Imagine, for a moment, if you stopped giving a fuck.

Doesn’t that feel good? Maybe you feel a little bit guilty, but you’ve also got to admit it was lovely to relax.

It’s no secret that caring deeply is a great tool of highly successful, kind, important people. Caring drives a lot of greatness and can inspire anyone to make themselves and the world better. The only problem is that too often, we as people mistake caring for taking things personally. Caring also has the power to make mankind worse off.

Taking things personally is selfish to its core

If we consider what may have pushed a person…

I was sitting in my living room with my best friend the other night when she began to grow angry. In recollecting one of her favorite TV shows, The Office, she blurted out that she “felt guilty” for watching it because it had been the go-to show for her and her ex-betrothed. They separated a long time ago, and she recently celebrated her one-year anniversary with her new boyfriend. From this memory, our conversation about comedy TV turned into a mutual pondering of how bad we each should or shouldn’t feel about enjoying things we used to enjoy with exes.

…

Any writer can tell you that their work comes with its difficulties, whether they choose to pen fiction, finance, self-help, or just about anything else. Writing itself is challenging, and trying to build an audience is even harder. Even if writing is one’s “calling”, it doesn’t always make it easy.

With the occasional exception, I typically write self-help-driven personal essays. I follow a scheduled format of opening my articles with a thesis and then contributing to that statement with a body of personal experiences that I believe both provide myself credibility and allow the reader to know that they aren’t…

In the beginning, I was playing outside in a field on a bed of grass. There were children everywhere and a few other teachers, and I was fidgeting on the grass trying to close all of the goody bags that we’d made for the kids. Maybe it was field day or something. The sky was such an opulent blue and the clouds were wispy but still full enough to envision shapes when you looked up at them. No one was wearing masks, either, so I assume that the pandemic was over. …

2017 was a really bad year for me. I ringed in the New Year in a psychiatric facility, and though my time there was brief, it led to a circus that included a new psychiatrist and a whole bunch of new medication. Along with that circus came a bunch of diagnoses I hadn’t ever heard of before, which included:

• Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
• Bipolar Disorder
• Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

For years, I was treated with Lithium, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin, Lamictal, Abilify, Doxapine, Trazodone, Latuda, and others. At any given time, I was on four…

It doesn’t feel very impressive when I open Medium every morning and see roughly 40 followers and 1,000–1,600 views per month. In fact, when I compare myself to the posters in Medium hubs on Facebook, I feel abysmally small. As my peers share massive earnings statements and stats with 10 times the amount of views on one article compared to what I have for a whole month, I wonder what I’m doing wrong.

Then, I stop and think about how my growth here has been enormous. $20 over three months doesn’t sound like much, but wait until you hear this:

…

A typical day for me includes a little bit of tidying up my apartment, getting to work early, and cooking dinner at the same time. I find time to write in between my daily work schedule and my tutoring schedule, even striving to wake up early each day just to get some extra writing in. When I don’t have any assigned responsibilities, I assign them to myself and make sure that my novel receives the 1,600 words per day that it deserves.

When it comes to schoolwork, I cannot say the same thing. No matter how old I grow and…