Unattached: Empowering Essays on Singlehood

In retrospect, you will see how clearly and intricately you have been guided. How the right things always arrived at the right time, even when you were absolutely convinced that they would not. How the wrong things left no matter how tightly you gripped, how hard you tried, how much you attempted to force a lesson into a lifetime. How you were drawn to the experiences you most needed, even if they were not the ones you wanted. How life gave you the exact amount of space, and time, you actually required, even if you spent much of it wondering why things were happening too fast, or not quickly enough. How all that seemed so random, so ill-fated, so untimely, wove together into something greater than your conscious mind could have pieced together when you were just standing in the ruins, wondering how you would build the new city. Everything unfamiliar is also uncomfortable — no matter how good it is for us. That is what makes change so scary. Not that we are actually afraid to try new things or have new experiences or press up against the limits of our perception and defy them, but that we grow to prefer a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. When we reestablish our comfort zones around the things we actually want, things start to come together effortlessly. It’s cause-and-effect. It’s inevitability. If we get comfortable with consistency, eventually, the right things align. The idea is born, the love is found, the next step is taken, and the new path has begun. In time, it culminates to becomes the foundation upon which we build our new lives — including all of the pieces of the past we’ve loved, and all the new ones we did not even know we would come to find. 📖: ‘The Life That’s Waiting’ (out 2/26)