I didn’t know that all the therapy and journaling and meditation and “work on myself” I did would eventually start to pay off, and that after a lifetime of worrying that people might not like me, I would learn to love and trust myself enough that it would finally stop mattering so much what strangers thought and I could FREAKING RELAX.

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We have a fear of being left out, a fear of failure, a fear of rejection, a fear that our children will forget about us when they leave home, a fear that loved ones will leave us, that our spouses will lose interest, that our beauty will fade, that our jobs will be automated, that our food will cause cancer, that our president will spark an interna

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Is this it?  Sometimes I look at my partner after a disagreement, my child after a meltdown, my house after something breaks, and I think: Is this really what life turned out to be? More often, I look critically at myself—my tired eyes, my wrinkled forehead, my struggles to join group conversations, my endless list of worries—and think: Is th

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