Free You are a Badass by Jen Sincero

FOLLOW YOUR FANTASIES
    Now that I’ve given you all the kinder, gentler ways to figure yourself out, I’m going to suggest something you’re probably not going to like so much: Jump in the deep end and follow your fantasies. What do you fantasize about when you’re staring out the window of a train, or before you go to sleep at night, or when you’re pretending to listen to someone really boring talk your ear off? Are you onstage doing stand-up comedy in front of thousands of hysterical fans? Are you surrounded by your beautiful children in the coziest, happiest home ever? Are you being celebrated for building orphanages around the world? Do this exercise as if money were not an issue. Tap into what brings you great joy instead of what you think you need to do to survive. If you had an unlimited supply of cash, what would you spend your life doing?
    Our fantasies are the most revealing peepholes into who we are and what we think is awesome. No matter how out-there and ridiculous they may seem, they mean something to us, and usually represent our biggest and best versions of ourselves.
Our fantasies are our realities in an excuse-free world.
    Meanwhile we’d all be mortified if anyone could read our minds and catch us in the act—“I know, it’s totally stupid, I want to sing on Broadway.” Well, is it really stupid? Someone’s out there doing it, so why couldn’t you?
    Much of the time we pretend we aren’t clear on what our calling is when what’s really going on is that we’re horrified to face it because it seems too big or too impossible to make a living at or completely out of the question for us.
    But what if you had the audacity to leave your excuses and your shame about wanting to be huge and fabulous behind and really went for it full-on anyway? What if you decided to do the most outrageous, most exciting thing you ever dared fantasize about, regardless of what anyone, including your terrified self, thought?
    THAT would be living.
    8. LOVE YOURSELF
    Like you’re the only you there is.

CHAPTER 9:
    LOINCLOTH MAN
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
—André Gide; French author, Nobel Prize winner, fearless self-explorer
    Every May I go backpacking through the desert wilderness areas of southeast Utah with two longtime friends of mine. It’s one of the most magnificent and bizarre places I’ve ever been: giant, jagged, obscenely pink ridges of rock jut out of the ground like huge slabs of raw meat; white, yellow, and purple towers of sandstone stretch and twist into sculptures made of taffy; deep cracks in the earth’s surface form cathedral-like slot canyons whose walls, smoothed over from flash floods and sandstorms, change colors from moment to moment as the sun’s rays shift through the narrow opening high above.
    It’s like the moon. Only cooler.
    We merrily trip through this alternate universe, picking up colorful rocks, climbing around on boulders and arguing over which eagle or snake or mountain goat should be awarded Creature of the Day. Because my friends are such excellent navigators, we go deep into the wilderness areas, where there are no trails and even fewer people. In the sixteen years we’ve been hiking out there, we could practically count the people we’ve bumped into while backpacking on one hand. Which was why I was so surprised, and dubious, when my friend Tom, who’d gone ahead to find us a place to set up camp for the night, reported that he’d seen someone. “I just met this really wild guy,” he said when I caught up with him. “He was wearing nothing but a loincloth and a headband. He was holding a spear, too. Said he’d been living in the canyon for thirteen years.”
    “Was he riding a magic dragon?”
    “I’m serious.”
    “So where is he?”
    “He went off to check his squirrel trap. But he could come back.”
    “Mmmm hmmmm.”
    Tom is a lousy liar, and wherever he was taking this joke, he wasn’t getting to