Carrying around emotional baggage weighs you down. It’s no way to live, yet millions of people do live this way.
Bearing this kind of weight while going through life can keep you from happiness until you are finally able to process and release it.
In this episode, I talk about some of the concepts of self-care and personal growth to help you start the journey of letting go of what no longer serves you.
(The following podcast transcript has been modified for easier readability and to benefit the Deaf and hard of hearing)
I had a conversation with my girlfriend earlier that I’ll share a little snippet of. We were in the living room. I just said, “It’s been seven years. I’ve been doing this podcast for seven years now.”
She said, “That’s why you’re succeeding at it. That’s why it’s working out for you.”
I thought anything you do consistently with persistence, will eventually work out. I shouldn’t say anything, but if you never give up, something has to change; something has to give; something has to break to the point where you finally reach a level of – I don’t know if you’d call it success – but some sort of achievement or accomplishment.
It doesn’t mean everything is going to work out necessarily. You can work on something for years and just have it a be a complete failure as well. I’m sure relationships come to some people’s minds when they think about that.
For me, yes, I could work on something for years and it could be a complete failure. But I don’t like to look at things as failures. That’s our first personal growth lesson in any seminar, right?
There is no failure, there are only the lessons you’ve learned.
I’ve often heard it called There is no failure, only feedback. I like to take that feedback into my next journey, into my next challenge. Whatever we do with that feedback is how we learn, heal, grow, and evolve.
I look at this show… Seven years! Thinking back to my first episode, I remember where I was back then. I was interviewing people. I had Jeff Olson on, the author of The Slight Edge. He’s a really great guy. He was my very first episode.
At the time, I was a no-name, yet he was very gracious and came on the show and we had a conversation. (That episode is no longer on the air anymore, it will however be available for Patron members over at moretob.com. I’m putting all the older episodes on that site).
Thankfully, that episode is no longer on the air because when I listened to that episode, I cringed. I heard myself playing those superduper long intros. On his episode, I spent I don’t know how many minutes introducing him but it was way too long, at least by my standards today. And by a lot of standards nowadays because a lot of us want things quicker. A lot of us want things to be faster. Some of us use the microwave to boil water instead of boiling water on the stove. Sometimes for speed. Sometimes it’s for convenience. Sometimes it’s just because that’s how we’ve always done it, so we do it again and again.
I look at those past episodes and how much time I spent doing certain things like introducing a guest, or not even the time, but just the quality of the content and the quality of the audio.
I can hear what some people are saying right now: Is this how the show normally goes where he just talks about himself? No, that’s not how it normally goes. But yes, I do talk about myself on these episodes because I’ve experienced a lot of the failures that I bring up on the air.
I don’t come out and say “Hey, I’m perfect. I’ve never had all these failures, so let me teach you how not to have failures too. Let me teach you how to succeed.”
That’s not me. I come on the air and say, “This is what I went through, this is how I got through it, and this is how I’ve healed through it.” So that could be a success I share, absolutely. And sometimes I haven’t gone through what you’ve gone through.
If you lost an arm or leg, I haven’t gone through that. But I know what loss feels like. I know what pain feels like. I know the emotional state that I was in for 20 years with some debilitating pain that got gradually worse over time.
I never lost an arm or leg like I said, but I can talk about different things from different perspectives in the manner of what one could lose in their life and how that would change their life. But I don’t profess to be able to empathize with somebody who’s gone through greater pain and suffering than I have.
Let me get back to my point, at least in this first segment which is sometimes you have to be consistent. Sometimes you have to persist to succeed at something.
This won’t work however if you’re trying to succeed at something there is a high amount of resistance from another person or something else. There’s always going to be resistance to anything you do that challenge you to the point that, when you succeed, you feel like you’ve accomplished something big.
If all relationships had no resistance, you’d probably get a little bored. I know there are people out there that would say, “I just want an easy relationship! What does that consist of?”
Yes, I hear you. I think that sounds like a fantasy. That sounds like a wonderful thing. But the resistance is the contrast. The resistance is the different belief systems, the different values, the different ideals, and religious beliefs, and culturally speaking where people are different from different places. So you’re going to have resistance. You’re going to have challenges. This is why no relationship is easy, really.
Relationships are challenging. The feelings of accomplishment come from getting through those challenges, and meeting each other on the other side of them with a new understanding and a new connection. Or at least a stronger connection, where you can be with someone and say, “Wow we’ve gone through a lot.”
