Somewhere along the way, I started lowering the bar. Not settling—lowering it. There's a difference. Settling means accepting less than you deserve. Lowering expectations means being realistic about what you can actually control and what you can't.

And it freed me from so much suffering.

I stopped expecting people to be different from who they actually are. That meant I could finally see them clearly, and accept them or not, without resentment. I stopped expecting life to hand me anything, which somehow made me more capable of building what I actually wanted. I stopped expecting emotions to be permanent, which meant I could sit with sadness or anger without panicking that it would destroy me.

The paradox is that expecting less has given me more. More peace. More clarity. More ability to notice when something genuinely good appears, because I'm not constantly measuring it against an impossible fantasy.

It sounds bleak, I know. But it's the opposite. It's freedom.

When you stop demanding that life be a certain way, you finally get to experience what it actually is. And that's often better than the story you were telling yourself. 🌙