In my last article, You Can’t Fall Out of a Hole, I spoke about getting from the hole to the ground, specifically addressing the external pressures from living in a life of screens that feed you marketing that constantly tells you that you alone can’t possibly make you whole and fix your problems that they say you have. I also mentioned stoicism. It can be helpful on this journey but not just yet.

To be clear, you may already be on the ground. When I have authored more articles, I will put a link here to future articles that might be more useful for you who are already on the ground, but this is a somewhat linear journey right now as I construct these thoughts.

Getting from the hole to the ground requires two things:

• Honesty with yourself and others.

• Keen awareness of your grammar, which highlights your honesty.

Hard work is required to get better at working the muscle of honesty and being accountable for your grammar. I truly hope you don’t abandon this article given grammar’s significance here. I promise, unlike grade school grammar classes, this information is mechanical and simple. It is worth trudging through some curated words constructed with our useful alphabet to see what grammar has to do with honesty and change.

But before addressing grammar and tools, there is a need to soften into something that you will consistently need to be practiced in to be brave enough for honesty. Before you do any of this hard work on honesty and grammar, what you need to practice is love.

LOVE

Do you love yourself? I don’t even know you, and I can say for sure there are things about you that I would love if we were ever to meet. Here’s why. One of my life rules is “Find something you love in everyone you meet.” It is rule number 19 in my list of twenty life rules called “20 for the 20s.” I’ll share a link to these in the next article. I practice this because it instantly changes the energy between me and the person I encounter. I practice this way of engaging even walking down the street. I see a person approaching and I feel good about them. I believe in them. This started in high school after reading Leo Buscaglia’s book “Love.” This also may be the result of programming myself listening to John Denver before going to sleep most nights when I got my first Walkman. But I digress. The practice of loving others helps you love yourself.

As you practice loving others, you begin to practice Anaïs Nin’s profound quote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” In this world distorted by screens and their politics, social media, and medications, one way to find your way back to yourself is through love. It is possible to love a stranger simply because…

• They are wearing something you like.

• They have a bumper sticker on their car that makes you laugh.

• They smile at the same dog you smile at during a morning run or walk.

These small connections soften you so you can connect with others. They also help you find compassion for yourself, and love for yourself too.

THE FREEDOM TO BE IMPERFECT

So, as you begin to love others, even those you don’t know, you begin to love yourself. As you practice loving yourself, you build this scaffold of strength and tenacity to become honest. The key here is that loving yourself gives you freedom to be imperfect.

It isn’t much of a stretch to see that if you can love someone because they too loved the dog you did on your walk or you loved their haircut or they had a hilarious bumper sticker, then you can love small things about yourself that help you ease into this idea that you are love and you love yourself. Mr. Rogers daily said, “I love you just the way you are.” If my tool here to find something you love in everyone you meet doesn’t work for you to love yourself, go back and watch any of those Mr. Rogers episodes. Or trust this process and just go with it. Love one thing about yourself.

THE GRAMMAR OF HONESTY

From here, the next article gets into the grammar of happiness and, more importantly, honesty. I introduce the first tool, two words to eliminate from your language to help you shift from fear, which is future, to being here now. At the end of the day, most of us are dishonest in communication simply because of fear of hurting others.

As you learn to love yourself, even something simple like your eye color or your ankles or your wit, or maybe it’s your gaming skills, you begin to believe that you are lovable and even loved. This love shores up your ability to be honest with yourself enough to look deeply at how you speak and to scrutinize the words you use so you can go from communicating from a place of fear to communicating from a place of love and connection.

This article took me down a path I wasn’t expecting. If you find me in the shrubbery, please send help. In the meantime, my goal here is to show you real ways of getting to know you and changing things as you see fit. In the next few articles, I will continue to write about language and self-love, eventually stoicism too. I will describe why I believe we should say “I love you” regularly to all the people we know, not just husbands and romantic partners and not just family members. I will explore why these have become such sacred words and how that may be limiting our ability to unite as a society and a world. Two warnings: I do not use AI for any of this work. Also, these thoughts have come forth from years of experience sculpting and shaping ideas about happiness. I enjoy this work.

And finally, I am going to sell you something: if you need practice in self-love, go to Let’s Go Adventure Books. My husband and I wrote two children’s books, but they’re not just for children: they’re for the child within you.

