Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who's Been There

People can’t help but tell us the truth about themselves. Your job is to pay attention.

Choose ONLY the people who lift you up, who are reaching for higher things themselves, who MAKE YOU FEEL AWESOME. Grab on to them, hold them, scream “Mine, mine, mine,” and do everything in your power to be good to them. Never let go of the people who treat you like the shit and who are the shit themselves.

It’s exhausting—and, it turns out, impossible—to try to manage other people’s judgments.

Life is not a series of crises to be endured. Life is to be enjoyed.

It turns out you can’t command the perceptions of others, and the more you try, the more you risk losing your own sense of self-worth and alienating people. It took decades of running myself ragged trying to gain acceptance from others for me to learn a fundamental truth I would now like to share with you: No one cares. No one is watching you. No one is tallying the total of your decisions, judging you from afar. They are not doing this because they are too worried about themselves. They are making all kinds of judgments about their own lives and worries, and I love you very much, but they are just not thinking about you right now.

Maya Angelou once wisely pointed out that “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” It took me thirty years to understand these sage words. I’m pretty sure Dr. Angelou meant that people—the folks you date, the friends you have, your parents, your siblings, basically all of the people you encounter on a daily basis—are constantly telling you who they are through their words and actions. They can’t hide it! There’s no magic to understanding them other than making sure you are watching, listening, and paying attention to what is genuinely happening.

You can't govern how people treat you or the things they say, but you can absolutely decide what you will do with the gospel that nothing is personal and people are limited.

The people you surround yourself with make up the quality of your life.

No one cares. No one is watching you.

When you begin your morning recognizing that you are a goddess, you'll notice the whole world will start to treat you that way.

Busy’ is worn as a badge of honor these days; the busier we are, the more important we feel. But busy doesn’t mean important. Busy just means you are preoccupied. And often it means you’re distracted. It doesn’t mean you are esteemed, fun, smart, worthy, valued, loved, appreciated, excited, or happy. Busy likely means you are not paying attention to the current moment but instead are hustling around in a fog of things you ‘have’ to do. Busy isn’t special. We are all busy. So why label yourself something so common? You’re better than that.

I was talking with an especially insightful friend recently about the unfair stigmas placed on medication and the idea that it can actually help us return to ourselves. “What about when you have a pounding migraine that makes you miserable and curl up into your sofa, totally incapacitated?” she asked. “If you take maximum-strength Advil and suddenly feel like yourself again, did that change your personality? Or did it get rid of the horrible migraine that was keeping you from who you really are?” I realized she was onto something. For me, it’s the same thing with mental health. If I need to take medication because I have been swallowed whole by the whale of anxiety and depression, if I feel like I am deep at the bottom of the sea and will never make it to the light again, there should be no shame in allowing science to help lift me back up to the surface.

The sooner you can get comfortable with the ambiguity of two things being true at the same time, the sooner you will enjoy all parts of your life, even the not-so-great ones, because you know that's not the whole story.

How well can you actually know someone who is not open enough to share their feelings with you?

Getting ready like Cleopatra, doing one nice thing a day for yourself, taking baths, learning/tricking yourself to be comfortable in your body, collecting amulets, having a physical space to take yourself seriously, keeping your home as nice as you would for guests, nourishing yourself with food, avoiding substances that make you feel bad, seeking medical help if you need it—these are all ways we build the faith that we can lead the lives we want to lead, lives we are proud of, lives full of delight.

Life is not always a list of problems to be solved; sometimes it’s actually made up of fun and ease and beauty and laughter.

She understood that taking yourself seriously, having a room of your own, is KEY to creating the most authentic version of you. I

If the people close to us are acting in a hurtful way, we reason that it is very specifically about us. We then tend to internalize it and question ourselves. What did I do wrong to deserve this? We blame ourselves: They wouldn’t have treated us in this fundamentally shitty way if we were worthy of better. But I’m here to tell you directly: This is madness. The way a person treats you has almost nothing to do with you. It’s about them and their limitations.

[...] I began to realize that I did indeed have a lot to be grateful for. That didn’t mean I also didn’t have trauma in my life. It certainly didn’t mean that I had worked out all of my issues from childhood and now everything was ‘perf, thanks, byeee.’ The trauma and the gratitude were able to live in the same space, together. Little by little, I pulled the golden thread of gratitude out from the blanket of pain I usually wrapped myself in.

i hate this double life of being good at work and bad at life

For you, I see something grander: I see a life that you consciously live. That you curate and cultivate and create for yourself, a life in which you are self-aware AF, grateful for the luck that you are here at all, a life in which you love and also let yourself be loved. I see you engaged to your life, holding it firmly yet tenderly by the hand like it’s your soulmate, bringing it in for the deepest of make-out seshes. I see you feeling up your life in the most passionate of embraces. That is what I see for you.

It only matters that I do the things that make me feel good and respect myself.

Taking yourself seriously means allowing yourself to have a dream, a vision, a hope for your life. It means putting in the work, little by little, to be who you know, deep down, you are and want to become. It means living your life in pursuit of your most authentic self.

One way to fast-track change is to act as if you are the best, highest version of yourself. What are all the best qualities you want to show this other person? Write them down. How do you want the other person to feel in your company? Write it down. What’s something caring you could do for this person right now? Write it down. Look at your lists and see how, today, you could start enacting those “better versions” of yourself.

Having grown up in a house of constant criticism, I didn’t trust compliments. When I heard feedback that was flattering it went in one ear and out the other into a holding dumpster, where I quickly set fire to the praise. All that would be left were the ashes of the compliment, which I’d then bury at sea so I’d never have to recognize anything ‘nice’ about myself

Find a ritual that celebrates that thing you think needs work. Find a practice, a special piece of clothing, a favorite piece of jewelry. Something that tricks you into liking your body. Sometimes you just need to take something you abhor about yourself and honor the fuck out of it.

if you need support from others, trust the people who are in your corner. These are not always the people you desperately want in your corner. These are not always the people you wish treated your ideas with care. These are not the people about whom you think, Well, maybe they’ll come through this time. Fingers crossed! These are the people who actually show up for you.

I’m talking about the sheer delight in looking around and thinking, Oh yeah, I live here. Awesome. Even if you are not living in your dream home, even if you are living in a far cry from your dream home, by treating your space with care, attention, and a little organization, you will feel better about your life overall, because you will have made active choices about how you want to live. You can bring order to your physical world no matter your circumstance.

Given enough care, the objects you surround yourself with can become amulets, energetically charged with your love and attention. Your wooden kitchen table, which you wipe down with oil once a month and always use coasters on, is no longer just any table, it’s a talisman. It’s a symbol of how much you value meals with family and friends. Your sweat equity seals in the power of the table.

Chances are, if you are justifying something you are doing as a means to "deal" with your day, then it's probably not a great idea. We don't justify the healthy things.