Im happy but there is a heavy feeling of sadness in my heart that I just can't remove. Why am I like this?

And the sadness?

You are like me, then.

Your job is not to be the manager of your life, but the one who discovers yourself fully.

Hi, I’m Jo. My best friend died 2 years ago today. My husband died 6 months later. So, I’m a depressed mess (we were married 28 years) and can’t shake it. Even my Brother is worried. Some days I don’t do anything, and avoid men cause I don’t want to date. Any suggestions? Thanks for reading.

It’s impossible to overstate the freedom and peace I discovered, and I realized the only one who had been keeping those from me was… me and my imagined standards and expectations for how I had imagined I should be.

In the absence of a should, I was free to be as I am.

Be who you already are.

Will surging sea levels kill the Great Barrier Reef? Ancient coral fossils may hold the answer - The Conversation

What most people don’t know unless they’ve looked more closely is that there is also an element of deep, profound sadness that has always been with me since as long as I can remember.

What I am trying to say is that when you stop trying to change yourself into something you are not, you give yourself the gift of discovering yourself as you already are.

It’s here now, writing to you.

Most people obey arbitrary rules even when it's not in their interest to do so, experiments show - Phys.org

It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I finally fell out of that ferris wheel of trying and failing to fix myself.

The sadness was still there.

It’s still here.

Why is the covert narcissist actively avoiding me when they see me everyday?

It’s difficult to put into words exactly what caused what, but to the best of my ability to describe it, I felt as if my will to keep fighting was beaten right out of me.

I was tired of trying and failing.

I was tired of fighting.

Your left and right brain hear language differently − a neuroscientist explains how - The Conversation

It’s the most beautiful and liberating thing in the world.

When I stopped trying to force myself to be something I am not, I gave myself the freedom of being who I am.

You are the masterpiece you came here to discover.

How to reduce your risk of melanoma and other skin cancers - KSLTV.com

So if you are sad - like me - then be sad.

This interpretation lead me on a path of self improvement, to fix what I considered to be “wrong” with myself.

But no matter what I read or practiced, I could never make the sadness budge for longer than a few fleeting moments - and even then, it was likely due to me being distracted from the sensation of sadness rather than anything actually shifting.

Patch Notes: New Co-op Emotes! — Warcraft Rumble - Blizzard News

So I finally threw my hands up and said something to the tune of “fuck it, since I can't seem to change, I’ll just be whatever I am then.”

Most people that know me would probably describe me as a social, happy, and somewhat quirky person with a twisted sense of humor.

For much of my adult life, I interpreted this sadness as something being wrong - with either myself or my life in general.

Homophobia is clearly a harmful mental sickness. What can LGBT people do to cure it?

I had run out of hope.

But unlike before, there is no more resistance to the sadness.

Without resistance, sadness has a sense of beauty and depth I cannot find otherwise in life.

What do you think of Hegseth calling The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, "a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes” after team Trump texted him their top-secret war plans on Yemen?

Now, this may sound like a story of failure and giving up, but it’s actually a story of liberation.

Needless to say, my failed attempts to fix my sadness simply brought me more pain and suffering.