You’re ready to level up.

First, you must escape your current reality.

(Can it be done? Of course!)

Follow these steps.

1. Let Go of the Old Version of Reality

“If you wish to create a new reality, you must first let go of the one that no longer serves you. A glass that is full cannot hold more water. It must be emptied first.”

You have to be ready to let go of your old life, your old identity, your previous reality. It can be scary, but this is the only way to create something new.

When the world ends, a new world is born to take its…

It’s cold. I’m tired. I waited too long to write my #Ship30for30 article (again).

So, here’s another shitpost, brought to you by my cell phone.

One of the pieces I’ve been planning to write for this challenge is why you should embrace the Shitty First Draft.

I used to be a perfectionist

Terrified to write. Agonizing over the fact that I’ll never achieve my unattainable standards.

Writing anything took FOREVER.

I missed deadlines. Lost clients. Went spinning down the anxiety death spiral. Over and over.

Then something changed

A few years ago, I signed a contract to do some consulting work for a business coach.

She was awesome. One…

All goals are basically arbitrary, when you think about it.

Hat tip to Daniel for the topic and title of this A̶t̶o̶m̶i̶c̶ ̶E̶s̶s̶a̶y Medium article. We were having a conversation on Slack today and he asked why my goal at the moment is to publish on Medium. My answer is…I don’t really know

It was essentially an arbitrary decision. I spend a lot of time reading on Medium; there are some amazing writers here. There’s a built-in audience and monetization opportunity. It seemed easier to gain some traction there than to build and optimize my own blog or website.

Most goals are totally arbitrary, and that’s okay

You…

I used to hate feelings

Especially when it came to romantic relationships. Every time I started to have feelings, no matter how great things were at the outset, eventually they’d become tumultuous. I felt like I didn’t have control.

The younger version of myself was deeply insecure.

When you don’t believe you’re worthy of love and you are absolutely convinced that you’re fat and ugly, well…

You need to do some work on yourself. It’s worth it. You deserve to be confident, secure, and happy. Enjoy your own company. Love will follow.

How can you expect to be loved if you don’t know how to…

Are we the only intelligent life on earth?

Humans spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves for our unique and unmatched intelligence.

That’s obviously a lie.

If you’ve ever interacted with humans (especially en masse), you probably have an endless list of examples that demonstrate human intelligence is…

…possibly a myth.

We’re not as special as we like to think we are.

Yet the story we tell about our superiority to all other life persists.

It’s possible (perhaps likely) that the reason we’ve not had contact with aliens yet is because they’re talking to other intelligent life.

We’re too arrogant and dumb.

Virtually everything that humans do, ants do better.

Not only do ants outnumber us by population and overall biomass, they share a number of qualities that previously we thought…

When I was in graduate school, I was reading — no joke — for 12 or more hours a day. The workload was way more than one human could possibly handle and to keep myself from going crazy, I developed a habit that also applies to working from home.

Instead of sitting in one place all day, trying to consume 5,000 pages of text, the only way I could stay focused was to change venues throughout the day.

I’m not sure if I had a pattern, but I rotated from my sun porch to the library, then to a coffee…

A few years ago, I had the strange experience of accepting a job at a company run by Scientologists. That’s a story for another day, but…nevermind.

I’ll just tell you.

So in 2016, I moved to Sacramento with my now ex-husband. (The whole being married, secretly, for six months is definitely a story for another day.) My goals upon arriving in my new home/city were reasonable.

1. Figure out WTF the “danger box” outside our bedroom window was doing, and whether or not it was dangerous. (Yet another story for later.)
2. Get two job offers.

I’d always been subject to the…

Have you ever discovered that you have a doppëlganger?

Your identical twin, who you happen to have never met and had been blissfully unaware of until one of your friends sends you a picture.

You’ve probably heard this word before — a doppëlganger is “an apparition or double of a living person” — and they appear in the wild more often than you’d expect.

For example, my friend Rachel Andersen recently discovered she has a twin when someone discovered what appears to be her on a bag of cat food.