I just want to give this message to anybody who is really going through the thick of it right now. Now this is probably obvious but I think it is worth repeating: Life is not perfect. I think sometimes we expect so much perfection from ourselves that we become our harshest critic. We constantly tear ourselves down because we do not live up to what we think society wants us to be.

One of the biggest problems I have found in myself and one of the biggest problems I have seen in people around me is that we will label a season of our life or a certain chapter of our life as how our whole life is going to be. So maybe we are going through something rough and we start to believe that life will always be rough and tragic and difficult. Maybe we are more rude to the people around us during a season when we are under stress and we start to just believe that that is who we are and we start to settle into that idea. We become comfortable with living in tragedy and we find ourselves helpless to the situation.

There is this thing called learned helplessness where we start to believe that there is nothing to do about our situation and so we stop trying to fix it or get out of it. We just resign to the bad season in our life and we allow it to stay forever because we never choose to move on from it. We allow the pain to become our identity. We allow our past mistakes to become who we believe that we are. I just want to tell you that you are not your mistakes. You are not your past. Maybe this sounds cliche and maybe you have heard this plenty of times before, but if you didn’t listen before I hope that you will listen now. When I say that you are not your mistakes, that is not just a line I say to inspire motivation. It is the absolute truth. Whatever happened to you in your past does not define who you are today. Whatever you have done in the past, the kind of person you have been, the places you have gone, none of that defines who you are today. You can always choose to be better. You can always pick today to choose peace. You can pick today to choose calm.

I am not saying that you are responsible for the pain that you feel now and the struggle that you go through, but I am saying that you are responsible for the way you choose to respond to it. If you choose to stay in the grief and the pain forever then eventually you are choosing to be miserable. At first the pain makes sense. There is a time for grief, but eventually it has to become time to move on if you want to grow and be more than your past. Pick today to grow and do not let your past define you.

It all starts with you.