Have you ever had the experience of feeling like someone is judging you or talking badly behind your back only to realize later it didn't happen and you misinterpreted or made the whole thing up?

I was recently at the post office on a busy afternoon and went into an anxiety induced delusion about ‘someone’ behind me in line getting frustrated over the time it took me to use the self serve machine. Afterwards, I turned around to apologize for my lack of preparedness, only to discover that no one else was standing there.  

I recently went on vacation with some close friends and was lucky enough to witness a couple in our group making the best out of some tense moments by uttering two simple acronyms to each other...

Pain is real. There's no denying it. You can pretend for only so long that it doesn't exist until somehow the scab gets scraped off and you're oozing and inflamed all over again. But we don't have to become our pain. We can acknowledge it, cry it, write it, dance it, stomp it, paint it, draw it, talk it, sing it, see it, get it, love it and let it be until the storm passes through.