Have you ever been in the mountains, tens of thousands of feet away from the solid, sea-level earth? You feel like you are hovering not here, nor there, but somewhere else. This is what 2011 felt like for me.

This year was really, really tough for me.

Did you know that? Did you sense my worry, my sleepless nights, the anxiety that welled up inside me like a ghost? I hope you didn’t. I hope you peered at my Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and thought, what a strong bold Mermaid that one is, unstoppable, effervescent, beaming like a winter sun. That’s how you need to look in tough times to everyone else.

But you’re not everyone else. You’re someone who reads this blog because I promised to be honest with you, so I won’t try to be the winter sun here, the cold hard beams that touch you and make you feel colder. That isn’t me, here.

This year I’ve had to make major decisions in every single thing that I do and be and live by, and those decisions feel heavier then they did when I was 23 or 24. I’m 26 now. I gaze in the mirror and I’m still young, but less young. I have time, but less time. I feel like I’m putting on a suite and it’s slowly zipping me up into adulthood.

I’ve realized that the hardest thing about growing up is not the DOING of tough adult-like things like work and houses and investments, but those in-between phases when you’re doing nothing. When you’re choosing what to do next. Your own liminality is the hardest pat of adulthood. That’s a word I learned in anthropology class, liminal, to be something that is not here or there but in-between, the threshold of a door, the tip top of a peak where men and mountain gods meet.

But you know what made me feel better? This first line of a story that Rose Finn wrote when she was 8. Rose was my editor for an article I wrote, and she’s also a writer, but that’s all I know about her. I couldn’t find her on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, those places where I hope I look tough and strong. But I found her here saying things we all know but always forget:

“Hi, my name is Amy. My parents died in a car crash. But I’m okay now, because it’s fall, and the leaves are crisp.”

Do you see this plant? How neon-green it's leaves are, how red it's trunk shines? It only grows in swamps, but during Katrina it drifted in the flood waters and rooted randomly in my front yard. We kept it. We transplanted it in my backyard. It spread, and now, my yard is full of glowing, green plants, shining brilliantly in that other-worldly way..

When everyone at the luncheon started crying, I was trying to login to Twitter.

My phone had been giving me a headache the whole lunch– it seemed that the company Twitter password had changed, and I didn’t know it. I couldn’t load Hoot Suite. I couldn’t login with the Android Twitter app. I was trying to live tweet from the French Quarter Business Association luncheon about the Louisiana Bicentennial, to no avail.

What’s the new Twitter password? I texted my colleague.

She texted it back to me. But it hasn’t been working, she said.

I was trying for the umpteenth time to validate the Twitter account when General Honore approached the podium and started speaking.

Do you know who General Honore is? If you’re from New Orleans you do, but if you’re not he’s the guy who stepped in during the darkest moment of Hurricane Katrina and saved the city from an even darker moment.  Mayor Nagin called him that “John Wayne Dude” who “ came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussing and people started moving,”

Nagin said this the moment before crying on live, national radio.

Honore started talking about Katrina, about stepping into the city and telling the soldiers to stop pointing their guns at us because we were citizens. About a woman saying that her brother died in Vietnam and that she had hated the military until this day, when the military saved her life.

And right then and there General Honore started crying.  A 6 foot-something military man was choking back sobs in front a room of 70 business people. Suddenly, the entire room was sniffling, sobbing, dabbing eyes and blinking back tears. There we were, over six years after Katrina in a New Orleans that had come so far, a city that was so hopeful, so vibrant, so on the verge of something great, and right beneath the surface was that ache of all we had lost, the more potent ache what could have been lost: everything.

I put down my phone. This was important, this room of crying business people on a humid Thursday afternoon in the French Quarter, six years after Katrina.

After the speach a client of my company came up to me. “You were glued to your phone the whole time! I almost sent you this text,” he flailed his Blackberry in front of me. “In fact, I’m going to send it to you right now.” He pressed send and my phone lit up with, Stop looking at your phone and look at Honore!

