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Success at what cost?
The core of being human is the need to be significant to others, especially with significant others. Our efforts to be successful feel empty and unfulfilling if we have no reason to believe that it positively impacts the lives of those around us. So, we set out to be successful so that we can be…
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Don’t trade your best for their worst
There is rarely a day that passes without me reading or hearing about someone who invested years, if not decades of their life, to people who were not invested in the relationship. When the reality of that betrayal finally hits home, it destroys our spirit and convinces us that we’ve sacrificed the best years of…
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Don’t pay it forward
Vengeance is easier than understanding. Bitterness is easier than forgiveness. Mirroring the behaviour of those who treated us badly is easier than rising up to be better than them. Each time we choose the easier path, we become the very monsters and degenerates that created the hurt and pain in our lives. Too often, we…
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Self-imposed prisons of our mind
We imprison ourselves each time we restrain our natural expression because we’re afraid that it won’t be appreciated, or celebrated. Our need for approval or validation soon becomes our greatest crutch in life, until eventually it becomes our prison. We decorate its walls with images and scraps that honour the past, sometimes recalling moments of…
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The hypocrisy of self-loathing
The most toxic plague in the human condition is that of demanding kindness while withholding it. I watch with morbid curiosity the volumes of memes and quotes shared by many in which we are reminded to treat everyone with kindness because we never know what struggles they are enduring. Yet, those same people are waiting…
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Contaminating the self
Self-worth is contaminated when we try to define it by the way we think others perceive us. Whether their perception is correct or not is irrelevant. The fact that their perception has more sway over our self-worth than our perception of ourselves is what determines the difference between a healthy self esteem, and an unhealthy…
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Choose better
We choose what we take from life. Understanding those choices is therefore key to finding peace, or joy. Our choices, even though sometimes painful, are always based on good intentions in that moment of choosing. But, when that good intention is driven by a need to establish our significance rather than connect with the value…
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Don’t look the other way
Those who oppress others are often the first to draw attention to the weakness or inadequacy of those that they oppress. They do this to pacify their conscience so that they can avoid the guilt of treating others poorly. The reason why judgement works well in such cases, for both the abuser and the abused,…
