limitless happiness

It is so easy to doubt what dreams you can achieve.

It is so easy to set limits on your potential.

Potential is terrifying.

To believe in one’s potential necessitates setting high expectations for oneself. Setting high expectations, depending on our mindset, can translate to predicting our failure.

It’s scary to let yourself imagine the future you actually want. It’s scary to believe in something that you don’t have a lot of examples for; that no one you know is doing. It’s scary to make yourself vulnerable to defeat and the “I told you so’s”. It’s scary to go against what people are telling you; the people who themselves are scared to try. The people who care about us and yet have told us over and over that our dreams are too big, under the guise of protecting us.

So we believe them and we don’t set high expectations. Instead, we simply start to accept our lives as they are. We stop reaching for more, for what we want, and we become complacent, stagnant.

Today I am writing this on my balcony overlooking a little, peaceful, albeit swampy, lake on a Wednesday afternoon in the sunshine. I never could have imagined this scenario in my future. I never could have predicted the happiness I have obtained today, the freedom, or the love. I never would have believed it to be possible.

If I had set limits on my potential I wouldn’t know the happiness I get to know now. If I had tried to define my expectations, I would have accepted a different kind of content because I didn’t know this kind existed.

It should also be said that no one’s life is perfect and I’m not saying I am this happy every day; what I am trying to say is that now I get to know this happiness, know that this life is possible.

Now I know what to reach for on the hard days and know what I get to reach past on the best days. Now I get to set even bigger dreams because I have to come to the understanding that as far as I can tell, my happiness is limitless.

There will be days that are hard and we will set limits on our potential. There will also be days where we just don’t allow ourselves to believe. It’s on those days that we are setting our limits. It’s on those days we have to tune everyone and everything else out. It’s on those days we have to believe in us.

We have to believe in our dreams.

We have to believe in our dreams because if we don’t believe in them, who else will.