"You Are Always Enough"
self-limiting beliefs, revisiting a prior consciousness, and a more loving way forward.
Readers note:
A version of the essay that follows was first published to
on July 13th, 2022.When I first started this newsletter, it was called Let’s Thrive Together. It was mostly written from the perspective of a depressed mid-twenties queer person trying to figure out how to fall in love with their own life again.
After a period of earth-shattering transition, where I lost two lifelong life-partner-level relationships that were very important to me in November of 2021, I fell into a deep, life-altering depression.
I put everything on hold.
The fancy New York agents who’d loved my grad school novel didn’t hear back from me. I graduated from my master’s program in a haze, barely awake to my own life.
Most nights, I cried myself to sleep. It was a period of profound mental darkness, processing grief and loss. During that period friends and family members died, wars were started, COVID-19 ravaged my body, and my mind, and took the lives of millions of people globally, pets died, I lost and gained employment, my mother fell sick and was hospitalized, I started taking Lexapro, I gained a great deal of weight, and all of these things only served to compound my grief, anxiety, and fractured sense of self further.
In that headspace, in November of 2021, I turned to TikTok to try to channel my energies into something productive. I had this strange idea, one that I’d harbored for many years, that people might care about what I had to say if I was only brave enough to say it out loud.
The first video I ever posted was seen by only one person, my friend Julia from my undergraduate creative writing classes. I simply said. “What if I’m not interesting? What if nobody cares what I have to say?”
Julia commented: “I care! Please keep posting!!”
It’s a cliche at this point, but cliches are cliches because they're true: it only takes one person to believe in you. It only takes one person in a room of one hundred to tell you that you have what it takes. Julia was that person for me. I decided to trust that if Julia cared, others would too, and I began the long road to becoming a content creator.
That winter, I began recording videos every single day, talking into my phone many times per day to pass the loneliness and isolation of that malaise-filled period.
As it was still the height of COVID-19, life and everything in it was through a screen. I could not go anywhere or see anyone unless it was through my phone or laptop.
It was a strange, lonely, and surreal time.
I felt like a hamster in a large vacuous cage. I walked laps around the park near my apartment at night to get exercise, listening to the sounds of my silent town, emptied of its inhabitants.
My videos were about anything: my depression, my loneliness, the TV shows I was watching. And slowly, after a period of posting for six months into the empty void, my account began to gain traction.
On Christmas day of 2021, I had 1,000 followers.
These new friends were people around the world, people who truly found my words interesting, relatable, challenging, and sometimes even thought-provoking.
I started to feel this exciting sense of possibility again. A feeling that through democratized content creation, I could somehow make my life anything I wanted it to be. I could universe or timeline jump into a life in which I not only did things I loved, read books I cared about, and spent my life thinking and connecting over life’s deep and profound questions, but a life where I got paid to do so!
I was beginning to feel myself as less and less of a poltergeist, haunting my own life, and more and more like a true human being, finally connecting to the world, even in such a tenuous way. I felt like a bear waking up after a long winter, peaking out of the cave of existence, stretching my paws, taking tentative steps towards an unknown future.
I began to pour more and more time into my videos, doing meditations, and sharing stories from therapy, from my travels in India, Mauritius, Italy, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Senegal, Iowa, New York, Los Angeles, and so many others.
I began to pour my heart and soul into that little app and soon, people arrived, in the hundreds at first and then the thousands. Thousands upon thousands of people flocked to my little corner of the internet.
Major publications like Refinery29, Fortune Magazine, and the New York Post, among others, began to feature stories about my work. I felt alive and exhilarated again, with the momentum of keeping one small promise to myself every single day, without exception.
As of my writing this, my TikTok account has around 44,000+ followers and 14,000,000+ likes on my public videos.
I’ve made hundreds of virtual friends and acquaintances, who feel more real to me than some of the humans in my IRL life. My videos have been viewed over three hundred million times, a fact that is still so hyper-surreal to me, and I’ve had so many conversations and moments that continue to bring me back to the person I lost along the way.