This is why sometimes people who have experienced infidelity, which is very painful, can feel the betrayal enter the relationship like a poison. That poison can sometimes be drained out, if I may use that term, to the point where the relationship becomes stronger because of the infidelity. That can and does happen. Though, I don’t recommend you try it. I’m just saying, it can happen. Because everything that happens when there’s infidelity is all the the stuff that needs to be talked about and expressed. All of the thoughts and feelings that led up to the infidelity where probably never shared before, or at least not in a way that led to change. Some or most of it might have been kept hidden, behind the other person’s back. Nothing has been discussed at length and maybe things should have been discussed at length to avoid the pain that infidelity can bring.
After something challenging like infidelity, you need healing. The pain and anger are there. You need to get through that pain and anger. When a couple is willing to work on those things and try to heal through it together, and they end up getting through it and on the other side of it having mostly healed, they’ll be able to look back and glean much from the lessons and create a foundation of trust again. They can get to a point where they feel secure in the relationship again.
That process can create such a strong relationship. They can both look back and say, “Oh, yeah, when we went through that, it was a huge challenge. We thought it was the end, but now we’re stronger than ever because of it. I trust my partner 100% now.” That can happen, but it takes work. It takes persistence and consistency and continuing to show up and continuing to try.
That’s why it drives me crazy when I hear about emotionally abusive relationships. I talk about this on my other podcast, Love and Abuse. If you haven’t heard that show yet, and you’re having a difficult relationship, you might want to tune into that. But what I’m talking about today is that I’ll hear from a lot of people in emotionally abusive situations where the person being abused is really trying giving it their all. They’re trying to please the other person and trying to accommodate. They’re trying to do the right thing, but the other person says, “It’s all you. It’s all your fault. You need to fix your problems. I’m going to relax into this and just keep doing what I’m doing while you do all the work.”
There is no resistance or challenge in their mind. They think you’re the problem and you’re causing the problems. You could create resistance by saying, “Hey, you need to do the work to. This is an equal partnership. And as much as you think this is all me, we still have to work through this together.”
That’s probably not how the conversation should go probably. But likely it will sound a little more like this, “I have to do this all by myself? I think we should work on this together, and maybe even seek couple’s counseling.”
Or, it doesn’t even have to be about a romantic relationship. It could be about anyone else in your life: “I think we should work on this together. I think that we need to talk about this.”
Even that conversation may not happen because it just doesn’t often happen that way, at least in the type of relationship I’m talking about right now. The victim of emotional abuse could say, “We need to work on this together,” but they may not get agreement from the other person.
The other person in the emotionally abusive situation might say, “It’s not me, it’s you. You’re the one with the problem.”
Think about anyone in your life that thinks you’re the one with the problem. They’ll tell you it’s not them, it’s you. I hope you don’t have anyone in your life that does that but if they’re out there, and you want to make the relationship better, then it’s a two-person job.
Or if there are more people in the relationship, it might be a “more” person job. But typically a two-person job that saves the relationship also heals the relationship. And they both continue to work on it consistently and persistently. It’s a commitment to making things work. Just like my first episode, and my second episode, and then getting to my 50th episode and my hundredth episode. It was a commitment to cringe through my first 10, 20, 30 episodes, thinking I was doing well, thinking that I was making a good show to some people. I probably was to most people, but when I listen to those early episodes, I think what am I doing? This isn’t a personal growth and development show. They don’t want to tune into this.
A lot of self-doubt creeped in. Listening to those old episodes, I realized I had a lot of work to do on myself. I tell you what, doing a podcast every week for seven years, sometimes multiple shows a week, teaches you a lot. I’m not talking about just learning about broadcasting or speaking, or just talking for an hour. I’m not talking about any of that stuff. I’m talking about everything that you have to face in yourself. Anything that you go through – relationships, jobs, climbing a mountain – you have to face yourself.
That’s the best part of it, though. Since I’ve been doing this show, I’ve had to face my own insecurities and relationship issues. I went through a divorce while doing this show. That was a huge challenge. I’m going to be vulnerable right now, I would have episodes, probably two or three that I can remember where I had to stop recording because I would start to cry. The reason was because I would hit on something that I hadn’t yet healed from, or that I still had an emotional trigger about, or that I really had feelings about.
I remember recording an episode about my wife and how bad I felt about how I treated her while we were married and I had to stop recording. I thought maybe I should just keep recording because this is real, it’s raw, this is me. But I couldn’t say anything. I would have felt like an idiot so I just stopped recording.
