You Can Only Save Yourself

This is a lesson it took me a long time to figure out, and I still have to remind myself of it often (which is probably why I’m sure these words show up in more than one of my books) —

No one can save you but you, and you can only save yourself.

You can sit with someone in their pain and grief and difficulties, and you can ask someone to sit with you in yours.

But the actual work to change our lives falls on each of us alone. No one can do our work for us, and we can’t do anyone else’s work.

That work — the self discovery, the healing, the diving deep into what has made us who we are and how we grow from and with and beyond it — is the work that makes up our lives. Doing that work isn’t easy, but it is, in fact, what makes our best lives even possible. It opens us and our lives in ways we could never open if someone did the work for us.

Yes, it would be wonderful to have someone sweep in and fix everything for us.

But the only person each of us can save is ourselves.

(However: a wee note to the Universe, which I know is always listening: I’m not opposed to winning the PowerBall, just to have the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.)