Give enough of a fuck about your life to pull the rug out from underneath yourself and start again. Give enough of a fuck about your life to stop wishing it were someone else’s. Give enough of a fuck about your life to stop trying to change it, and start trying to live it – doing so will create the change you were seeking in the first place.

Give enough of a fuck about your life to remind yourself that happy is a thing you do, not a thing you wait to feel. And happy is not a high. Happy is a purpose. It is meaning. It is a choice. It is a way of seeing. It is a manner of being.

Give enough of a fuck about your life to stop seeking more of it, and start seeing what you already have. Give enough of a fuck to stop trying to create moments, and start trying to embrace with more clarity and gratitude and profundity the ones you already have.

Give enough of a fuck about your life to stop trying to make sense of it.

You should try to make sense of your feelings. You should figure out the root of your thoughts. But trying to make sense of the trajectory of your life is trying to apply the life you have to the person you were. It’s keeping you in a very small box of “what was right.” It keeps you back from the real work: trying to make sense of yourself.

It’s not going to make sense. Most things never align with what you think will logically come next. The life you had five years ago doesn’t fit with the life you have now because there were two different people living them.

You don’t figure out ‘why’ and then assume everything will shift back to the way it should be. There are reasons for things you won’t know until years and years afterwards. There are things you’ll look back on and say: “I never understood why that was.”

And yet that does not make it any less so. 

Give enough of a fuck about your life to trust it.

To allow it. To surrender to it, to let things be effortless. Doing all of that is doing one thing and one thing only, and that is trusting yourself.

Trust that the things that happened were for the best. The things that are chosen are the things you are to do. The relationships that end are meant to. The people who compel you are meant to. The school you agreed to go to you were meant to.

Rectifying, editing, backpedaling, questioning, changing for something more, more, more is what creates resistance and stress. Not a better outcome. Give enough of a fuck to allow.

Give enough of a fuck about your life to remind yourself every day that you’re going to die. Write it on your wall, and put it on post-its next to your desk. In every boring meeting and infuriating afternoon commute, let one thought ring through your head: I am going to die.

Give enough of a fuck about your life to remind yourself of the uncomfortable, invisible force that drives us most: we do not have forever. We do not have a long time, even. Most psychological security is an illusion. True freedom is in embracing that nothing is safe, and nothing is certain, and that’s okay.

Give enough of a fuck about your life to let it go.

The segments of the past that still flash through your head, let them go. The people who only have a presence in your life through an idea, let them go. The expired ideas you have of yourself, let them go. Feel what you feel and then do something about what you feel so you can let that go, too.

Give enough of a fuck about your life to stop trying so hard.

The work is not effort. The work is in allowing. The way people fail is by abstaining. The way people abstain is by placing all their mental and emotional energy toward trying to change, avoid, deflect, muster up anger and shoot it without a target, get so upset they force themselves to change, worry until they’re convinced they’ve thought through every option, and it’s safe to start living.

People kill themselves through the apathy they adopt to quell the intensity of the ‘giving a fuck’ that’s completely misguided. They default because they don’t choose to have the courage to try again.

Give enough of a fuck about your life to say thank you for it. When you’re grateful for what you have, you’ll seek more of it. When you consider the elements of your life not privileges but rights that need to be improved upon, you’ll spend your days chasing daydreams that were never meant to be – all under the guise of the idea that the people who give a fuck about their lives are the ones who least let them be.