I protested, reminding him that this was why he had hired me, because I was always glued to my phone, but something inside me knew that I was wrong. Yes, being connected all the time was my job, but it was also my job to know that Twitter, Facebook, this blog that I’m writing on right now— it’s all useless without our own communities, online and offline.

I remember my own Katrina story: the flood waters that miraculously swept right beneath the floor of my parents house, how the floorboards buckled as the moisture pressed beneath, waiting to get in, but somehow remained one inch shy of flooding the entire house.

I remember my harp at night. How the strings would snap from the ninety-degree heat and my parents thinking they were gunshots.

This was Katrina: harp strings snapping and gunshots everywhere.

I can share this experience with you and give you a glimpse into who I am, who we all are here in New Orleans, what this city meant to us during Katrina and how much more it means to us now, all because of the internet.

But we all need to disconnect sometimes, maybe right now. Do it. You. Put the phone down, shut down the computer, power off the ipad and relish in the great, moving moments exist all around us, all of the time.

Tell me, how do you unplug? When do you unplug? 

One of the biggest things I hate about New York City is tat it’s driven by money.

When I lived in NYC, everyone was obsessed with money: having it, not having it, wanting it, spending too much of it.

And in New Orleans? We’re obsessed with one another—talking to each other, having coffee with one each other, saying hi to each other, recognizing each other in our really random Mardi gras costumes. The priority here is people first, music second, and somewhere down that long list of food and festivals, money, because we need money to have languorous lunches to obsess about one another at.

Maybe that’s why there’s no toiling in the Big Easy: we know the most important thing in life is the people you care about.

Maybe that’s why visitors come and never leave: because community springs up everywhere.

I took this self portrait with a film camera, a tri-pod, and a self timer when I was 16. Something about the soft light, the blur of my hands, the look of utter concentration on my 16 year old face, reminds me that everything is still possible.

When I was five I told my parents that I wanted to play the harp.

They looked at each other and then at me and said, “Play the piano first.”

So I did. My piano teacher was named Ms. Kitty and she was a strict, Christian lady who made me count out loud every time I played. To this day, I still count to myself when I practice. To this day, Ms. Kitty still sends me letters asking me if I’m playing the piano.

When I was nine, I told my parents, “I play the piano. Now I want to play the harp.”

A harp teacher was offering discounted group lessons after school in the music room. So they signed me up.

And that first day, as I walked into that room ready to proudly start playing the harp, there were kids who had already been playing the harp for one year. While I fumbled around trying to figure out which string was what note, they breezed through melodies, plucked out tunes, performed fancy glissandos.

I felt that I had missed the boat. Why hadn’t my parents let me play the harp when I was seven? I would have been playing for almost three years by now and I would have been so good, I would probably be able to play in youth orchestra.

It was going to take me forever to catch up.

This is how I felt at age 10.

And this is also how so many of us feel at age 20, 30, 40, even 60. We didn’t start an instrument, our careers, a language at some magical age, 10? 17? 20? and our brain went into lockdown and whatever talents we managed to eck out by sheer luck and childhood fancy, are the ones that we are destined with forever. If we haven’t learned music, mastered a language, become a writer, we never will.

Thus the people who sigh, “I wish had learned the piano when I was young. It would be such a great talent to have.”

And the others that pine, “If only they had offered Spanish in school when I was ten. I would be bilingual.”

And me who shouts, “Shut up and starting practicing!” Because piano playing and language speaking might be easier at younger ages, but they can come greatly at any age if you decide to sit down, practice, and persist.

If you start playing the harp diligently each day when you’re forty, by the time you’re sixty you will have twenty years of harp playing under your belt.  You’ll probably be able to play in the symphony, all before you’ve reached the ripe old retirement age of 65.

