playmingiplay

"One evening, a girl named Stephanie says she fears falling into a depression because her job hunt is going nowhere. Bernstein locks eyes with Stephanie. “If your happiness is based on external experience, then, my darling, you are fucked.” Emphasis on the fucked, as her voice rises. “I say that very seriously: If your experience of things being happy and abundant has everything to do with what’s going on outside—because the guy called, you got the job, whatever—like I said, you will all be fucked. Outside experiences are not for us to control. Our internal experience is what we can work with, what we can choose to change.” Her point isn’t that Stephanie should lie on a chaise and wait for a job to find her, so powerless is she to control the outcome, or even that she should dismiss the way she really feels—scared—it’s that if she chooses to feel defeated, then she will be."