you can still unlock more of your own potential and understand yourself better

Which is why I avoided saying “full potential” like it’s a life panacea and any failure to achieve 100% is your personal failure instead of the program’s.

Yes please only go to board certified professionals for mental health and/or therapy, and please please puhhlease don’t make an LLM or authority figure like a priest your therapist…

Sure, compared to food or shelter it’s in the ‘nice to have’ category. But for me at least it’s shown a lot of things that I would never have understood or probed deeply enough to address. Better relationships, more understanding of self/finding your actual self, handle adversity better, etc etc

You don’t have to sign up for endless sessions, you can quite viably do a few introductory sessions and ask for takeaway homework/tools to use. Return as needed or when you’ve found a new topic that you feel needs work.

It’s the days you rawdog life and go home without music. Thems the days.

Go to therapy y’all. Even if you had a perfect upbringing and zero trauma or adversity, you can still unlock more of your own potential and understand yourself better. Even an imperfect outlet like a NA group setting like is better than white knuckling it.

Grew up in SoCal, been back many times to visit family over the years, I don’t see why anyone moves there who isn’t aspiring artist of some kind - and even then… good luck!

High cost of food and supplies, excessive housing costs, droughts, wildfires, car-centric everything yet questionable civic planning, smog haze basically daily, termites eat your house every few years, and the sprawl… Jesus. Knew an old hat Boeing engineer who built his dream home way outside the city, and over the decades his commute went from 45 mins to three hours. Before he took early retirement he found a carpool buddy to trade off days driving so at least one of them got to use the time effectively.

But hey! It’s right by the ocean, and the weather is perfect - if you love cloudless sunshine and hate season.