I’ve been slowly writing a book on happiness for over a decade. I created a mathematical formula for happiness and developed five tools to help as well. But for the most part, I’m not writing it. I am usually thinking about it and taking notes. This place here online is the beginning of a journey to complete that book. I have a friend who admitted that she was embarrassed for me every time I brought up the book, and yet I’m still not ashamed that it’s not finished. This article addresses some of why I have no shame for this decade-long, perpetual failure. And I am lying. It’s been longer than a decade. This is also not what I intended as my first post. This article began as a draft comment on a piece I read here about curiosity and imperfection, topics that also profoundly influence happiness.

You Are Not Enough

We live in a world that believes we will always be inadequate and imperfect. This world to which I refer is called marketing. Everything that is marketed to us is done in a way to make us feel we are powerless to solve things on our own. (Influencer culture simply inserts a human advisor designed to instill a brand’s trust.) Every day every marketing campaign tells you,

“You’ll never be able to fix [fill in the blank of your insecurity] yourself. You need us.”

or

“You will feel better—more chic, more desirable, more happy, more seen-by-others as better—if you buy [fill in the blank of what they are pushing].”

Why This Seems True

The feeling of inadequacy or incompleteness is pervasive in our world because of what we regularly expose ourselves to, how we program ourselves, if you will. That programming epicenter today is the screen: television, gaming, the internet, you get it. Magazines seem harmless today compared to other media.

I am a bit of an outlier in this great screen experiment. I did not watch TV or consume most media for 23 years. (I had practiced this when I was much younger, too, for a time.) I did not live under a rock, something Wayne Gretzky surmised when we met. No, I don’t know him personally. I met him once, but my husband quotes him every time he gives a talk. I will soon write about that encounter as it relates to value systems and how they shape our priorities. Back then, I consumed news via text alerts and email, and I would seek out information further if I thought I could be of service to the issue or situation. It truly created happiness for me.

This timeframe also continued to erode my already feeble knowledge regarding pop culture, especially TV shows, sports, and their celebrities, hence my Gretzky encounter. Back then, I had just gotten a promotion into a new division. When I went into work on my second day, my co-worker asked me if I’d heard Chris Farley died. I said, “No. How terrible! Where did he sit?” It is not lost on me that there is privilege in the behavior of choosing not to know things. But during this time, I gave my energy to things that helped me grow in ways that I valued. Some things were easy and some were hard. And to be clear, just because something was hard didn’t mean it made me unhappy. I learned quite the opposite is true, for me at least. I will write about stoicism soon. This time away from that TV/online input gave me perspective. It created a baseline.

The Hole is What You Believe

In my personal and work life I look at any situation that needs attention and I ask, “Are we in a hole or on the ground?” I learned this concept from my manager years ago when I was Director of Software Development at one of the first web analytics platforms (WebSideStory, eventually acquired by Adobe). She would say, “Well, you can’t fall out of a hole,” when things were seemingly at their worst. It was helpful because it meant that we needed to stop looking at the bottom, the problem, and to start building a way up and out. It was about change, willingness to see things differently, the curiosity to look in another direction.

How does the idea of going from the hole to the ground tie into self worth, adequacy, and selling machines that want you to believe you are in the hole? If you can begin to see yourself as being on the ground, nothing has power over you. Being on the ground for me means I am at peace with myself. I am complete: I am entelechy, both acorn and oak tree at once, whole in this moment. I can look in the mirror each day regardless of accomplishments and say, “I love you.” Changing beliefs about ourselves is hard, and the work I plan to deliver here is designed to help with this change. This work is about helping people get from the hole up to the ground, and I believe this begins with self-love.

As an adult, I continue to shore up self-love, which is one of several roads to happiness, with personal activities that daily bring me joy. I write poetry, I paint, I hike, I observe. I work in tech, something I love, and I am grateful for the colleagues with whom I interact daily.

My goal here is to show you real ways of changing you. I believe this will help you become comfortable with change. In the next few articles I will write about language and self-love, stoicism too. I will describe why I believe we should say “I love you” regularly to all the people we know, not just husbands and romantic partners and not just family members. I will explore why these have become such sacred words and how that may be limiting our ability to unite as a society and a world. Warning I am going to sell you something: if you need practice in self-love, go to Let’s Go Adventure Books. They’re not just for children: they’re for the child within you.

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