I began to discover that vibrant, exuberant, loving child-self of mine, who was so full of life and wisdom and courage and bravery, who I am still slowly rediscovering, re-meeting, and remembering with each passing year.
One of the things I’m most known for on my TikTok is discussing essays. I love the act of reading an essay, breaking it down, and sharing the part of it with my audience that feels the most valuable to me.
I found this was a way to keep myself reading voraciously during my long battle with depression and anxiety, one that is ongoing and will likely be a present struggle throughout my life. Along with keeping me reading, this act of sharing daily videos was also a way to keep me publicly accountable for my goals. Suddenly, I had a community of voices asking for more. When I let myself down, I realized I was letting others down too, that I had somehow, unknowingly built an apparatus of people who come to rely on my voice, and the part of me I so desperately want to excavate. I had finally aligned my personality with my purpose, as Oprah often says, and discovered that my talent for vulnerability was something desperately needed and cherished.
After about six months of posting on TikTok in this way, I finally began to approach the elephant in the room: my writing.
I hadn’t taken a terribly long break, as I was in graduate school for creative writing at the time and required to generate three new 30-page manuscripts per semester, which I gladly produced.
However, from the moment after handing in my master’s thesis in April of 2022 to the moment of my first Substack post in July of 2022, I hadn’t written a single thing.
Not a word in over four months.
For a person who typically writes every day of their life, this felt guttural, like a part of myself had been killed, neglected, lost, abandoned, or worse.
I didn’t expect or know that Substack would be the bridge back to that part of my consciousness.
What brought me here in the first place was a series of somewhat random events that began on a kayaking trip with a professor who’d planted the seed of an idea in me.
The professor, Belle Boggs, a terrific writer (go check out her work please) told me about a platform called Substack, as we paddled down the choppy waters of the river near her home.
At the time I was teaching a course to undergraduate students on creative non-fiction writing, one of my specialties, and was bouncing essay ideas off of her during a brainstorming session.
She loved the topics I wanted to explore and kindly encouraged me to publish them to Substack and begin keeping all of my work in a designated place so that it would be easy for those who loved my writing to find and support me.
She’d said that she predicted Substack might be the new space where writers and readers could come together and support one another. I kept it in the back of my mind, but as I was struggling to get out of bed most days in that period of life, having mustered nearly all of my energy for our little kayaking excursion, I didn’t take any tangible action. I just thought, that would be nice, and moved on.
It wasn’t until Misha Lazzara, a novelist in my program, and a dear friend of mine, made a Substack of her own the following semester, that I began to feel more momentum towards the idea.
Misha wrote a terrific weekly meditation about creativity and the many creative blocks that we as artists must face and overcome to lead our most authentic creative lives.
I began reading her newsletter religiously and found that I was anticipating with excitement its arrival in my inbox. She included interesting prompts and ideas to consider and spark new work, and suddenly, slowly but surely, writing started to feel fun again. Something it hadn’t been in years.
During grad school, I’d briefly fallen out of love with writing altogether. I’d had thoughtful and talented peers and mentors who were kind and supportive of my work, but I began to leave the kingdom of childhood and creativity and enter this strange otherworldly place of writing as a professional. I hated that mental headspace: the corporatization of writing.
I was taking copywriting jobs, and querying fellowships and magazines and agents, and what was once my deepest passion, the lifeblood of my creativity, began to become dwarfed by all of this pressure and self-comparison and expectations that I wasn’t sure I could live up to.
Not to mention that, unlike now, most of the writers I knew then were deeply unhappy. I wasn’t surrounded by a loving community of support, people who loved their lives and loved what they did in those days. I was surrounded by a lot of anxious, uncertain, self-comparative, scarcity mindset, and critical energy.
Probably more my fault than the people I was around, as I wasn’t seeking out and didn’t have the tools yet to find community with like-minded people.
Pretty soon, it wasn’t about if I was making what set my heart on fire, but writing what would sell, what would be most of interest to a literary agent, what would be most marketable, or most likely to make money.
Along with that came the creative comparison of being in a program with a number of people who were at vastly different places in their writing lives.
