Are you feeling down? Is life just not what you always thought it would be? Do you feel like there’s got to be some magic switch to make everything better?

GUESS WHAT THERE IS!

AND WE’RE GONNA SELL IT TO YOU FOR THE MEASLY SUM OF ONE TRILLION DOLLARS! YOU LUCKY DOG!

*cough cough*

Sorry, sorry. I got into Crazy Infomercial Announcer mode.

When you start to feel like you’re doing Life wrong, what do you do? You look for a Quick Fix. That’s just our culture. We want everything and we want it right the hell now.

Not too long ago, I was in that state of doubt. I wanted to know what I had to do to make all of my dreams come true. I mean, I was thirty already! Shouldn’t my dreams have come true by now? Clearly, I was living life wrong somehow. I needed to find the Mysterious Key that would unlock the Dreams Come True Achievement.

Since I don’t like talking to people, I turned to books because of course I did. What genre do you read to find the Cure? Self Help, naturally.

I was convinced it had something to do with how I was thinking. How does one think correctly?

As it turns out, all the Books had to tell me was that I should love myself. Easier said than done. Their suggestion for making myself love myself was affirmations. Basically, tell yourself you love yourself all the time every day until it’s true.

I’m sorry, but that mess just did not work for me.

It’s almost heartbreaking for me to admit that reading a book did not solve my problem.

Only now do I realize that reading books did not solve my problem because those books were not the Truth I was searching for.

Maybe those were the Truths some other people have sought. But not I. I was looking for something else. I was waiting for that AHA moment. It never really showed up, but I slowly worked myself to the YEAH, OKAY moment.

So I’m here to dish out the Miracle Cure you’ve all been searching for.

Ready?

Here it is:

You are flawed. You will always be flawed. Your flaws are why people love you.

That’s it.

Yeah, I know it’s anticlimactic. I am extremely disappointed about the lack of magic spells and fairy dust. However, if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the answer is about ONE TRILLION times simpler than you think. The problem with those self-help books telling you to love yourself is that they never address the fact that you need to love your flaws, too.

The thing you’ve been missing is simply the realization that you are not missing anything. Your flaws, your uncertainty, your searching hands in the darkness, these are the things that create you. Most often, these are the things people love about you.

The magic spell is acceptance. Accept yourself the way you are, right now, in this moment. Maybe you don’t have the high paying job you want. Maybe you have a tendency to overthink things to the point of causing yourself to have a panic attack. Maybe you don’t floss. It’s okay. It’s okay to love and accept these things about yourself. It won’t always be this way. Life is always changing. You need to let go of your expectations and allow yourself to be. The past taught and shaped you, but you don’t need to live there. The future is unknown and you don’t need to live there, either. You need to live right now. You need to love this moment. You need to love the fact that you are alive.

You don’t need a miracle cure because you are the miracle, exactly the way you are.