the why.

So maybe, to keep the bar really low (and because most of the rest of it is focused on the living bits), the better focus here might just be how not to die when...

• you're sitting on the sofa staring at the person you married, knowing it's over, and in order to live, you have to get divorced.

• you let yourself go and you're standing on a scale and you weigh the same as you did when you were pregnant (you're not).

• the people around you don't understand you or understand that the nature and character of their words and approaches hurt (even if, in reality, they're hurting the most). 

• you move away from home to build a new life and you and don't how to how to meet people or develop a community outside of the one where you were raised.

• you've cried your way to work for years under the false premise that "life is hard and then you die", continually beating yourself up because you should be happy you got your dream job with an office and an assistant. 

• you got "the job," and all of a sudden realize the darkness and the lies and the betrayal and what the truth of "the top" really is. 

• you're not married and a mom or dad by 30.

• you don't have a dog and a picket fence and a partner that takes videos of you to post on Instagram.

• you've made a series of bad decisions that have put you in a spot that you can't even imagine climbing out of and yet – because you're not going to kill yourself – you've gotta do something.

• you achieved everything that they put on your list achieve, faster than anyone around you, and you sit on a sofa in a southern California Airbnb, looking at your life – and your beautiful child – and you know that you don't want him to have a mom that hates her life and you have the courage to pull out the Google machine and search "how to be happy."

This is where we begin. Understanding The Systems.