Some were relatively new writers who were using grad school as a launch pad, some were seasoned professionals, who’d already won awards and were studying a second or third discipline, some were as young as 20, prodigies, who’d been at the top of their year at university and we’re bringing fully fleshed novels to the workshop, and there were some like me, who had literally no idea what they were doing and were convinced that they’d somehow been accepted by accident and that any moment they’d be kicked out for being not good enough. This imposter syndrome was another journey I had to overcome, something I no longer struggle with, as you’ll read in the essay below.
The pressure of becoming a great writer began to poison the actual craft for me. At least, at that time.
I tried my best to preserve my childlike wonder, penning a novel over the holiday break in the winter of 2020, which my advisor found to be too whimsical and not the type of book that would have me taken seriously in the world of literary awards and acclaim.
I was going through a transformation, trying to understand what I wanted, and realizing slowly but surely that the life amongst the literati that my very expensive and privileged education had chosen for me was perhaps not the life I wanted for myself.
My advisor wanted me to focus on the novel I’d applied with to the program (totally fair) a novel about the lasting impacts of childhood trauma, set in Mpumalanga, South Africa, a tragic story about a young missionary named Luis navigating the brutal after-effects of sexual violence.
That book, a project I do love, is very painful for me, because some of it is confessional in nature, and it feels almost too risky or too personal somehow — as if I needed to write it solely for my own healing and not for public consumption.
Despite this, the energies of being pushed one way by my mentors — who are all very kind and who I love deeply, mentors if you’re reading this, please don’t take this the wrong way, I love you — but who wanted different things for me than I wanted for myself.
In grad school, despite this anxious energy and relative unsureness, I was quite successful, I placed in hyper-competitive statewide competitions, got bites from major publishing houses, published work in respected journals, had work published in print anthologies, wrote a joint mosaic novel which comes out next year, and penned three full-length manuscripts, and nearly 30 short stories, poems, novellas, and articles — all in the span of just two years! It was a period of prolific production.
And perhaps it was that I had hit a wall and burned out, perhaps it was the mixed signals from my mentorship — but when I faced a personal crisis in November of 2021, and lost my best friend and my roommate in one fail swoop, everything came to an inexpressible and grinding halt.
I didn’t understand why the ideas stopped announcing themselves. Worried that I’d betrayed the muse by taking a respite to heal from my heartbreak, I began to realize that writing itself was so inextricably intertwined with the two people I’d lost forever, who had read and supported everything I’d written, who were more than my writing friends, but my life partners, my other halves, two corners of a triad of my very being that was tragically and irrevocably undone.
Without them in my life, I almost had lost my Schopenhauerian will to create, to live, to do anything. Like the grief of death, the absence made nonsense of everything. What for years had been so clear was now completely unknowable. If I wasn’t creating things to share with them, who was I even creating for? What was I even living for?
Luckily during my period of healing, apart from TikTok, I had a lot of real-life support, which is I think why the bulk of my heartbreak healing only took about 18 months, whereas I imagine it could’ve taken much longer in other circumstances.
Not to say that I am completely okay now, by any means, but I am much happier and more stable than I was before. My heart no longer hurts as often when I think of their names and the life we used to have together and I no longer feel like killing myself is a viable option — all big wins!
During the season of great healing, it was a mix of many things that brought me back to life, the tireless love and support of my sweet parents, who had to raise me literally from the dead. The phone calls between me and one of my lifelong best friends Mallory who listened with an open and non-judgemental ear as we processed and worked through what happened.
Reconnecting and falling in love with my good friend from college, Ayanda — building a best friendship and business with her — and also the growing collective community support from my friends, subscribers, fans, and followers on all of my platforms.
All of these things together brought me back to life.
My only hope is that through my creativity, I can play some small part in helping to collectively bring others back who are hurting, who need help, or who need the healing powers of vulnerable writing that makes them feel seen, feel heard, feel loved, feel held — something we all deserve.
I should note that so many writers, novelists, colleagues, mentors, and friends helped me through my period of decay — it takes a village — and it by no means was a solo effort, but the largest hurdles of my journey were emotional veils I had to move through alone.