Speaking of jobs, if you completely switched careers at age 40, you have 25 years to pursue and perfect your new job until retirement. And if you start working at 25 (the average time we all start), and consider that it takes 15 years to become a jedi master at whatever you do, you’ll have enough room to perfect three different careers in your lifetime.

I challenge you to stop the job you hate, and find the one you love right now.

I challenge you to listen to that song that you love and learn how to play it.

Because we’re never too old to start doing the things that we love

I grabbed my shoulders.

“Are you cold, or is it just me?” I asked the guy who was talking about his job in sales.

“Uhh, no, I’m actually hot!” He said waving his hand over his ruddy face like a fan.

I took a deep breath and calmed the shivering for one second. Then my teeth started chattering.

He looked at me.

“I gotta go,” I said, and I ran out of the building into the 100 degree August New Orleans heat, inhaling a big breath of marsh fire (that’s another story) and I felt better. Kind of.

I knew I was getting sick in a very predictable way, when your body functions on a fragile film of adrenaline, waiting for that one single moment when all of those essential duties have been completed and it can officially go into catastrophe mode.

So off I schlepped to bed and then to the doctor early in the morning who said: you have an ear infection.

And I immediately thought: blue tooth.

I thought blue tooth because I know when I stand around talking on my blue tooth, gesturing to no one, my ear lighting up like a Christmas tree, I look like a corporate shmuck. An infection from that would totally serve me right.

Either way, I had to work through it.

You see, when you’re sick, you don’t want to do anything. You don’t want to work, or do yoga, or pet your cat, or even eat cupcakes. But you still have to do some of those things.

Which of course is eating cupcakes, but after that it’s work. Because work is what sustains us and gives us the ability to go to the doctor (with insurance).

So on Thursday, when I woke up and my fever had subsided, I sat down at my desk and I worked.

Calmly, systematically, and straightforwardly. I couldn’t work with that some blue-tooth overdrive that I usually do— loud, passionate voice (yes I talk a little loudly sometimes), flailing hands (I gesture wildly). But I could work with lightness, focused simply on one the one single task in front of me, and then the next.

And it struck me that this was the first time in a long, long time that I was truly in the moment at work.

It made me wonder if all of this grumbling that we do about our jobs—how we’d rather be doing something else, how we feel oppressed by whatever tedious work we say we have to do– is simply us not being present in the moment. When I’m working, I would rather be doing yoga. When I’m doing yoga, I would rather be writing. When I’m writing, I would rather be playing the harp.

But when we focus on the thing we need to get done, there is calmness, lightness. As I did everything I needed to get done on that sick working day, each thing I completed brought me closer to the end of the day (and sleep!), but each thing I did brought my forward in life in some little way, too. I could feel that so acutely as I worked on that sick day.

And this was one of those tiny revelations that I would never have had if I had been sitting there with my blue tooth shoved in my ear, typing tweets at 100 WPM, frantically trying to fit an entire year of work, life, and passions into one single day.

I think I might just bring that calmness back with me when I get better.

And I think I might just ditch the blue tooth.

This is my VW bus parked on a moonscape like beach on the gulf coast. Something about the sparseness of this picture reminds me that when we strip our lives of all the junk we don't need, we're only left with our dreams. In my case, a bus, two surfboards, and the endless ocean.

I felt like I was destined to sit at the head of the table with the question that had been assigned to me, “If you didn’t have to work another day in your life, what would you do?”

It was perhaps the most important question that you or I might ever have to answer. The hardest question we might all have to answer because secretly it’s asking, what are your dreams that you’re too terrified to pursue?

I was at a networking night put on by an amazing organization in New Orleans, 504ward. They connect young passionate people in the community with established professionals with the end goal of helping retain talent in New Orleans.

We had all been assigned random seats for dinner so we could network, and little pieces of paper with icebreaker questions had been placed at each table setting. I picked up mine and turned it over in my hands, wondering when I should spring the question. Not now. Everyone needed to do their first intros and how-do-you-dos.

