Don’t look at your neighbor’s paper

When I was in elementary school, a classmate got caught cheating during a test. It crossed my mind to do the same, but I was so scared of getting caught that I chose the risk of failing the test over the consequences of cheating. Do you know the kid who cheated failed the assignment, but not because they cheated. It was because the kid they copied from didn’t know the answers either.

Many of us have not moved beyond this mentality. We see another person confidently strut into the room and suddenly we feel like they must have hacked the system for a happy life. They give the outward appearance that they have it all together, but most of it is the same amount of false confidence as the classmate in my story above.

You have permission to live a life that looks different from culture would tell you is okay. You have permission to parent your kids in a different way and dress in a way that makes you feel best. You have permission. Not because I gave it to you, but because this is the beautiful thing about life. Just because your life looks different than someone else’s does not make it wrong. It simply makes it different.

What if this is one of the reasons mental health looks like it does? What if we’re all looking toward someone else as our guide for what we should be doing. Maybe for once, we stop doing things because everyone else expects that from us and we start doing things because we genuinely want to. Your career, your style, the house you live in, the trips you go on, and where you choose to go to church or send your kids to school….all of that is up to you. You get to decide.

So what is it for you? What’s the thing? What would you spend your time doing if no one else got to know about your accomplishments? What’s the thing you would do just for the sake of joy?