I had to learn how to give myself permission to love myself again, easier said than done, and then I had to learn how and when to trust my own voice outside of the protection and purvey of my two life partners who were my best friends and my support system for my work, who were my validation and my other halves, who checked and validated and made me feel like my life mattered.
Reader’s note: If you are looking to other people to define your worth in totality, if you’re looking to other people for your sole source of validation, this is a red flag. I have a whole host of books I would recommend, starting with Codependent No More, but please consider starting therapy, if you can afford it, it might just change your life.
Finally, I had to learn how to write for myself first, to write without fear, and to accept that done is always better than perfect, a long and arduous journey.
The first step back into the garden of my writing mind, which felt more like a wasteland with dried-out soil and deadened, fracked fields — that first step home, was to create a Substack.
With trepidation and great fear, I decided to give it a try, accepting fully that I might not succeed, or that I might not find my version of success for many years, that like those first six months on TikTok, I would have to create without guarantees, speak to an empty room, build a catalog of my best work, with hopes that one day readers would come. It was hard at first, to be vulnerable enough to be seen. To put my ideas in the world without fear.
To continue posting when my pieces received no engagement, no comments, nothing for months, and I was in the void of uncertainty, not knowing if what I had to say mattered. It was in that void that I met myself truly for the first time, that I became my own champion, that I learned how to love and hold my own hand, that I began to understand how and why the universe had brought me to this place, so that I might learn how to create without fear, how to give without expectation, and how to walk myself home, to the fertile gardens of a mind that never gave up on me, to the front door of ideas that waited patiently for my arrival.
All of it took so much time, dozens and dozens of silent shouts into the void. But with each, I began to become more sure of myself, more sure that what I had to say was valuable, that with time each of my pieces would find who they were meant for. That my job as the artist was to create, and the universe would introduce my work to whoever needed it most, through intersecting actions far outside of my understanding or control.
Right now it is a beautiful day in January of 2024, the birds are singing outside my window — catbirds, chickadees, bluebirds, and a whole host of others, brown thrashers, and Carolina wrens, the bountiful song falls upon me like composed music.
It is wet and rainy and the lake is flooded again, and I know the catfish and bass and minnows and turtles and cranes are relishing all of this fresh water.
Dad and I just got home from the passport office, I depart for CDMX in one week. I’m beyond thrilled. In the car, we had a powerful conversation, one that I’ll aim to write about more in-depth as it might be of use to others as well.
It is with this consciousness that I meet you, and take your hand lovingly as we dive back into the person I once was, in the summer of 2022, heartbroken, lonely, living in a two-bedroom apartment I couldn’t afford in Raleigh, North Carolina, drowning in debt, surviving off of two dollar paninis and OJ from the corner store — and typing into the night of a glowing screen and a life I was not yet sure wanted me.
The piece, reading it now, feels like a meditation, a promise to my future self. It’s strange to inhabit the future-self body. The body that receives the work of previous versions of me. I often felt this strange pull from the past and the future, Alex then and Alex now.
Me now in 2024, telling him to please keep going, please don’t give up. How proud I am of his resilience, his courage, his strength.
And me then, receiving those messages, guided on by a force I couldn’t understand, moving forward towards a whisper in the ether, a voice from a future self, who did not want me to quit.
That version of me, the Alex in 2022, was starting his life from scratch, making sense of a world that got burned to a crisp, trying to rebuild what he could from the ashes.
Now in 2024, I have a job I love. I’m building a company with my best friend that I genuinely believe is making the world a better and more loving place. I have a massive audience that reads my words and admires my thoughts and respects me enough to listen carefully to what I have to say.
I have accumulated tens of thousands of loyal readers, followers, and subscribers on multiple platforms who respect me enough to keep returning. To keep coming back and asking for more. Who support me with their time and energy and money. Who know that I am valuable and I deserve to be compensated, as all artists do.
