Heather Havrilesky

Let’s try this: If I told you that you would never, ever fall in love again, what kind of a plan would you make to ensure your own happiness moving forward? What would you work toward? What would you do more of? I bet that you’d have to give up on some big dreams that you care about a lot. But I also bet that giving up some of those things might add up to a weird kind of freedom. Maybe you’d cut your hair short and save up for a house. Maybe you’d start riding horses or writing poetry or growing sunflowers or taking dance lessons or baking pies.

Let’s fly into your future and look back at this year in your history in our minds. This was the year that you really knew that you were an artist, first and foremost. This was the year you committed to what came next.

Remember this year? It was a good year, actually. This was the year you stopped waiting around for things to happen. And somehow, as soon as you stopped waiting, as soon as you started doing things, making things, claiming your own space, speaking up for yourself? That’s when your real life began.

Keep doing it, on all fronts. Reach for what you love with abandon, with hope in your heart, with fragility, without knowing exactly what comes next. Reach and never, ever stop reaching.

It sounds paradoxical, but uncertainty and vulnerability are your guides through this soggy life you’re living. Leaning into your not knowing will bring you more knowledge and wisdom and understanding than you ever dreamed of.

Follow your uncertainty and fear into the darkness, accept that the darkness will always be a part of you, and recognize that that’s where you’ll find your passions. Then you’ll finally KNOW.

And sometimes you won’t know, too. But it won’t feel the same as the “I don’t know” that haunts you now. It will be a new kind of “I don’t know” that helps you close your eyes, to feel how good it is to be alive, to feel how good it is to just breathe.

Treat yourself with the respect and love that you deserve.