There’s a reason you don’t fit in when you’re truly happy, when you’re growing, when you’re being yourself. Authenticity makes people self-conscious of the masks they’ve been hiding behind. Raw joy makes people suddenly realize how often they’ve settled and how bad that hurts. Growing irritates the fuck out of people who are stagnant, people who haven’t found the courage to change. Let it be. Being accepted, making people comfortable, fitting in...it’s all so ridiculously overrated.

What I’ve found is that when you finally get to the point where you’re really okay with your choices, how other people feel about them stops mattering so much. When you’re okay with walking alone, you attract the kind of people you need to be around.

When you break the ceiling and start growing, you’re life finally takes on real meaning and the joy that comes with that is full and complete. When you take off your own mask and start living out loud (offensive as it might be to the people around you), you are reborn. In a nut shell, when you stop giving a fuck...like really and truly stop caring so much about how people feel about your life and your choices, that’s when you stop letting life just happen to you and start actually living.

Brooke Hampton