AT YOUR BEST ~ Jess

Tell us why you felt at your best in this moment:

I felt better in this picture than I have my in my whole life because it was the ending of a very long struggle with depression and self-unlove (I won't say hatred) and the beginning of a life built on faith, peace, and love.  When I started my Masters program I was living in my parents' dining room literally because there weren't any spare bedrooms. I had just moved home after a failed career, a failed pseudo-relationship, and a failed young professional social life.  I felt like a total failure.  This picture just shows how far a little belief in yourself can get you. I lost somewhere between 40-50lbs, I graduated with a 3.9 and acceptance into a Doctoral program with a full ride, and most of all I was so happy I was glowing.

How do you define beauty:

I think beauty is freedom and simplicity.  Not the freedom to be daring or off the wall or outside the box, but even greater and more radical; the freedom to be yourself.  Your truest, simplist, most stripped down self.  Far too many people are putting on a show, a highlight reel of themselves for the world but then you rob of us the whole story, the real you! Don't cliff's notes yourself. My latest revelation that I'm saying out loud for the world as my ultimate truth is "I am SO MUCH MORE than I always thought I was." Possibility, that's beautiful.

How do you define happiness:
Happiness to me is fleeting, because it is, at its core, only a consequence.  There's this quote by Eckhart Tolle that reads:

"Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not."

That's what I want, inner peace. I want to be able to enjoy the sum of the human experience and that includes happiness, but also sadness, grieving, anger, love, and pain.  I want to be able to sit in those emotions and accept them, work through them letting them flow through me like water and at the end (or beginning or middle) of the day be able to say that all is forgiven and I will still love.  I think that is the highest power, no matter the religious title you put on it.  To me happiness is nice if and when it comes, but it is not permanent. I just want to learn to be okay with that.