Anger feels a lot like the water when you’re walking out of the ocean; it’s like the strong rush of water that flows back to sea and serves as stark opposition to your exit. It pushes so hard in the other direction that there’s that split second or two that you can see your legs moving but it feels like you’re not gaining any ground. Only you are.

It’s just a phase, I tell myself. You’re still moving in the right direction.

I believe it to be normal, when facing a fork in the road, to seek the input from others. It’s like on that show – Who Wants to be a Millionaire – when the contestant is not quite sure what the answer is so they utilize a poll from the audience members. The hope, of course, is that the majority opinion is the right answer. Only in life that’s not always true.

I’ve learned that the answer lies within ourselves. What’s right for me may not be right for you.

The challenge then becomes knowing your own boundaries; like when you’re building a home and all you have is a plot of dirt and you have to take nails and string to outline where the rooms are going to go.

We are our own architects.

By Vivianne Castillo

In the early 1900s, some psychiatric hospitals gauged patients’ readiness to integrate back into society through a simple and peculiar test. The patient was ushered into a room with a sink, where the hospital staff would place a plug in the sink, turn on the faucet, and wait for the sink to overflow. As water bubbled over the ledge and splashed onto the floor below, the patient was then handed a mop and the staff would leave the room, closing the door behind them. If the patient turned off the water, unplugged the sink, and mopped up the water that had spilled onto the floor, they were deemed as ready to go home and enter back into society. But if the patient opted to frantically mop as the water gushed over the sink, failing to turn off the faucet or remove the sink’s plug, they were deemed insane and prescribed more time in the psychiatric hospital: they failed to acknowledge and address the root of the problem.

Reminder to self: put your mop away and address the root of the problem.