Aren’t you tired of half-hearted connections, one foot in and one foot out, waiting for the ball to drop?

Tired of Pinterest wedding announcements, pleading with the world to see us as perfection, candid shots in love with love?

Aren’t you tired of food consumed due to convenience over food consumed for its nourishment, mouthwatering, life-altering, hip-swaying nourishment?

Aren’t you done with high heels that make your feet ache and skirts that break the circulation just to sit behind a desk all day, smiling at the customers that arrive and demand?

I’m tired of hearing ads about ways to relieve the stress from a long work week. The best way to relieve the stress is not to create it in the first place.

Thank God it’s Friday? No, thank God our legs move and our hearts beat on Mondays and Tuesdays and every day in between.

We are killing ourselves.

Heart attacks and broken hearts.

Working our health, children, marriages away, then going into debt trying to save our lives.

Do we need all of those things that sit in our garage and collect dust?

Do we really need to spend that money on a car or a new wardrobe? If we do, great. If we don’t, than take a breath and look around you. Your life is already complete. It’s just waiting for you to notice it.

Aren’t you tired of sitting across the table and fake laughing at jokes, pretending to be amused?

Look at your newsfeed. Look at the way we act as puppets at times. It’s disheartening. All we want is connection, don’t you know? Deep-hearted, blood and bone and sweat and tear connection. We were simply never taught how to build these connections so we hide behind masks built out of fear and put each other down.

Clinton over trump.

Trump over Clinton.

I watched the national conventions for the first time this year. I was broken at how both sides put down the other side in order to fuel people’s fire, in order to fuel a sense of hatred toward the other. Aren’t we better than this?

We must be successful, we need degrees and goals to show our own worth. But if we knew of this worth, would we spend so much time concerned about what the world assumes of us?

Goals have been the death of me.

Really though, goals are what has kept me up at night, trying to decide if I should go left or right, up or down. Goals are what have kept me from enjoying so many sunny afternoons because I was too busy seeping agony over the future and regretting the past. “I need to be more productive,” my mind would say but my body would scream for me to stop. It would tell me to have a glass of wine by the poolside with great friends and talk of nothing but the beauty that is this life.

My mind and body are at a constant war.

I’ve thrown the term “goals” out of my vocabulary. They have done nothing but destroy my ability to be utterly complete in the moment that I am currently embodying—always seeking and never seeing.

We must build an empire to have something to show for our time on this Earth.

So we forget to love the ones who love us.

We forget to love the ones who don’t know how.

We forget to kiss in the kitchen and dance under the stars.

We forget to smell the flowers in spring and pick pumpkins in autumn.

We forget to play with the dog whose life is so much shorter than our own. The dog that spends his days by the window waiting for our return.

We forget to look in the mirror and cherish the shade of our face that day, making note that tomorrow it will be one day older.

Aren’t you tired of blaming circumstances around you in order to forget the pain you’ve inflicted upon yourself?

I know it’s lonely in there. It was so lonely for me that the pain of staying locked up became so great, that I knew I couldn’t keep living a lie.

So I stopped. I stopped running. I stopped pretending to enjoy people, places and things that made my skin crawl from the negative energy that made these people, places and things their home.

We have to stop running. Stop distracting ourselves with things and goals and loves that weren’t meant for us.

We can do better. We have to.

~

Author: Emily Gordon

Image: Brian Merrill/Pixabay

Editor: Katarina Tavčar