If you do not know what to do next, it usually isn’t because your next step is far out in the distance, but rather right in front of your feet.
You are being asked to stop gazing outward and start looking inward.
You are being called to rebuild yourself at this exact moment.
If you do not know what to do next, it is not because you need to seek more answers, but rather, accept the ones you’ve already been given.
If you do not know what to do next, it’s time to learn to be in the answered prayer that is this very day.
It’s time to learn how to use what you already have and be as you are.
It’s time to stop waiting for some future scenario to bring your dreams into the light and to dig them out from beneath your fear and begin.
EK #02
It’s disrupting you because it’s trying to move you to a kinder thought, to a better place, to a deeper knowing.
It is trying to open up a piece of your heart that you have closed, to soften you in the places where life has left its harshest scars.
It is trying to inspire your forgiveness, to meet others in the moment, as they are now. It is trying to help you stop keeping the past alive by maintaining outdated perceptions, and it’s trying to bring you firmly into this moment.
It’s unnerving to you because it is a messenger, and you have not yet heard what it is trying to say.
It is persistent because you need it, even if you don’t want it.
It’s here because it intends to grow you, and it won’t pass until you agree to let it stretch you past the tiny confines of a life half-lived.
EK #03
You are here to carve a new way out of the unknown.
You are here to defy what’s expected and create a new normal, one where you feel inherently free to not see external challenges as absolute dead-ends, but to discover the quiet resilience you cultivate as you work your way around them.
You are here to nurture the feeling a life most fully lived would give you in your chest, not what you imagine it would appear in someone else’s eyes.
EK #04
There are a lot of things you can give up on in this life, but love is not one of them.
There are a lot of things you can let go of, a lot of things you’re allowed to say you were wrong or a little too hopeful about.
There are a lot of things you can age out of, phase through, and move on from, but love is not one of them.
You have to believe in love up until the very end real love, true love, honest love.
To not give up on love is to be open to how it may come, and when.
To not give up on love is to accept that the deepest possible experience of it might not look exactly as you pictured.
To not give up on love is to realize that it will not be something that sweeps you off your path, but helps you stand more firmly on your own two feet.
It is not something that idealizes an idea of you but does not support the person you are becoming love is willing to care for you in the most constant, simple, human ways.
In the end, love is not something you find one day, it’s something you learn to see surrounding you already, and it is something you heal yourself into being able to fully receive.
EK #05
You become who you are when you start choosing the things that you find meaningful and worthwhile.
You become who you are when even the most minor decisions throughout your day reflect your authenticity and when your instinct leads you before your mind interrupts.
You become who you are when you start allowing the brightest parts of you to shine without apology,
And when you begin to realize there is no substitute for your love finally flowing through your own life.
EK #06
Letting go is not meant to be easy;
It is not supposed to be simple to unwind your soul from the things that have captured your mind, your time, and your life for so long.
You are not supposed to be able to effortlessly and numbly cut things that were once a part of you out and set them free.
You are not supposed to separate yourself from what’s most essential within your experience.
Your willingness to do so is testimony not to your failure nor your inadequacy but your faith on fire with the knowledge that even still, even here, there is something greater that is waiting to be seen.
EK #07
Do you know how many perfect moments are unfolding before your very eyes?
Do you know how much you already have?
Do you know how many quiet nights of peace you have already experienced;
How many hearts have loved you?
How many people would love to see your name pop up on their phone right now?
Do you know how much you matter?
Do you know how good you are?
EK #08
Don’t depend on anyone, but learn to rely on the ones you trust.
Make your home your safe space.
When it feels like nothing is happening, that’s when everything is about to happen.
Don’t get so used to chaos that peace feels like something’s wrong.
Love is something you build; attraction is something you find.
Nobody has everything, but everyone has something focus on your something.
If you start to pay attention, you will be amazed at what you find.
EK #09
It may seem as though other people stumble upon their dream lives, but the truth is that everything inspiring is layered upon itself through time.
Everything is continuously and consciously chosen, over and over again, until it forms into reality.
Soulmate relationships are built.
Dream careers are built.
Resilient people are built often with the pieces of their own greatest failures, mistakes, and missteps.
You do not have to be perfect.
But you just have to keep going.
You have to keep moving in the direction of your dreams.
EK #10
Nothing is wrong with you.
You are supposed to have days in which you are so self-assured followed by nights where you gaze into the sky and wonder if this is all there is.
