This is a question I ask myself a lot. Am I living to my full potential right now or am I passing thorough life just waiting to punch out that last breath, that last thought, that last moment before I slip away. In reality, isn’t that what we are all doing when we spend hours swiping on social media or watching tv instead of playing with our children, working on personal goals, or engaging in a deep and meaningful way with our partner. Are we living or are we just passing through? More living can be done on a street corner shooting the shit with your best friends than will ever be accomplished in a cubicle. More living is accomplished in a kids play park than in a day care where someone else is watching your kid grow, and they do grow up, and they do go away.

I have spent most of my life watching life without really interacting with it. Life has always seemed frightening to me. My bat was never the biggest, my car was never the fastest, and I have always sure that there’s a tidal wave of danger around every corner. I preach a lot about not living in fear because I fight fear and surrender it to God every day of my life. I know that living in fear is not living at all. I know that living in fear keeps us captive, impoverished, and disconnected.

So what is it to live? I live when I walk my dogs or talk to my son. I live when I have coffee with my friends and laugh or cry with them. I’m not proud of my lack of living but I am proud of my attempts at healing, at trying to get into the game, of trying to be social and real and fully alive, fully human. Gone are the days when I would look at my therapist and ask, “Am I real? Am I really sitting here?” Those were my dissociative days, my ghost days, the days when I felt so outside of life that I couldn’t engage with the magic of the world because it was a thing on a screen painted in black and white with the sound turned so far down that it faded to nothing.

If you know how to live, do it. Get out of your rut and be real. Many of us need an example that’s not from a movie or a show. If you don’t need booze to mingle at a party you are the magic some of us are searching for. To be truly and fully alive is a gift that should not be squandered. Relish it when you find it, don’t take a picture, just feel it light up your soul and whisper, “Yes, this is what it feels like to live. Right now, in this moment, I am totally alive.”