Tara Schuster

You can’t control how the outside world treats you, but you can and must decide how you treat yourself

We get this one human body, and whether you hate it or love it, it’s yours. Any time spent feeling uncomfortable or ashamed of it, past adolescence, is absolutely wasted.

Virginia Woolf wrote about the importance of making space for yourself in A Room of One’s Own. Though written in 1929, her words are just as urgent today. Her most quoted passage is probably that in order to create, in order to pursue her own passions, “a woman must have money and a room of her own,” free from distraction and judgment.

My problem is that I overplan. With work, I feel like I have to suck the marrow out of every single opportunity

Busy isn’t special. We are all busy. So why label yourself something so common? You’re better than that.

DO YOU EVER GET BOGGED down? Do you ever get so in your own head about your problems and worries that they are all you think about? Do you ever get to a place where it’s hard to see what’s good in life because you are preoccupied with all of the things you haven’t yet accomplished, with all of the issues you need to “fix” about yourself

My unbridled optimistic view that I can and will enjoy my life, even when it’s difficult, is not some “cute” or “naive” thought. It is a powerful, pragmatic tool to help me not just survive, but to thrive, to fully live my life to the hilt.

If these are the things you find yourself thinking on the regular, then I am going to tell you something you need to hear: You are the one hanging on to what’s wrong. It’s not that the painful stuff doesn’t exist; rather, two things can be true at the same time

. You can be stricken with grief that you never had the relationship with your mom you deserved and you can appreciate that it pushed you to find other mentors who opened up your world.

The sooner you can get comfortable with the ambiguity of two things being true at the same time, the sooner you will enjoy all parts of your life, even the not-so-great ones, because you know that’s not the whole story.