If you wanna stay stuck in the same place and keep getting spanked with the same lessons over and over, be negative, resentful, and victimized. If you want to get over your issues and rock your life, be grateful, look for the good and learn.

The trick is to not only deny the criticism any power over you, but, even more challenging, to not get caught up in the praise. There’s nothing wrong with blushingly accepting a compliment, but if you find yourself always seeking outside approval that you’re good enough or cool enough or talented enough or worthy enough, you’re screwed. Because if you base your self-worth on what everyone else thinks of you, you hand all your power over to other people and become dependent on a source outside of yourself for validation. Then you wind up chasing after something you have no control over, and should that something suddenly place its focus somewhere else, or change its mind and decide you’re no longer very interesting, you end up with a full-blown identity crisis.

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You are loved. Massively. Ferociously. Unconditionally. The Universe is totally freaking out about how awesome you are. It’s got you wrapped in a warm gorilla hug of adoration. It wants to give you everything you desire. It wants you to be happy. It wants you to see what it sees in you.

but the foundation of your fuckedupedness is something that’s been passed down through generations of your family, like a coat of arms or a killer cornbread recipe, or in my case, equating confrontation with heart failure.

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the most painful part was that deep down I KNEW I was a total rock star, that I had the power to give and receive and love with the best of ‘em, that I could leap tall buildings in a single bound and could create anything I put my mind to and . . . What’s that? I just got a parking ticket? You have got to be kidding me, let me see that. I can’t afford to pay this, it’s like my third one this month! I’m going down there to talk to them right now . . . then, doop de do, off I’d go, consumed once again by low-level minutiae, only to find myself, a few weeks later, wondering where those few weeks went and how it could possibly be that I was still stuck in my rickety-ass apartment, eating dollar tacos by myself every night.

If you finally decide to quit your soul-crushing job and start the pastry shop of your dreams, be not upset if a truck drives through your front window into your scones. Instead of taking this as a sign that you shouldn’t have opened your shop, take it to mean that you’re ridding yourself of your BS and moving in the right direction.