I tried on some advice I was given- like a castoff sweater from someone else’s life, it felt scratchy – it weighed me down. I felt heavy, defeated.

I asked my own heart, and she answered:
What about this? Be radically honest.
Take a risk that people may not like you.
The ones who see you & know you will love you, but only if you are authentically you–not squeezing yourself into someone else’s knitted idea of who you need to be.
If you want the life you envision, BE the self who dreamed that life. It starts within.

It starts with the courage to live authentically.
I do not want to waste time living something I am not.
I have always been a risk-taker in this way: It has been my lifelong specialty- radical honesty.

I have been told “question the way you define yourself” –but no; no, this is the one thing I know is true: nothing in this life is more important to me than living with all my heart, and all of my truth.
Anything less simply will not do.

We go so many places for advice…
when really, we carry everything we need within us.
Inquire within. There are your deepest questions, and sometimes, answers.

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.
 
Heart, I said, what a gift it has been
to enter this circle of lovers,
to see beyond seeing itself,
to reach and feel within the breast.  – Rumi