Mind Over Matter

Because whether we realize it or not… isn’t that how we live regardless?

I recently got a tattoo after almost three years of not adding any new ink to my skin.

“Mind over matter.”

The words now live permanently on my body, which I think is funny considering how inconsistent the mind itself can be. Although I knew I needed a reminder of how I can never escape myself, and how even if no one else can hear my thoughts, they always end up reflected in the way I act, the way I move, and the way I choose to live.

This tattoo was intentional alignment, not an afterthought, as most — if not all — of my tattoos have been. The words are a reminder of the power of creation. Of the fact that what you think, you eventually become.

I say things like that all the time — everything is energy, perception is reality — but words are just words when you use them only to fill silence. They lose meaning when you repeat them while simultaneously allowing your mind to consume itself with fear, negativity, and doubt.

It is easy to stay where you are comfortable. Familiarity has a seductive quality to it. But at the same time, I have always loved transformation. I love curiosity, learning, and the constant act of improvement. Still, knowledge can only take you so far. At some point, you have to practice what you preach.

And I adore experimenting on myself. Pushing some sort of invisible limit and observing how people react to it. I observe everything.

Recently, I got let go by a client I had worked with for almost three years. It gave me stability while I tried to figure myself out, while I explored my own ambitions and creative goals. I gave that work a lot of myself — maybe too much of myself. It occupied so much of my time, my energy, my thoughts, and because of that, I had no intention of letting it go anytime soon. Not because it was necessarily my dream job, but because I had learned how to build my life around it. Because it was comfortable.

It worked… until it didn’t.

And getting let go hurt my ego more than I expected.

I realized how much of my self-worth was tied to being needed. I didn’t know how to separate losing a client from feeling rejected as a person. I realized how much of my inner dialogue revolved around proving to myself that I would never truly be chosen. That eventually, everyone leaves.

So work became the one thing I thought I could control.

I immerse myself deeply into my work. Everything becomes content to me. Every experience, every emotion, every observation eventually transforms into something creative. Sometimes I wish it didn’t. Sometimes I wish I had someone who demanded my attention enough to pull me away from work entirely.

But as most of you know, I’ve been single for essentially all of my adult life, which has given me an unusual amount of space to explore myself freely — to improve, to fail, to obsess, to become selfish and selfless whenever I choose. Though of course, nothing is ever that simple.

So my work became my baby. My routines, my thoughts, my life itself began revolving around creation. And in the mind, everything always moves faster than reality allows. But real life requires patience, repetition, discipline. There is so much work no one ever sees, especially the internal kind. And not knowing everyone else’s internal battles makes us believe everything comes easy and fast for other people.

I knew that internally, something needed to change. I knew I needed to take this new-found time to figure out my next step. Mania, sadness, anxiety, faith… I let myself move through all of it because in order to detox, you have to allow yourself to go through the process. A loss is still a loss, and you must feel it fully in order to free yourself from it.

If my thoughts create my reality, then the real work became learning how to think differently. Radical optimism. Why not me? Why not the best possible outcome? Why must my mind instinctively prepare for disappointment before anything has even happened?

So for the past month, I’ve been trying something new. Every single day, without fail, I repeat positive affirmations to myself. And strangely enough, it has taken up the same mental space I used to dedicate to overanalyzing everything. The spirals that once became Substack essays, video concepts, observations, anxieties — all of it had to move to the background while I focused on the way I speak to myself.

Because despite everything, creating still makes me feel the most alive. And every single thing requires work, energy, and attention — this is simply where my focus is now.

I still don’t have some beautiful conclusion to all of this. And honestly, I don’t think I need one yet. The important thing is that I’ve already decided this is no longer a temporary phase or an experiment. This is the way I want to live now.

Mind over matter.

Because whether we realize it or not… isn’t that how we live regardless?