I have become and am still becoming the person that Alex in 2022 dreamed of. A person who is free. Free to speak his mind. Free to give and receive love. Creatively and emotionally liberated. I still have many more goals and dreams that I want to achieve in this life, but I am so proud of that. That I never stopped writing, that I never stopped posting, that I never gave up on myself or my imagination. That no matter how much time had passed, I always allowed myself to return.
With each passing year, it all just gets a little bit clearer, as if Alex in 2026 or beyond even that is whispering to me from some future space, in his sweet and encouraging tone:
You are always enough, I promise.
As we dive into my consciousness of 2022, let’s revisit my words with the loving grace of hindsight, of all that we know now, and see what wisdom that version of me has to impart to us all.
With love,
Alex
July 13th, 2022
Hello, my friends!
I have two questions for you and I want you to be honest with me.
Right now, right here in your conscious mind, it’s just you and I.
Nobody will know what you say.
Nobody will hear you, not even me, if you decide to lie.
My questions:
What is holding you back from becoming the person you are truly meant to become?
What is holding you back from living the life you are truly meant to be living?
I want you to hang on to your answers for a moment because they might just be the key to unlocking a completely new life.
Chances are, if you’re like me, you have every excuse in the book, ready and available at any given moment, to disarm that gnawing feeling that wells up when confronted with the life you are currently just tolerating.
Thoughts such as:
“Oh, this just isn’t a good time right now, what with work being so stressful.”
“Oh, I’m still burnt out from the pandemic. I’m not in the headspace to make big changes.” (Readers note: I should note here that the pandemic is still very much ongoing!)
“Oh, so and so just passed away, and I don’t feel like myself; that’s why I’m not taking action on my goals.”
“I don’t have enough money.”
“I don’t have enough time.”
“It’s not ready yet.”
“It’s not my best work.”
“People will laugh at me.”
“People will say that I’m an idiot.”
“People will say that I’m too fat.”
“People will say that I’m too [insert self-limiting belief].”
“I don’t have the privilege of thinking about my goals and feelings; that’s a [insert other group] thing.”
“What are my goals when compared to my family’s struggles? I need to focus on other things and on people other than myself.”
When did we all learn to become so defensive of our perceived unworthiness?
Where was it taught that we must defend, at all costs, the reasons why we are not where we want to be?
The reasons why we do not deserve the life we want to be living? Why is radical accountability, for your own life, which at the end of the day, you are somewhat in control of, not the norm?
Readers note: Hey y’all, it’s Alex in 2024 again. I just want to add: that none of this is your fault!
This is how the society is designed, to be as extractive and self-defeating as possible. The more they make you hate yourself, the more money you spend and the more pliable of a consumer you are to corporate marketing strategy, etc. The more exhausted they make you, the more likely it is that they ensure you can’t organize or fight for systemic change.
Please take my words in this piece with a grain of salt and recognize that I’m speaking about the aspects of our lives we CAN control, and not on the many unfair aspects that are out of our control, like the horrors of capitalism, discrimination, economic inequity, etc. Okay, now back to the consciousness of Alex in 2022. Bless his heart, he’s doing his best!
You want to know why I, Alexander Lopez, am not where I want to be? Personally? Professionally? Spiritually? Financially?
It is because I made choices every single day, and yes, those choices were impacted by so many things outside of my control, and sometimes I had less agency or autonomy over my life than at other times, but at the end of the day, there was enough time.
There was enough connection.
There was enough ability.
The was enough abundance.
There was enough of everything I needed that I convinced myself so desperately that I did not have.
I was more than enough to make my goals happen, so why didn’t I do them?
Why didn’t I get that agent I wanted? Or publish my novel when I wanted?
It’s simple — but just because it is, doesn’t make it easy to stomach.
The reason is because of one thing: I stood in my own way.
I made excuse after excuse after excuse.
I did just enough to skate by.
I said constantly: “It’s not the right time, I’m not ready, who am I to do that…” and as much as it pains me to admit, I made nothing but excuses, excuses, excuses.
That was until, in November of 2021, I had a breakup that totally changed the way I see myself and the world and everything in it.
In that relationship, I lost myself to another human being. I gave myself away fully. I was perfect, and it still wasn’t enough.
