For most of my life, I’ve let the judgments of others determine my fate. In school, I looked to my teachers to tell but a B in Math. If I worked REALLY hard, I could be an A in Math, too, but that meant I probably shouldn’t try to make a career out of it.) As much as the As lifted me up, the Bs broke me. When it was time to get a job—it’s exactly the same thing. When I decided to be a writer, I had to send editors my ideas and examples of your work. They’d decide if I was worthy or not. It was the fear of rejection kept me from writing for a long, long time.

But one magical day (about the time I started this blog) something happened. It’s like I woke up one morning and realized I’ve been wasting precious time waiting for approval to do what I love. I don’t need someone else to give me permission to do what I want. If I want to write about yoga (or purple unicorns for that matter) I’m going to do it, by God, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks! So there!

I was tired of having great ideas, but never doing anything about them. I was tired of seeing those ideas in the pages of my favorite magazines, written by someone else because I was too scared to pitch them. It is possible to respect the knowledge and experience of others without letting those opinions stop you in your tracks. I’d rather write a thousand mediocre blog posts than nothing at all. Life is too short.

I’ve had some time to ponder my great epiphany, and I still have no idea what happened to cause it. Am I just getting older and wiser? (I do have a lot more gray hairs lately.) Has all that business about seeing the value and beauty in even the most flawed of yoga poses finally spilled over into my philosophy on life? Was it something I ate? It doesn’t matter.

I’M FREEEEEE!