our memory. We promote fear to our children as the habit that has kept us safe, while simultaneously admitting that it has ruined the very best parts of life for us. How tragically ordinary it is to exist without feeling alive and to die without ever having live...

You're easy to control when you don't know what you want and you're not sure what you deserve. Someone will come along and use you as a means to their end. You'll help them feel better about their own insecurities. This will trap you in a cycle of trying to build an identity through meeting their needs and making them happy. You'll become, at best, 'medicine' for that person or at worst, a DIY project.  If you're wondering if this is you, ask yourself: Will this person still care about me and treat me lovingly if I don't do what they want?  Will they respect my desire to change this relationship dynamic?  How much of my interactions with this person revolve around me compromising my own needs in order to meet theirs? Am I often 'wrong' or 'at fault' and responsible for 'fixing' their mood?