1. “i get it.”

Sometimes, in life, you experience things. Good things and bad things. Sometimes they’re your fault, and sometimes they’re not. I don’t always need to be right, or justified. But life gets a lot less lonely when I hear this. Not necessarily this exact phrase. You can say it with your heart. But the idea of, “If I were in your position, I would totally understand why you’re feeling the way you are. And your feelings are real and powerful and difficult, and deserved to be acknowledge for the full extent of their strength.” When you’re suffering, sometimes people being ultra-positive just feels alienating. But to have someone mourn when you’re mourning, to enter into your pain, is a remedy in itself.

To fight for something and feel like nobody is fighting for it with you, you can get numb. But when you find that one person who sees what you’re fighting for, and you realize they’ve been fighting for it too… it’s as if you feel like you are, in fact, NOT crazy, but that perhaps the rest of the world is crazy for not seeing the fight.

And when you’re happy about something and there’s nobody to celebrate with you, it makes your victories feel insignificant. But the truth is, they are. And the deserve to be shared. And people miss out when they don’t “get” how hard something was for you. Well, even if someone is telling you to move on right away, don’t move on.

Chocolate was meant to be tasted, savored, not swallowed whole. Our lives are more than a percent daily value, you know.

2. “i love it.”

This mainly pertains to my work. Not just my job. But the work of my hands, the ideas of my head, the passion of my heart. I don’t just want my work to be “good enough.” I want the recipient of my work to be pleased. To be blessed. Isn’t that what I was made for, to be a blessing?

When you’ve had a long week, and you’re working way longer and harder than you bargained for, and nothing’s going right anyway, and you work some more — you are incredibly vulnerable. This is what you’ve been spending your life on. And your life is all you’ve got. You know?

To be considered “not enough” at that point is the most exhausting thing. Sometimes I will give something my all until my creative preserves have turned into raisins. And I find it was still not good enough to reach a goal. That is the most discouraging. At that point, it takes everything that’s left in me to say, “The world may be against me, but my God is for me” and to pick up the pieces and dive back into the chaos.

But to have someone come back after all the sleepless nights and rug-burns I invested into something, and to say,

“… I love it.”

And to genuinely mean it. That restores me. That reminds me why I’m doing what I do.

Maybe sometimes I look too much to impress people. Which is the bad part of me that chokes out the life of everyone. But the good part is, I want people to believe, not only believe, but experience, that there is something in life, even in work, that goes way beyond what you could have earned.

You can buy something, and you can get what you paid for. If it’s expensive, then no matter how much you paid, you’re not impressed, because you just got what you paid for.

I believe there exists something in the world where you don’t get what you pay for… you genuinely get a ton more, and for no ulterior motive. I have experienced this, and I want the world to experience this.

Some of that is giving sacrificially myself. But I’m realizing increasingly that more of it is pointing people to a reserve of abundance that is much greater than I can hold in my backpack.

 

But yeah. Those are the two phrases I think I long to hear more than anything.