In the middle of the entrée, when conversation had simmered down to a lull, I pounced.

“I have the best question in the world,” I said picking up the small piece of paper with purpose. The table hushed, everyone gazed up. “If you didn’t have to work another day in your life, what would you do?”

Silence. The clinks of forks and then, like the roaring of a tumultuous ocean, an army of Hmmms.  “Never thought about that, hmmm” and “Hmmm, that’s a good question.” Hmmm this and hmmm that.

I picked a woman and said, “We’ll start with you.”

“Me?” She said, doubtfully. “Well, okay. Let me think about it.” She thought and thought and thought and finally said, “I would travel.”

“Travel!” I exclaimed. “I love to travel. Where would you go?”

“Hmmm.” She stalled. “Well, I’ve never thought about that.”

I go onto the next person, but he was even more confounded than the first. “I don’t know. I like my job. Well, uh, I guess I would travel too.”

“Where?” I asked, hopeful that he would at least have an answer to this one.

“Uh, Europe?” As if he was asking my permission to dream about traveling to Europe.

As I went around the table, every single person had the same lackluster response. Vague answers like, I would travel, or I would move to an island somewhere in the Caribbean.

I couldn’t wait for my turn because I had a long laundry list of seething, breathing, living dreams. I wanted to share it with them, hear their thoughts, talk about how this could all become possible.

But no one ever asked me.

Do you see this? It's a native trout that my boyfriend caught in a stream in New Jersey. One of his dreams fulfilled.

After I turned to the last person at the table, asking the question one more time for emphasis, brandishing the little piece of paper in the air like a sword, the conversation quickly turned to something else. How hot August was in New Orleans.

I thought to myself, how are we not able to iterate our dreams on the spot?

And then I thought to myself, why doesn’t anyone care about my dreams?

Already, at twenty-whatever, we are all dangerously close to losing ourselves. We have fallen into that treacherous hole where the work you do for someone else dominates you. Your dreams seep out of you, leached away slowly, almost imperceptibly until you’re a skeleton of who you once were. You’re like rich, beautiful soil sucked of nutrients.

It scares me that no one had an answer to that question, but it terrifies me that no one cared what other people’s dreams were.

Where did we get to a place where a dozen twenty-somethings don’t have dreams that are on the tip of their tongue, rapid-fire ready to take flight?

I love dreamers. The passion in their voice, the way that they walk around with that shine in their eye, willing the world to become their vision.

Dreaming is innate; it’s what our ancestors did when they drifted across the big wide ocean to America, and what the greatest executives and change makers have done every second of their lives.

What is wrong with us?

Near the end of the dinner, a guy that I had talked to at the cocktail hour approached me. “You work in tech, right? I have an idea for a business.”

We sat down at a table and in a passionate hush we talked about his idea, why it would work and why it wouldn’t work. The world faded around us, it was just rapid fire back and forth.

This is what I had expected at a dinner with 70 twenty-somethings. This. Exact. Thing.

And I realized that maybe not everyone has it them to fight to keep their dreams alive. Every single day it is a battle to cling to your dreams because when you get home from work, tired, exhausted, hungry you do not write the novel, or play the banjo, or work on the business idea that’s been haunting you for months.

That’s why I’m writing this at 6:30 AM outside my neighborhood coffee shop that hasn’t opened yet. It’s the first thing I do this morning because it’s the most important thing I will do today.

This is the first time updating my blog in almost two months. I’m vowing to never let it go this long. Because blogging about stuff that I care about is one of my dreams.

So tell me, are you a dream-fighter? What are your dreams?

I’m finishing up my practice, touching my head to the earth, inhaling deeply, exhaling loudly. This is my favorite part. This is the picture that my boyfriend slithered on his belly across the living room to take.