I thought it was a wise decision then but maybe I should have left it there. Either way, I still talked about it when I got back on the air. I don’t know if I said I started crying and I had to stop it, but I decided to address the emotions and the feelings that came up.
If you heard my shows where that happened, you heard some pretty raw stuff. I chose to put this on the air into the public airwaves to be downloaded tens or hundreds of thousands of times by different people all over the world in their own relationships. I exposed myself and chose to be vulnerable and humble place where anyone could have just written to me and said, “You were a big jerk.”
I expected that kind of feedback quite honestly. I expressed things I did that I was definitely not proud of and even felt guilty or shame about. And I expected people to keep me feeling that guilt and shame by reminding me of what I already knew.
Surprisingly, they didn’t! You didn’t. You didn’t write to me and say things like, “You should be ashamed of yourself Paul!”
I’ve had people do that. I had someone write a review for the show. They said, “This guy was a jerk to his wife. She was right.”
That reviewer was right. I was a jerk to my wife. I admit it. And I deserved that criticism. But at the same time, I also acknowledge my healing and growth. I’m proud of how much of learned and grown since then. I’m proud of the things that I’ve accomplished. I’m also happy that my ex-wife is in a better relationship. I’m so happy for her because I was poison back then. I was very toxic. So getting through that took (you’ve heard me say it already), consistency and persistence, and continually committing to my own personal growth and healing to the point where I had to stop being toxic to others.
What does that involve? It involves a lot of grounding with myself, connecting to myself, and being with myself.
Self-compassion, self-love, self-care… all those things are huge. If you aren’t doing these things, it is vital to practice these because if you’re having bad results in any of the areas of life I’m talking about, your love life, your career, or any area of life that elicits emotions in you, you’ve got to make sure that you’re giving yourself self-care.
Self-care doesn’t just mean you love yourself and you treat yourself as your best friend. Self-care sometimes means digging into why you feel like crap and why you’re anxious, depressed, sad, or angry, and really allowing yourself to feel these things and bring them up to be processed, evaluated, and discussed inside your mind. And maybe even discussed with somebody else that you can trust; someone you feel safe with.
If those feelings stay inside you, you carry around emotional triggers. You carry around things that haven’t been addressed yet. They’re probably affecting your life in some way. They’re probably affecting your relationships, your decisions, they’re probably affecting what you value and what you believe, and so on.
The old traumas, neglect, hurt, and pain, or anything that you went through when you were younger, whether that was a year ago, or 30 years ago or longer, if it’s not resolved, it’s still in there. You can figure out if they’re still in there by thinking about these past events. When you think about them, do you have a negative emotional response of any kind?
I’m not talking about if someone died which might make you sad when you think about it. I’m talking about if someone hurt you or you went through suffering of some sort. When you think about that time, is that pain still there?
The pain, hurt, feeling small or discarded, feeling disrespected, any of those feelings that you carry around that you could have gotten anywhere from anyone at any time, if they haven’t been resolved in you and when you think about them it affects you in a negative way, you need resolve.
When I think back to the first year that I was making this podcast, and all the stuff that I was still resolving and still going through (this was around the time before my divorce), when my divorce came, it was a shocker. It was something I had to figure out and process.
I asked myself if I was going to be the same person I’d always been through every past breakup. I think about when that time came when my first girlfriend said she was no longer in love with me. When I heard that, I didn’t know what to do. I had started this show and I wanted to continue doing it but suddenly, I was questioning myself because usually, when I go through a breakup, I just quit everything and move away.
That’s what I did for a lot of my life. I just gave everything up and got away. This time I said to myself, I really need to think this through before I just jump ship and run away like I usually do. This time I’m not going to avoid it. I’m going to allow myself to feel the feelings that I’m having and I’m going to allow myself to grieve. I’m going to allow myself to accept that this is the end of the relationship and I’m going to treat it like the relationship died .
I told myself to grieve the end of the relationship. Thankfully, I was starting my 40s at the time. I believe when you hit your 40s, you start gaining wisdom from your life – from the life that has been thrown at you for all those years.
If you haven’t reached 40 yet, wisdom is coming! I’ve met people that are much younger than I am that definitely have a lot of wisdom, but I think when you hit your 40s, you should access that wisdom and not be afraid to face the challenges that were scary before. You should do anything to connect with yourself and dive into yourself.