I still got left.
And it wasn’t until many months of reading, crying, and therapy later that I realized that in so desperately trying to convince someone that I was lovable, that I mattered, that I was worthy of being loved, that in doing all of that, I was loving everyone but myself.
But let’s rewind a bit, because this is less about me and so much more about you.
My goal with this newsletter is to help you thrive.
Think about that for a moment.
What would your life truly thriving look like?
What would it look like if you were truly in a state of flow, doing and experiencing and simply being all that you were meant to be?
Seems nice, doesn’t it?
But before you thrive, you need to heal.
And before you heal, you need to address those wounds, the ones you walk around with every day, the ones you dress up, cover, and hide behind. Those wounds that whisper in your ear, “You are not enough. You will never be enough.”
A wound is meant to be healed.
Your body and your spirit are self-repairing apparatuses, but wounds cannot heal if they are not tended to. My separation taught me that I was wounded and refusing to get the help I needed.
It all started in childhood…
I was a gifted child, as most wounded children are.
We learn early that it is easiest to earn the praise and affection of adults if you excel in the systems that they themselves built or that they themselves were sold on, as children.
We learn that studying obsessively, sacrificing your physical health for letters on a page, good grades, awards, and accolades — that these self-betrayals readily lead to the adults in our lives bestowing us with the words we so rarely say to ourselves, “I am proud of you.”
This begins the cycle. It sets us up for a lifetime of feeling that we must prove our worth to others through labor, sacrifice, and self-neglect.
Labor, mind you, that is in service of proving something that is fundamentally unprovable because let me be the first to tell you — let me be crystal clear — your worth is NOT something that can be proven, because it exists and is fixed indefinitely. It is immutable.
In other words: You are ALWAYS worthy.
You don’t have to prove that the sun shines, it just shines.
You don’t have to prove that the water is wet, it just is.
It is as true as the air you breathe.
It is a fact.
You are worthy.
You belong.
You matter.
You always will.
There is nothing, nothing you can do or say or become or be, or fail at, or succeed at for that matter, that could ever change this immutable fact.
The mindset shift I invite you to consider…
I invite you to consider what might happen to your life if you truly accept this fact.
What would happen if you chose to radically accept how much you belong, and how much you matter? What if you accepted that this is the road to healing, to self-discovery, to self-love, and to so much more?
I believe that when you begin to accept that you matter, you begin to take care of yourself and meet your needs from a place of certainty, a place of abundance, instead of the ever-present fears of scarcity and not-enoughness.
A mindset shift such as this:
“Of course, I deserve to work hard each day on my writing goals, because my voice matters and I matter, and I love myself enough to carve out whatever time I can to stick to the goals that I have set for myself.”
“Of course, I deserve to eat well and be cared for, because my body matters, and I deserve to feel full of sustenance and energy. I deserve to love my body in every shape and form. My body is perfectly itself and that is all it has to be.”
When you operate from a place of lack, a scarcity mindset, a mindset that you are not and never will be enough, you see the world as something that at any moment might find you out, that at any moment might humiliate you, your worst fears confirmed, that your perceived ugliness, your perceived unworthiness, your perceived faults will be laid bare, and that you will be shamed. To counteract this, you go around people-pleasing, you go around trying desperately trying to get people to see your worth, as if screaming, “I swear, I know I’m a burden, but I matter. I promise!” but deep down, you don’t believe it yourself.
When you live and operate from the space of not-enoughness, you do actions and things not from the kindness or love in your heart, but from a place of fear, the fear of being harmed, of being taken advantage of, of being left, of being abandoned. There is love there too, but it can’t fully express itself, because it is so overshadowed by a profound and overarching fear.
The shift from “I am not enough” to “I am always enough” is a difficult one, but as someone who has made the shift, who fully used to think I was worthless and who now recognizes and celebrates my value daily — I can tell you that it is possible.
