We all start as strangers, but we forget that we rarely choose who ends up a stranger, too - Brianna Wiest

Unless you are a trained expert on the topic, any strong emotions that accompany your opinion on it are usually strictly personal (and therefore keep you away from being objective and realistic). It would take years and an extraordinary amount of research (at the level of Ph.D. candidacy) to be in a position to truly understand a nuanced issue enough to have an extremely strong feeling about it.

Maybe you don’t need to find more energy, maybe you just need to find a dream that makes you actually want to get up in the morning. Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes. Maybe you need to stop trying to be good at the hundred things that do not light up your soul, and finally choose the one that does — the one that asks you to risk, to lay your heart bare, to try again, even though you’re scared. You’re not failing because you’re not motivated. You’re not supposed to get far on a path that was never yours to walk.

When we hold onto fear and pain after something traumatic has passed, we do it as a sort of safety net. We falsely believe that if we constantly remind ourselves of all the terrible things that we didn’t see coming, we can avoid them. Not only does this not work, but it also makes you less efficient at responding to them if they do. Because most of the time, you’re so busy worrying about monsters in the closet, you forget to address the actual things that will erode you over time: your health, your relationships, your long-term vision, your finances, your thoughts.