You might have to do what I did which is basically be your own mommy and daddy. That sounds a little strange, but you self-parent, you show up for yourself in a way that maybe your parents couldn’t, or never could, or can’t now. If you do have loving, healthy, kind parents that want to be supportive, then of course reach out to them maybe they’ll give you some wisdom of their own.
But some of us don’t have that. I have a mom and she’s been so supportive. She loves and cares about me, but to ask her how to deal with something like this? That’s not in her resume. She does not know how to deal with what I’ve been dealing with, so even though I could share this stuff, all she could do, for the most part (she does a lot for me but all she can really do to help me emotionally) is just listen and say “I’m there for you if you need me.”
She didn’t have the advice that I was so needing. But at the same time, I didn’t want because all I really wanted to do was crawl into a hole. But it’s nice to have people that are in your life that you feel safe being around and that you can trust to be there for you. Those are the non-judgmental people that love and care about you, and just want you to feel better. If those people can allow you to just be yourself, even if that “self” is sad, lonely, and scared, then you’ll be able to release some of the pressure that normally builds up when you don’t have that.
But when you don’t have it, when you don’t have somebody you can trust and have a shoulder to cry on, or just express yourself, that’s when self-care comes in.
This reminds me of an email that I received about empathy. They asked, “How do empathetic people stop putting themselves in harm’s way?” I forget the entirety of the email but she said some people are very empathetic and they always put other people first.
The first thing that came to my mind is you’re not practicing self-empathy first. You’re not practicing self-compassion before you give compassion to others.
What is self-empathy? Doesn’t even make sense! I look at self-empathy as caring about how you feel and feeling how you feel. Yes, it’s weird to think about it that way because you are you, but if you are able to connect with yourself as you would someone else, and feel how you feel, and care about how you feel, you’re going to experience self-empathy to the point where you will care for yourself to heal yourself and to get into a better space. You’ll process what you need to process and listen to yourself. You’ll get to the point where you now are available for other people.
This is what self-care is all about in my opinion. Self-care is self-compassion and self-love. Self-empathy is where you care about caring about yourself.
It’s kind of a dissociated perspective where you’re outside yourself looking inward caring about yourself and having empathy for yourself. When you can do that, you will get the energy you need to care about others and care for others, and stop putting others first.
I know that’s not something you can do all the time. Sometimes there is a challenge that you need to care for someone else first. There are different situations that apply but for the most part, especially very empathetic people, especially people-pleasers, when you care about others to the point where you’re drained, you will never be happy. You will always feel drained. The only time you’re happy, if you’re going to feel any happiness, is when you care about somebody else to the point where they are gracious and thankful to you. Their gratitude will give you a quick high.
But happiness shouldn’t be about quick highs. Happiness should be a general, positive feeling that is often there and sometimes not. If it’s the opposite, where it’s often not there and sometimes is, then you might be finding quick highs in your life. The emotional highs are what many empathetic people try to get. A lot of people-pleasers look for that too. They will find these quick highs so they become happy for a few hours or days but then they’re back to that general feeling of unhappiness after that. Happiness should be an experience that happens more often than not.
Let me wrap up with my point with this segment which is talking about how sometimes you do have to make a commitment, go through the struggles, go through the beginning phases of things, and work hard at it.
As long as there is a synergy (I hate to use that word, but I’m going to use it anyway), between you and what you’re working with or who you’re working with, it means the person you’re working with to figure something out or make something better has to be on the same page. They have to be in close proximity to your values and beliefs. They don’t have to match necessarily, but there has to be some level of balance in there, some level of similarity.
That doesn’t mean you have to be the same person. It just means when you look at two adults working on something together, you would expect those two adults to put all the effort they can into it. When one of them is not making the effort, then it doesn’t work. It is the ship listing; it is the scale unbalanced; it is the seesaw that somebody jumps off and you land on your butt.
I don’t know if you’ve ever done that in your life. It’s not pleasant. When you fall, you wonder why they did that. “Why would they do that to me?”
Do you get back on the seesaw and hope they don’t jump off again? I would be very careful because people that do that aren’t really out for your best interest. In the end, you have to be careful about those people.
There are people you need synergy with, I’ll say that too. There are things that you need synergy with, and environments that you need synergy with. If you go to an environment that is toxic or makes you feel ill in any way, you will not synergize with that environment. You won’t even feel synergized with yourself. So you have to be really careful what you expose yourself to.