You are supposed to have years that feel like weeks and weeks that feel like years.
And you are supposed to get rejected sometimes.
You are supposed to have people disagree with you at times.
You are supposed to be a little lost now and again.
But you are not supposed to have all of the answers.
Nothing is wrong with you.
EK #11
Life is a blank canvas upon which our subconscious minds paint pieces of our souls.
What matters is not so much what’s in front of you, but what’s within it that you see.
That is what will tell you everything you need to know.
EK #12
If you have a heart that is healing, what you need to remember is that there is more to life than romantic love.
There are equal joys.
There are other worthwhile pursuits.
Even if romantic love is an element of your life, it is not the only thing life is about.
It might be that the fabric of our society hinges on you believing that matrimony and reproduction are the end-all-be-all, the highest-high, the only thing truly worth living for.
It may be well-intentioned people who do not want you to experience what they fear.
But romantic love does not excuse you from the inner work.
It does not solve your every problem, and often, a rush to find it complicates our hearts the most.
The pressure to be in a relationship creates a complex that can bend your sense of self until connection feels futile.
Love exists in myriad ways, but the assumption that this singular form of it will lift you above your human experience, sanitize your pain, and make the rest of your days a fever dream is not only untrue, it’s unhelpful.
It is placing the portal to your inner peace within the realm of someone else’s commitment rather than leading you back to where it truly exists: in your ability to retrain your mind to perceive love at any given moment.
Our fantasies about other people are never really about how someone else might give us their love.
Instead, they mirror our unawakened love back to us.
They serve to show us not that we need to seek another human heart but that we need to remember to nurture the one we already have.
EK #13
The measure of a life well-lived is not how often you have avoided discomfort, pressure, or change, but the grace with which you navigated it.
To say that you faced not even a fraction of resistance within your life proves nothing more than that you were defined by nothing:
tried for nothing,
stood for nothing,
and did nothing with the gifts that were given to you.
I know it seems like the absolute worst thing in the world is to be disapproved of, but the actual worst thing is to paralyze yourself under the guise that you might be able to avoid any friction.
The merit is not in whether or not you have ever experienced anything challenging, but in the courage with which you faced what challenged you.
That is what matters.
That is what defines who you are.
EK #14
Rather than spending more of your time trying to work through your conceptual self, move out of your head and touch your life.
Do just one thing differently than you did before.
Care for yourself in the quietest, most intimate ways.
Your idea of yourself will reform as you give yourself solid, undeniable, consistent proof that you are different than you once believed yourself to be.
EK #15
Not everyone is going to understand your journey because not everyone is meant to.
Not everyone has made peace with their inner longings, nor paused to sincerely reflect upon themselves, or how they intend to be.
The nature of your transit will only emphasize some people’s stuckness, the fortress around themselves that they’ve come to feel is an essential shield they cannot live without.
What can be so unnerving about someone else’s development is the part of ourselves we recognize as desiring that same change so deeply and what it is within us that resists it in equal measure.
Please remember that your experience is not validated in proportion to how much sense it makes to others.
Even if you are the only person in the entire world who knows where you are going, that is more than enough to make it all the way there.
EK #16
When you know who you are becoming, it is a lot easier to make peace with who you’ve been.
It’s a lot easier to dissect the past for the lessons you needed to learn, and then let the rest go.
The experiences that delivered you those essential pieces of knowledge no matter how uncomfortable they were at the onset were not useless.
They were not wasted.
Your pain was not for nothing, your hurt was not meaningless.
You completed the most daring task of all, which is to look into the recesses of your fear and find hope, find meaning, and find a greater truth.
EK #17
Your story is not for everyone.
If they have not proven that they intend to hear you and hold you gently, you are under no obligation to share the rawest details of yourself with them.
There are some things you are allowed to keep sacred, that you are allowed to keep small.
This is not denying yourself; it is protecting yourself.
It is reminding yourself that in a world where it has become normal to broadcast every detail of your existence, it is okay to practice discernment.
It is okay to be intentional about who holds your most vulnerable pieces.
EK #18
You are not how you had to harden yourself to get through the chapters you had no other way to face.
You are not the person you became to cope with the experiences you would never have chosen for yourself.
But you are the person who is confronting these empty parts of yourself and releasing them.
You are the person who is asking yourself to keep going, who is asking to keep healing.