You see I work in the tech space- internet marketing– and it evolves at super lightening speed, at a pace that requires constant vigilance, constant apprehension of what happens next.

But when I touch my head to the earth I remember what hasn’t changed: the firmness of the ground, the solidness of my body, the constant taking in and giving out of breath.

As I feel the ground support my head, I can feel it supporting the foreheads of millions before me: in prayer, in supposition, in despair. I think of heads buried in hands, heads banged against desks, hands anointing foreheads. I’m reminded how old this is, this primordial bow.

And I love that. I love that I can do something all day at work that has never been done, and then do something has been done over and over, for millennia.

It reminds me that things change fast, but they never change.

It reminds me that I can fall hard and hurting on this unyielding ground.

But I will also stop falling.

Do you see this crookedness, this life lived askew? This is what it is like to to give give give give and not receive.

When my company closed down in a quiet but public way, I experienced for the first time, recruiters.

They swooped in from every direction— some via messages on LinkedIn, others with enticing tweets, and still others with heartfelt emails.

They were everywhere, like fluttering butterflies in spring singing sweet promises of future job opportunities. In their very best moments, recruiters were my greatest allies.

But then it started to get complicated. My last company was actually in the recruiting business, and calls that were seemingly about “opportunities” turned into an-all out brain picking session about where I saw the future of the job space going.

I was confused. Wasn’t this about me? Wasn’t this about jobs?

That’s when I realized it wasn’t. It was about getting information from me to help their business grow and not giving anything back.

I sighed. Ahh, the give and take of business. The helping and not being helped back. And money. The role of money.

You see, I’m the type of person that loves giving. I love offering insight, and I love helping, and I love inspiring others. That’s why if I wasn’t doing marketing and writing, I would be teaching. And that’s why I still teach every chance I get.

But business doesn’t exactly function the way that a classroom functions— the bottom line in schools is learning, and the bottom line in business is money.

So offering my hard-earned business lessons with no return started to feel weird. Like I was moving around the world slightly askew. Like I was a half-eaten doughnut. Is that a good analogy?  Half-eaten doughnuts must feel awkard.

If you think about what earning money really is—an exchange of energy—then my half-eaten doughnut feeling makes sense.  You put your time, effort, and energy into something, and in return you receive energy back. This could be in the form of money, or relationship building, or helping a cause you feel passionately about.

When you’re giving and not receiving, there is an imbalance, and you feel it.

Once I realized that, I decided to tweak my approach to giving and taking.

Now, I try to make it as easy as possible for people who want my energy to give me energy back.

When people contact me to “chat about my ideas,” I now say that I am open to consulting opportunities. Since they’re being direct about what they want—insight for their business—I like to be direct about what I want—job opportunities. This makes them take into account both their needs and mine, and it becomes very clear whether there is an actual fair trade off.

If you don’t make it clear from the very beginning that you have needs, then it’s hard to back track and enumerate them once you’ve already moved forward.

People will have much more respect for you when you’re clear about your worth, too.

I still believe there are moments when you should give and expect nothing tangible in return. Friends, non-profits, and mentoring all ring a bell.

But until then, getting up the gumption to be direct really helps that delicate process of giving and taking.

But I’m turning to you now—have you ever felt like you’re giving more than receiving? What did you do about it? Any more tips for me?

This is the surfing picture you don’t often see—a small wave, a long board, and a surfer that is looking to the open ocean, on his path, riding his wave, in bliss.

Does this ever happen to you?

You’re surfing the internet and suddenly find yourself yearning after someone else’s life. You’re blow away by their accomplishments, dizzy with where they are and where you are not.  You find yourself spiraling down into something that feels like despair but is too light and young to be that.

Something that feels like a quarter life crisis.

But you’re soooo over that hackneyed phrase for entitled kids that can’t find a job that fulfills every single one of their passions.

So you take a deep breath and remind yourself this:

Lusting after someone else’s dreams is dangerous because you lose focus on yours.