I lived in a part of the country for about three years (I won’t tell you which part because some people who live there love it), and it rained seven months out of the year for three months. It was gorgeous. The rain didn’t bother me as much as the cold. But the rain and cold together were miserable. And it was cloudy most of the time.
I really had to question if I was happy being in an environment where seven months out of the year I was cold and miserable. Turns out I wasn’t. I was not happy at all. Plus I wasn’t in synergy with the culture there either. I didn’t vibe with anyone. I wasn’t in the “groove” I guess. I weighed all these components and realized I just didn’t fit in there. It wasn’t them, it was me. So I had to take care of myself.
You have to take care of yourself and find that synergy. I got out of that environment.
There are relationships like that. There are all kinds of things like that in our life that we need to maybe look at if we feel that general sense of unhappiness more often than not.
How this applies to my show and going through all the changes that I went through? As my show went on over the years, it had to evolve. It had to change. It had to go into different phases and stages and get to the point where it is today. It was only in around 2016 where I got to the point that I finally found synergy – where I finally made it work for me and everyone else. It just feels good the way it’s structured for me now.
Some people think it’s too long. I won’t argue with them. Sometimes it is too long for some people. But this is the way it works for me. It works for a lot of people this way. I found a synergy with it. I’m good.
That doesn’t mean I can’t make a half an hour show sometimes. That makes it easier on me. That would save me a lot of time. But it just hasn’t worked out that way. Here I am, probably 25 minutes into the segment already, it just hasn’t really gone that way for this episodes because I guess the way ideas come out of my head, and I just speak to you, this is the way I communicate. This is just what happens.
My final point about all of this is that in order for this show to be the success it is (meaning it helps a lot of people), I had to keep at it. Whenever I felt resistance along the way, I addressed that resistance. I didn’t just plow through it and say, “I don’t care if nobody likes this, I’m going to do it anyway.”
No, that doesn’t really help anyone. It doesn’t help anyone to say, “I don’t care about that. I’m just going to plow through it.”
Depending on the situation, I can’t imagine that applies to too many scenarios. If it does, by all means, go for it. But when you are feeling resistance, when it’s hard, you have to address the resistance. You have to figure it out. You have to talk about it, connect with yourself, reflect on it, and figure out. Try to figure out if there’s anything you can do about it.
Or perhaps you need to change things up! I’ve had to change things up several times throughout the years this. I created the show in November of 2013. Back then, so many things didn’t work. However, I decided to continue forging ahead with the podcast and the blog (and everything else that I do at The Overwhelmed Brain – the coaching, the writing, the Love and Abuse podcast, The M.E.A.N. Workbook, The S.A.F.E. System, etc).
All the tasks and projects I do have evolved because I’ve worked on them. They’ve evolved because I kept at them. I was consistent.
To close this segment, if I felt like no matter what I did nothing ever worked, I would then reevaluate what I was doing with my life. If you’re constantly working at something and you are consistent and persistent, but there’s never any progress, or the progress is so minuscule that it doesn’t really affect you in any positive way, then it might be time to develop a new philosophy. That philosophy might be:
When you’re trudging through mud, you’re probably going in the wrong direction.
That’s the final thing I want to say on this. After many years of doing this show, I had to evaluate and prioritize what projects I was working on that felt like trudging through mud and accomplishing nothing.
One of those projects was when I started writing ebooks. I was trudging through mud doing that because the process took up so much of my time that I just had to stop. My goal was to write many, many ebooks but it turned out that I just didn’t have the time.
When I was writing those ebooks, everything else was on hold. So there I was working on a 99 cent product and putting everything else on hold. It didn’t make sense to put a ton of effort into a 99 cent product that only 20 people were going to buy.
I mean more people have bought my ebooks but it doesn’t really make sense to put a lot of effort into something small and perhaps not very impactful while putting everything else on hold. I put my coaching and this show on hold. It didn’t make any sense to do that so I had to reevaluate.
I also had to realize I felt a lot of resistance going in that direction. It felt like trudging through mud!
I use that as a gauge to tell me that I either need to pivot and go into a new direction, or reevaluate and just completely scratch it off my list, or do something entirely different. I just have to figure it out and continue moving forward so I at least have some momentum.
That’s what this show has done for me. It has allowed me to evaluate how things are going and pivot course as needed. I think that’s a good thing to do in anything in life. Even if you’re in a relationship and things are kind of stale, if you really feel like you’re trudging through mud you might have to pivot course. That might mean you leave. Or it might mean you talk about things in a way where you say, “I’ve had enough, I can’t do this anymore. Let’s either work this out, or we need to take another step away from each other.” Who knows! But that is something that you have to bring up so that you can address the mud.
