if you wish to be a warrior.

At any new stage in my life, its hard not to reflect and think about all those occurrences  that brought me to this exact moment. Sometimes it takes a lot of heartbreaks, failures, cuts, bruises to finally make it.

Things you really want can seem unattainable. Especially if getting there was such a task. This is just a reminder to MYSELF and ONLY to myself, that anything and everything I have achieved is for me, and even all the times I failed, that was for me too.

One of my favorite quotes by Khalil Gibran is, “I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.”

This quote is extremely reflective and true, we are SO ungrateful to these teachers, but I AM grateful. I always say, you can be many things in life, just don’t be ungrateful. Treasure your time, one thing you will never get back. Don’t fall in love with potential. Fall in love with yourself. Just because you want something SO badly, doesn’t mean you deserve it. That’s the thing about getting what you want… or NOT getting you want, either way, you have to work really hard. Be patient, but don’t procrastinate. Be hopeful, but never naive. When it’s right, you’ll know.

There are days I feel so underserving for everything I have, and on the flip I feel broken at times, asking myself, “why am I not where I want to be?” I remind myself I worked really hard up to this point, that all those failures meant something. To put eloquently, shitty situations inspire brilliant solutions. The trick is, that if you are extremely self aware of who you are and what your heart really desires, what others say or think won’t effect you. I wish I could say that was true all the time, but sadly it is not. There are times people will break you, but it should only make you stronger. The truth is, we spend entirely too much time in critiquing ourselves. Dissecting every thing that went wrong, why it went wrong, or why things aren’t happening fast enough. Unless you let go, forgive the situation, forgive yourself you can’t move forward. Embrace the glorious mess that you are. Accept your failures as an essential part of your journey. Let’s just be who we really are, and always be honest to yourself. I don’t know about you, but I never want to be in calm waters for the rest of my life. If it doesn’t test you, if it doesn’t break you, then it’s not for you.

Timing is everything, and even though it took me a long time to understand that everything genuinely happens for a reason and it is all a part of your story. I will never look back and think: I wish I did things differently. Because I know now, that what passed me by was never going to befall me what has befallen me was never going to pass me by.

I survived and pushed through…. because the fire inside of me burned stronger than the fire around me.