Healing is not becoming the best version of yourself.

Im proud of you, you made it back. Which means that you are making the steps to come here to heal. And I’m proud of you. Im proud of us. Because as you are reading my words to help you heal, I am healing from writing them.

Today I want to make something really clear. I don’t want you to have expectations that aren’t reality. I don’t want that for me either. And I have had this notion in my mind that healing creates the new you. And sure, you can become a new you along the way.

But, healing is not becoming the best version of yourself. Healing is letting the worst version of yourself be loved. So many of us have the notion of healing, that is it us becoming this amazing perfect version of ourselves.

That is bondage. Right? That is anxiety waiting to happen. Healing is saying that every single version of me deserves love, deserves tenderness, deserves grace. When we get to a place that we can see and empathize with every version of ourselves, even the version of ourselves that we can sometimes be ashamed of. That’s when we can know we are walking in a path of healing.

I’m going to introduce you into the 7 rules of life.

1. LET GO. If it doesn’t make you happy let it go, I know. You’re thinking “ Liz, you’re an asshole. It’s not that simple” but it can be. I’m learning it can be. We hold on to things so much longer than we should. Only to look back and realize we wasted time on that job, that person, that moment. Just because we were scared or attached. Let it go.

2. Never ruin a good day by thinking of a bad yesterday. Life is so short, and that is cliché. But I mean every word of that. And every day you deserve to wake up happier than the last, more successful than the day before, and more in love with yourself than you have ever been. And you can’t allow yourself to do that if you are holding on to the day before.

3. Ignore them. Don’t listen to other people. I wasted so much of my time and life being so worried about what other people thought of me or how I could please someone. And it did nothing but make me miserable. Live a life that’s empowering to you.

4. Give it time. Time truly heals everything. The sadness in your heart will eventually fade. The stress in your life eventually gets solved. There is a solution for everything. And time is always the answer.

5. Don’t compare. Your life, your soul, your body is always going to be different than the person beside you. Live for you, and you will be the best version of yourself.

6. It’s on you. You are the only one who can make change. There is no one in your life that can provide a better life for you than yourself. You are the only one who is truly in charge of your happiness. And when you start taking accountability for yourself, things get so much better.

7. Smile. Getting up every day with a smile and focusing on the positive only makes you do better and feel better. It’s not always easy but going through life with a smile can only make things better.

So today. I’ll leave you with this. Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them. Feeling sad after making a decision doesn’t mean it was the wrong one. You’re not stressed because you’re doing too much, you’re stressed because you’re doing too little of what makes you feel alive. The lesson you struggle with will repeat itself until you learn from it. And lastly, healing is not becoming a better version of yourself. It’s learning to love all the versions of you.

I love you, and I’m proud of you.