Yes, a fellow twenty-something owns a million dollar start-up. Yes, another one has published a book. Yes, this is all amazing, but are these your goals? Are they really how you measure your success?

The answer is no, simply because none of this was your path. And while combing through others’ career highlights might be a good way to gather inspiration for a job search, it’s not ever going to be your life simply because you are too unique. None of these people are you.

The hardest part of the job search is watching other people saunter down their path to success and feeling like you’re being left behind.

But that’s also the hardest part of life—seeing others rise, sometimes above you, sometimes in your dream job, and feeling as if you’ve missed out.

This is how to stop lusting after other people’s dreams, and start focusing on yours.

1.)   Do you really want to be that person?

When Britney Spears came of fame, every teenage girl in New Orleans wanted to be her. Imagine– a fellow Louisianan catapulted to fame at such a young age—at our age.

And then one day when my friend and I were trying out our voices, her father came in the room and said,  “I don’t think you really want to be Britney Spears,”

We looked at him with a serious dose of teenage attitude. “And why not?”

“Do you know how much she sacrificed for that? She probably never sees her friends or family. She probably doesn’t even have friends since she’s traveling all the time.”

I was thrown off-kilter. She didn’t see her friends? She didn’t see her family? I couldn’t imagine a life without those important people.

Sometimes we cling to other’s accomplishments because they look so alluring, so perfect.

But behind that glamour is toiling and tenaciousness, the grunt work that we all—every single one of us— has to put in h to do something great. And while maybe we understand this abstractly, we don’t understand that their sacrfies do not translate to our sacrifices because we all have different values.

Find a path. Be clear about it. Be true to it. And realize that there’s only one of you and only one path that is your path.

2.) Respect that roiling feeling inside you

Pause, Listen. What’s that screaming? It’s the dream that you’re not following.

Instead of trying to be someone else, listen to that wailing banshee inside you. Quell him by doing what you supposed to do, that thing you can’t help but do.

You don’t have to do that thing as a job. I understand that not all dreams pay enough to live.

But you do have to your dream as if it was your job because to your heart, it’s the only one you will ever have.

3.) Be pure of heart

A girl who I didn’t like in college became a feature writer at a prestigious publication at a very young age. And if you’ve ever taken a fancy to writing, you might know that writers can get insanely, supremely jealous.

But my friend said, “Be happy for her Lauren.”

I grumbled, “Why.”

She said thoughtfully, “Do you really have the time for anything else?”

And she was right.

It takes too much effort to be jealous of someone, to want their path, to wish that you were them. It takes time away from focusing on what you should be doing.

Realize this— people who accomplished things that impress you are important. They are inspiration. Be happy for them. Wish them the best because that is the energy that we need floating around the world, that is the type of community that ultimately me and you want to be in—a place where we are all wholly happy to see others succeed.

Imagine how much easier it would be to do what you love if everyone was hoping, wishing, willing you to succeed?

So send that energy out, and maybe some of it will come back to you.

I took this picture when I was in full Mermaid regalia on Mardi Gras day, which is why it’s one of my favorite pictures. But I also like it because it reminds me of what we all go through. Sometimes we’re the couple on the left-- entirely in love, oblivious, consumed, ecstatic. And sometimes we’re the guy on the right—alone and looking onto love, perplexed.

This is not a guide to finding the person you’re meant to be with because there’s no script for that moment, no play to act out, no right or wrong way to find what’s meant to be. You do what you love and somewhere in that love appears a person, suddenly, simply, and it will be easy. It will be the rightest moment of your entire life.

But until then you have other moments. Wrenching and disappointing moments with people that are not meant for you even if you thought they were.

And that’s okay. We’re human; we crave intimacy, even if just for one night.

And we’re also human, made to connect with someone deeply, intensely, for possibly ever.

This is a guide to letting go of the people who do not love you, and treating the people who you do not love with compassion.