I believe that it is through radical self-love and acceptance that you can begin the process of unlearning this mindset because when you love yourself, when you allow yourself to take up space, to care for and nurture your body, mind, and spirit, when you allow yourself to freely exist, to achieve and go after your dreams, you not only give others the unconscious permission to do the same, but you do something even more powerful than that. You begin to fill your tank and your cup so abundantly that love has no option but to, in all of its abundance, spill over and water all of the things around you.
When you love yourself abundantly, the ripple effects are like dominoes slowly falling into a beautiful tapestry of connection. Someone who sees and hears and watches you love and celebrate your body will begin to wonder if they have the courage to do the same.
Someone who sees, hears, and watches you continually lead with connection and vulnerability will begin to wonder if they have the courage to do the same.
That wondering, over time, becomes the roadmap for their own journeys, their own first steps towards the radical act of loving themselves completely. Which then, in turn, sparks journeys in the people around them and so on.
Maya Angelou once said, you have no idea what your legacy will be, because it will be measured by all of the lives that you touched, the people and souls that you never ever knew, that you never ever heard from.
I know for a fact that she was right.
I know for a fact that I matter. That I am beautiful. That I am smart. That I am wise. That I am brave. That I am powerful. That my words matter. That I am a vessel for wisdom and creativity. That I, and all of us, have the power to use our gifts to change the world for the better.
I see my impact every single day in the world. And I take up space because I deserve it.
And so do you.
And it all starts with a first step.
That is what this newsletter will be. Your spark. Your activation energy. Your guide to leading the life that you deserve. I hope you will join me on this journey because I truly want to help you thrive. I want to help you become everything the universe is longing to express through you.
Together, we can do this.
Together, all things are possible.
Readers note: This is the first piece I ever published on Substack back in 2022. In returning to my archives, I realized that there are some gems of wisdom in this piece that I wanted to share with you here.
My consciousness is in a different space than when I first wrote this piece, and I don’t like that I don’t explicitly say that you can’t self-love your way out of systemic discrimination.
However, I like to imagine my readers are open-hearted enough to recognize that my words are well-intentioned and that this piece is written within the scope of the aspects of our lives we can readily control and do have autonomy and agency over.
If I wrote this piece now I’d likely not publish it. I’d feel strange about being so prescriptive. I’ve fallen out of love with some of the motivational thought schools that I used to cherish, however, I still feel there are some very powerful nuggets of wisdom in this piece that I hope with resonate with you.
A motivational speaker I used to like as a child would often say, “Take what you can from this, carry all that nurtures and supports you, do away with the rest” and I would invite you to do the same with my work.
Let the bits of my writing that inspire you and move you and add value to your life lovingly remain in your consciousness, and kindly and compassionately disregard the pieces that don’t resonate or that are unhelpful, with the knowledge that I as a vessel am constantly reading, always growing, and gaining greater awareness and perspective every single day, so that I can become the best earth-vessel I can possibly be.
Despite my reservations, I believe the source energy of our universe is trying to get me to share this essay even for just one person out there who needs to hear these words.
One person is always more than enough.
With that, I leave you for today,
I love you and I’m rooting for you,
Always,
Alex
I hope you enjoyed today’s piece from love & liberation daily. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments. Please also, if you feel called to do so, share this post via Substack Notes, so that it may reach more readers. I am grateful for your time today, and sending you peace and love, in all its forms. If you would like to support this publication, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. When you become a paid subscriber, you make it possible for love & liberation daily to remain free for as many people as possible.
You are so brave!!
I am in a bit of a slump in my life lately, but when my partner tells me that everything I do matters, I matter, I just get the energy to keep going. You are right when you say that it takes just one person to believe in you.
I am glad that you are using your voice to create an impact in this world!✨
Just wow! The longest piece I’ve ever could not stop reading! You are a wonderful writer...sharing raw details and the long journey of recovery! Writing is healing ...and hopeful too if yiy let it! I love this quote from your professor:
“She’d said that she predicted Substack might be the new space where writers and readers could come together and support one another.” You have my undivided support and awe in how you’ve come back, how you got here. There’s a huge village here of loving people who share grief and journeys and we take care of each other. Well done and bravo, Alex! This is a powerful story!