Everyone has a journey.
Here's mine:
I used to be the kind of girl who could fall in love with anyone. I absolutely loved love. I loved getting inside each other’s secrets, inside the dark little corners of ourselves that we don’t share on social media. The mundane lit me up. I loved morning rituals of learning how to make each other’s coffee, finding “our” spots around the city, and the inside jokes where we could glance across a room with a half smile and we would just know. I lived for the feeling of our two worlds coming together to create a brand new world for only us. Our love was where we lived.
It is thus, less than surprising that when these relationships ran their course, I was floored. Every time. Eventually, I would make my way back into my own life; sometimes it took months, sometimes much longer. I learned to meet my grief as an old friend. I welcomed the breakup to the table and poured it a drink. I opened the door for the late night sobs and let them do their work. I learned my rituals of recovery and how to put one foot in front of the other, no matter how tiny my steps. With time, I took my long walk to recovery just a little more swiftly each time.
By the time I was in my early 30s, I was old enough to know what I didn’t know. I knew big, whole, all-encompassing love. But I didn’t know how to grow it, or why it kept collapsing. I knew how to do my self-work but I still didn’t know how to make my life into the vision of my future that I aspired to. And so, I chose a different tack. After 10 years in the yoga and wellness world, I was at the top of my career. It was time to walk away. I sold my wellness businesses to finance my Masters in Psychology from Columbia University and I went into the program with two goals: to learn why yoga and meditation were so impactful to my mental health through dark times, and to learn how and why relationships last.
And here’s the thing. It worked. I discovered positive psychology, literally the science of how to be happier. I lived knee deep in decades of research on the correlations between mental health and mindfulness. And I spent the last six months of my time at Columbia writing my thesis on positive rituals for making love last.
I was also falling in love. But differently. Slowly at first, without even knowing it. It took 15 years of near missed connections and a dozen mutual friends for us to even meet. It took over a year from the day we met until we went on our first date. In some ways it felt very different, but mostly in how it showed up with everything I had been missing in each previous love. He is a man who has become the healthiest, kindest, and most authentic relationship of my life.
As my career at Columbia was coming to a close, I started talking about everything I had learned, and all of a sudden, everyone was listening. My single friends wanted my “secret” to finding my relationship. My married friends were taking notes on how we’ve woven positive psychology rituals into our day-to-day life. Chats over coffee became powerpoint presentations which became workshops and from all of this, We Are Self-Centered was born.
My first intention in creating this community is to start where I started; with heartbreak. What seems to be an ending is always the most profound opportunity for a new beginning. The only roadblocks are when we become blinded by our own fears, attachments, and self-doubt. What I once thought was my ending turned out to be only a paragraph in my story. At Self-Centered we’re coming together to write through to the end of your story, and I promise, you won’t want to miss what comes next.