The tricky part of dipping toes into new communities (to curate your new environment) is that there’s a part of you that’s still the you that you were before. There’s a sense of dissonance that is triggered in us whenever we’re becoming something new. It says that you’re a fraud because you aren’t yet, all while you’re being pushed in the direction of more by your desires. You have the yearning and the fear occupying the same space and it can be maddening.

Life is meant to be curated but the way we’ve been presented with “certain” paths has conditioned us to take the plan that’s already mapped out. Take all the courses that are listed with the major that seems closest to the thing you want even though the thing in your heart isn’t exactly the thing that’s listed in the course catalog. Conform to the list rather than taking the list, seeing what works, figuring out how to refine it, and making it a little more specific to the undeveloped picture of a life that I’m working on bringing to bear.

What would I do if I weren’t afraid of anything? I’d let people in beyond the foyer. I’d let them sit on the couch of my life, stay for dinner, watch a movie or two and have conversations that didn’t have anything to do with work and productivity– which has been my safe zone for engaging with people I’m not sure about yet. I’d allow things to play out the way they’re going to rather than mapping out the escape routes for every connection I make. I’d offer real vulnerability rather than the PR twist of pseudo-transparent truths that I offer to test people’s integrity.

At the heart of the whole ordeal was fear. I was terrified of my waking thoughts. I was afraid to go to sleep because those thoughts manifested in the most bizarre dreams I’ve ever had. I felt isolated because I didn’t think I could talk to anyone about it —they wouldn’t understand. On the outside, I felt more or less normal. My patterns weren’t much different. I was still going to the gym, still getting work done, but I was being worked over in my mind in the worst ways.

Our minds are battlefields. I know it feels awful, believe me, I’ve experienced some unspeakable things in the privacy of my mind —but there are worst places to engage in that fight. When thoughts progress past our minds, they get down in our hearts (not the physical one but the emotional representation of us). The difference between a thought waging war in our minds and having that enemy breech our hearts is that we go from thinking the worst about ourselves to believing and behaving like the worst of ourselves.

You can be honest without the brutality. You deserve honesty without brutality. Truth can still hurt even when delivered with grace so why add the extra sting?

If we leave our relationships unchecked, we end up allowing others to ravage our time, space, and energy like a take what you need poster.