35 Things You’re Going To Lose When You Decide To Change Your Life For The Better

1. Your ten year plan.

2. The ability to justify your coping mechanisms.

3. Relationships you were in for the wrong reasons.

4. The willingness to deny how you really feel, even if it makes you look less put-together.

5. The willingness to deny what you really think, even if it makes you less popular.

6. The drive to be perfect, as opposed to being wholly and unapologetically yourself.

7. The ability to suppress deeply held emotions and memories that need to be felt and seen and accepted.

8. Late nights out in exchange for long hours of reading, soul-searching and traveling.

9. Parties where you disconnect from yourself in exchange for get-togethers with people who help you reconnect.

10. Chasing money instead chasing meaning.

11. Taking on other people’s problems as your own.

12. Confusing empathy for compassion.

13. The illusion that accomplishing your next goal will make you feel safe.

14. Blaming other people for what’s wrong in your life.

15. Waiting for other people to make it better.

16. The clothes that you bought to become a different person.

17. The belongings that you only keep to communicate something about your status.

18. The need to compulsively over-consume.

19. Being busy in exchange for being present.

20. Avoiding hard conversations.

21. Not standing up for yourself.

22. Justifying your life choices to people who only want to judge you, not support you.

23. Any social obligations you consistently attended just to save face.

24. The ability to fake your mood around other people.

25. The opinions you inherited from your family without realizing.

26. The ideas about yourself you adopted from other people’s perspectives.

27. The dead-end job you could barely muster the energy to do to begin with.

28. People who leech off your energy in exchange for people who revive it.

29. Your debts.

30. The singular and incorrect opinions you’ve held about those who are close to you.

31. The need to always be right.

32. Your pride in exchange for your wellness.

33. The unwillingness to forgive, not because someone deserves it, but because you don’t deserve to keep being tortured for their mistakes.

34. Your excuses.

35. The ambition to be anything other than completely at peace each day.