No more red – 83/100

One of my greatest enemies:

That bright red badge of death. And 99 is a lie. The badge count doesn’t go higher than that. I don’t know if it’s a glitch or it’s coded like that to prevent anxiety. I think it’s in the several hundreds at this point.

I used to be hung up on those little white numbers surrounded by red. I couldn’t live life fully if they were present in my life. So I read every. single. email. I thought each one was so important to me, my growth. That there was a lesson, advice, wisdom in every one of them.

And it was up to me to forage for them and become more productive, more wise, more everything.

Except, and it took me a while to realize, it was making me sick.

Truly. The weekends were quieter – not many marketers and newsletter-senders deliver on the weekends when people are trying to enjoy life. But come Monday morning, I’d dread seeing the notifications when I woke up.

I laugh now because that’s exactly what I felt back at my job – complete dread waiting for emails to load. I had removed myself from that environment because of the dread only to create it for myself in the freedom of my self-employed life.

I am so not intelligent sometimes lol.

Anyway, I realized I was chasing the answers as if they were all out there, hidden in articles, advice, tips, updates of other human beings. I thought I had to learn EVERYTHING I COULD.

So I began to view emails as a source of fear, fear that I would miss the lesson, miss the one insight that could change my life forever. That sounds funny, right? It does to me too now lol.

But then, I was so far from the truth that all is well.

It was out of sheer sick-and-tiredness that I stopped opening and skimming emails to avoid the red badges. The number went from 3 unread to 15 to 65 to 99 – GASP. And then at that point, I stopped giving a shit.

And then I got tired of seeing the red at all and turned off notifications for Gmail altogether.

And you know what I felt?

Peace. Hahah!! I’m so dramatic!!

It took me a journey but after all that, I remembered – all is well.

I remembered that I’m taken care of, newsletters or not. That everything I need to move forward, to walk my path is within me. That there’s nothing that can ever substitute the creative intelligence and wisdom within. That, should a certain email hold an answer I need, I’ll be compelled to open and read it.

So I now live in peace knowing that I have a gazillion unread emails and I still know everything I need to know.

It all sounds so silly, I know. But it’s the little things like this that remind me I’m in a process. I’m in a freaking process of living from within, of finding completeness and self-sufficiency in my path, of trusting the process. Yeah I said it – I’m in the process of trusting the process lol.

These things excite me. These truths, as little as they seem, enliven me. Like I said, dramatic haha.

Happy Friday yo.