Today the Turkey Vultures are migrating. Slowly circling ever South. Some stay year round, most migrate. They always seem to know and go a week before the cold.

Some people spend years trying to fix everyone around them without ever checking themselves. Others call it personality when it’s actually an old wound with an excellent marketing team.😂 Fear becomes control. Rejection becomes people-pleasing. Shame becomes perfectionism. Pain becomes anger. And suddenly, we're reacting to today's situations with emotional software installed years ago. 🙄 The problem? The people standing in front of us didn't necessarily create the wounds we're asking them to pay for. Painful experiences shape our nervous system and influence our reactions. Healing starts when we stop asking only, "Why are people triggering me?" and get curious about, "What is this reaction trying to protect me from?" That's where the real work begins. Not blaming our parents forever. Not turning every ex into a psychological case study. Not collecting healing vocabulary like Pokémon cards while repeating the same patterns. Actually doing the work: Learning to pause. Understanding our triggers. Feeling what we've spent years avoiding. Setting boundaries. Asking for help when we need it. Taking responsibility for the way we treat ourselves and others. And remembering that understanding someone's wounds doesn't mean we have to volunteer as their emotional punching bag. Our past deserves compassion. Our present deserves attention. And our future deserves more than a recycled version of our pain. So, open the emotional cupboard. Check what's been stored there. Some things need healing, some need releasing, and some expired approximately three relationships ago. 😂 Heal the wound. Keep the wisdom. Stop throwing the glass. ❤️‍🩹

I saw a friend last night who has given up. She's in town visiting friends and family. She has given up on men, her wish to move back here, getting a different job, pretty much everything. Nothing anyone says seems to make a dent. She seems to have resigned herself to everything being hopeless. It's tough because she is one of the nicest people in the world. Keep your hopes alive! Keep moving forward, no matter how slowly.

It is great to take people as we find them. Even people very different tend to have some shared ideals. For example, just because we might be friends with a heavy drinker does not mean that we have to drink with them. Some people might have a lot of drama in their lives, but if they don't spill it over onto us, that's ok. We can see and share the good in others, and just have boundaries for areas that are not so good.

We talk a lot about protecting our peace. But sometimes protecting your peace means something much less glamorous: Stop giving VIP access to people who bring discount-store energy. 😂 You don't need people who turn every dream into a risk assessment, every idea into a criticism, and every possibility into a list of reasons why you shouldn’t. And no, this doesn’t mean surrounding yourself with people who agree with everything you do. We need people who can tell us when we’re being ridiculous without making us feel ridiculous for dreaming. There’s a huge difference. So choose people who make you think bigger, laugh harder, recover faster and occasionally say: “Let’s do it and see what happens.” Life already comes with enough chronic meh. You don't need to subscribe to it. ✨