How To Fall Back In Love With Your Life

Acknowledge that the magic is gone. After all, you can’t find what you never even admitted was missing in the first place. Retrace your steps trying to find it. Pray you’ll be able to pick up right where you left off, not unlike seeing a friend you lost touch with and always missed or finally grasping that word dancing on the edges of your tongue. Figure falling back in love with your life will feel kind of like that: a reconciliation, a reunion, an epiphany.

So, start seeking what you know you once loved. Look for your misplaced hope in all of those familiar spots where it used to hide. The bottom of a wine glass. Within the characters of your comfort TV shows. In the pages of your old favorite books. At happy hours with friends and during late-night chats with crushes and at the tips of your fingers as you write.

Attempt it all. Still feel hollow. Slowly begin to notice that all of those places you’ve been and adored seem so very different now. It’s just not the same. Understand it’s probably because you’re no longer the same either. Contemplate what shifted. Wonder if you can ever go back to who you were. Come to terms with the fact that you can’t and maybe you don’t want to after all.

Take the hint that no reunion will be planned, no moment of clarity will be had. Accept the incompatibility of what once was with what now is. Forget trying to figure out what shifted. Understand that this is nothing but a distraction from what you must do next. Embrace the fact that sometimes what once worked no longer does and that you have no choice but to build anew.

Begin again. Start from scratch. Try to do things differently, to look at things differently, too. Redefine awe. Invite wonder to Sunday brunch with your friends and think about the fact that you’re so lucky you exist during the same lifetime as them. Be thrilled that you get to have your morning cup of coffee on the front porch. Watch the sun melt into the horizon during a random June night and feel the quiet, humming hope return to your veins.

Finally discover that magic isn’t something that’s found and that maybe it never really left you in the first place. Maybe loving your life is something you need to work at and keep trying to wrangle. Only when you accept that the magic you thought you were missing actually rests in your own hands will you find yourself spellbound once again.

That is how you fall back in love with your life.