You need to address the mud. You need to clean it up. If you can’t clean it up and you’re not accomplishing anything along the path, it might be time to choose a new path and make different choices. Perhaps a change of course is exactly what you need to resolve some challenges in your life.
If you still can’t resolve the challenges, that’s where self-love, self-compassion, and self-care come in. Practicing those things might be your best next step. Sometimes you do have to pivot and change things up. Doing so could make life a little easier. Though, it could make it harder before it gets easier because sometimes when you change things, they do get harder.
But you may have to go through more difficulty before you create positive change. That’s why a lot of people don’t like change! They know making a change will make it harder. The mountain will get steeper, and they will have to endure more challenges. That doesn’t sound appealing at all, so many will avoid change because of that. They’ll choose to keep things the same.
If the same is okay with you, then you’ll just have to keep dealing with what you’re dealing with. If it’s not okay with you, and you’re just trudging through the mud, maybe it’s time to allow yourself to climb the steeper part of the mountain so that you can get to the top.
The top is the place where, when you finally reach it, you can take the zip line down because a lot easier going downhill than it is uphill. Well, not on every mountain, but a zip line makes it much easier for sure. That doesn’t mean change is going to happen fast but I will say this, when you go through the big changes in your life what ends up happening is that you will soon hit that steep peak. The very top that was so challenging to reach.
Then that first step down on the other side will be a step down will feel much better than continuing to climb up, where the work gets harder and harder. It’s that threshold I’ve talked about before. You will get to a point where you’ve worked so hard because you are committed and consistent. And because you were persistent and dedicated to the completion of the journey, you will either reach your goal or be so exhausted trying to reach your goal that you die.
That’s a terrible way to look at it, I know! But if you don’t die, you will succeed. And even if you don’t succeed, you never know what path is going to open up because you’re always moving forward. That’s one thing I just said in my email newsletter. If you’re not on my newsletter, sign up today.
In my latest newsletter, I talked about how we can be stuck in these ruts where every day is the same thing. We’re not happy. We just keep trudging through the mud, continuing to move forward.
Sometimes it takes a lot of work takes get out of some of the ruts we get ourselves into, but the rewards are amazing. Even when you don’t get the result that you want, you still get a result. And because of that, today’s result isn’t the same as yesterday’s. That, I think, is one of the keys to change.
Like I said in the newsletter, some of us go through life day after day after day like skipping record that keeps playing the same part of the song over and over again. We can play the same day over and over again! That makes the next day the same as yesterday. Then we say things like same sh**, different day. It’s the same old crap that we’ve been dealing with. The same old crap becomes our new normal so we can get used to it.
Sometimes we don’t consider climbing that extra steep part of the mountain because we just don’t want to go through the challenge. It’s just too hard. It might also be painful. It might put us in the abyss. We might fall through a chasm and end up somewhere we don’t want to end up. But it will be different?
Yes, it will be different. If you choose to climb that steeper, more difficult part of the mountain, things will change.
This is kind of a metaphor for life. I don’t know if you needed to hear this today or not but I put it out there every week. I’m consistent and persistent! And I’m committed to continuing to do what I can to make sure that you are happier and moving toward a place where you feel better inside yourself and about yourself.
Remember self-empathy: Being happy that you’re happy.
Be empathetic about what you’re going through! Put you first and realize that if you don’t do that, you’re not going to have the energy to help or be there for anyone else. You need to be there for you first. When you do that, you will have the energy, the motivation for yourself and for others too. But you have to fill your own cup first. You’ve got to do that.
I hope you’re able to apply this in your life somewhere. I know sometimes life is a struggle. We all go through some sort of struggle. We all have our own version of struggling and suffering, so don’t let anybody ever tell you that you shouldn’t be angry or you shouldn’t be sad, or you shouldn’t be anything, because you have a right to feel anything you want.
Everything that you feel is real. You might have to go through it, you might have to process it, you might have to figure it out and work on yourself and show yourself love, compassion, and caring.
Some people aren’t able to do that for you. Those that can do that are the people in our life we want to keep. We want to keep those people around. And if they’re not around anymore, then we have to go right back and reconnect with ourselves. Connecting with ourselves is the highest, steepest part of the mountain. It is the epitome of personal improvement.
