Design your life. It sounds so, well, trite. But there’s something to it.
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From the those first weeks as a teen when I decided my electric guitar was going to be my ticket to a better life, I knew that it wasn’t just the material things I was after, it was everything that surrounded me. From friends to family to the city I lived in.
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So I curated it all the best I could. Naturally, many mistakes were made along the way, but my biggest goal was to avoid the mistakes that would haunt me the rest of my life and I managed to succeed on that count.
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My gradual climb into the skin I wear today was made of millions of tiny choices over the course of years, many of which weren’t apparent at all on the surface.
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But that’s what’s necessary to design the life that you want, regardless of the life you were handed.
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If you’re reading this and you’re in the midst of that struggle, hang on and keep the faith.
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What’s waiting for you is so much more powerful than anyone can ever explain.
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If you’re still trying to figure it out. The same goes for you. Keep at it and when the naysayers start up, figure out how you can either delete them from your social circle or minimize your exposure to them.
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The journey is hard enough without carrying dead weight.
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Not every decision is going to be easy, but each one is going to pay off in a design that will leave you awestruck. A life that will make you believe in magic.
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#mindset #motivation #DesignYouLife #FightForYourLight #ArtisticAgenda #AltadenaArtist #AltadenaAuthor

Yesterday, one of my sisters and I were talking about what consistent rejection can do to a person’s self-esteem.
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We both agreed, that at some point, the best thing we can do for ourselves is figure out a way to get past it.
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My abandonment issues started at the age of five, but I’d suffered enough rejection by my teenage years, that I had a ‘f*ck it’ attitude and was like, “this is me, take it or leave it”.
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Not that I was unaffected by further rejection, but I understood that it wasn’t enough to end me. I would endure.
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I wrote a poem that I used to perform so much that my wife commented on just how much I must have loved it. It wasn’t the most eloquent, but it was a retelling of my first real full declaration of independence.
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In the poem, my mother, who was pretty consistent in her rejection of me decided that I had managed to do something right, so that single trait, I got from her.
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My reaction was to tell her, “I’m not like any of you people.” I then began to insist that I was switched at birth and from then on, would refer to her as ‘you people’ because I wasn’t going to let anyone claim me when it was convenient for their ego, then reject me when it wasn’t.
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All or nothing. The good and the bad of me, or take a hike.
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That poem was my personal national anthem.
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So if you ever see me do spoken word and I perform ‘You People’, well, that’s where it came from.
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The picture for this post is another of my creative visits to the idea of rejection.
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When I took this photo and decided to make it feel like something out of a horror movie, the name “Absence” came to me and fully captured the emotion I was going for with it.
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As if I was supposed to be in it. But wasn’t worthy.
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Dealing with rejection is an art form and if you can figure out how to give it less power in your life, you’ll only be doing yourself and your esteem the biggest favor, ever.
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#rejection #selfcare #ExploreDiscoverBelong #mindset #photooftheday #artistinspiration #YouPeople