There’s an art to both, and when we can do it honestly and kindly, we make room in our lives for that person we are meant to be with.

1.) If they don’t show up, then leave them behind.

He asked me to go to the museum Tuesday, but he never called to let me know what time, so we never went. And one week later when he called to see if I wanted to go to a movie, I said, “No.”

Why? Because the first moments of dating are amazing; they might even be the most exciting time of an entire relationship. If someone stands you up, blows you off, forgets to call when they say they will, they don’t care about you. Period.

So much of our energy is spent making excuses for people who don’t treat us with respect and who don’t honor our time.  Let them go so you can focus on doing something that you love, and finding someone who respects that.

2.) Know the difference between confidence and asshole-ism

I was sitting on my surfboard utterly confused. There, surfing next to me was the guy that canceled our surfing date that morning, and here he was, surfing and ignoring me. Basically, on a very simple human level, being an asshole.

Yet I was more distraught about how I had spent months being wooed by him. He wasn’t like this at first, right?

Wrong.

I recalled our first dates and remembered that he talked a lot about himself, in fact, so much that I spent all the time asking him questions about his life.

And he treated other people poorly. Not all the time, not every single person, but sometimes people I didn’t know.

Listen closely: Women don’t like assholes, and men don’t like bitches. We all like people who are confident, but sometimes we mistake the brazenness of an asshole for the confidence of a gentleman.

Know the difference:

• Assholes spend most of the time talking about themselves. Confident people don’t need to, they already believe in themselves. They spend more time asking questions about your life.
• An asshole makes snarky comments about others and treats them rudely. A confident person has compassion and wants to help others.

If someone shows the slightest bit of ashole-bitcheness, drop them. If someone is being an asshole to someone else, forget them. It’s not you today, but it will be you tomorrow. You don’t deserve to be treated that way, ever.

3.) Be in a place that speaks your dating language

I don’t know how to say this other than I spent five-years in New York City and never had a relationship, and spent five months in New Orleans and fell in love. There’s something to that.

Perhaps it’s that New York City is one of the top dating cities for a very anti-relationship reason: everyone is single. There’s an unlimited pool to date from because no one ever commits.

Or maybe it’s that New Orleans is smaller than New York and has a strong sense of history. People are drawn to laying roots, to grounding themselves in the culture of that slow steamy port-town.

I don’t know what it is. But I do know that there are places that lend themselves to connection and intimacy; to the gentle patience of unraveling a person and discovering who they are. Find that place and live there. Not to fall in love, but to find a community.

4.) Be humane to yourself and others

He was an amazing guy: confident, kind, athletic, basically everything that I had ever wanted. Except he wasn’t the one for me. No reason, other than that floating feeling that he wasn’t it.

But he liked me. I could see those pools of love welling in his eyes, I could feel him falling as fast as possible into our relationship, which would be perfect. If I loved him back.

So I ended it. He came over, bright eyes and wielding his pillow to spend the night, and as wrenching as it was for me to do it, I sat him down and told him I couldn’t be with him.

It’s hard to end things with people for a good reason– we’re compassionate. We hate to disappoint.

But it can also be hard to end things for horrible reasons; the person likes us more than we like them, and we have power. We know we can eck by treating them whatever way we want and they’ll take it.

But you need to be humane. You need to stop a relationship when the person starts falling for you and you don’t feel the same. It’s not that you couldn’t ride that wave for a time, you could and it may be nice to have companionship, but it’s not fair to let their emotions get entangled, it’s not fair to break their hearts.

And it’s not fair to you. When you’re with a person that you know isn’t right for you, there’s no room to discover the one who is.

5.) And the others.

On the road to finding long-lasting love, we crave intimacy. Sharing an evening with someone is wonderful, even if just for a night; having a connection that lasts a week is amazing, however fleeting.

But until you find that person that feels right as rain, be kind, be graceful, be human, and know when to let go.