It's seven am, the alarm is blaring in your left ear and your unsteady heartbeat pounds loudly in your right. You turn off your alarm, your heart finds it's gear, and now all you can hear is silence. For a brief second, you allow yourself to exhale into the stress-free silence that surrounds you. You can hear the harmony between your heartbeat and your lungs breath. It's beautiful and majestic and just… right; then your phone rings; Obligation is on the line.

Obligation, with its excessively needy voice, starts unloading tons of expectations right into your nervous system. All you can hear is obligations raspy voice calling out to you, commanding you to do everything but take care of yourself. And you listen, because you don't know better; most people don't know better.

I, like so many other millennials, pick up the phone for obligation before I answer to myself. Time and time again, I throw myself on the back-burner of some figurative stove and keep answering to obligation until I am burned out. When I finally do take myself of the back burner, I scrap the blacken, bruised parts of myself off just like I would a burnt piece of toast. If I don't stop answering to obligation before I answer to myself, I am not sure just how much of myself will be left to scrap together.

Do I wanna be burnt out at 30? Probably not. Maybe it's finally time for me, for all of us, to stop picking up the phone for obligation before we answer ourselves.

Let's start making ourselves a priority. Let's stop answering to obligations on the first ring!

I know, remembering to put obligations on DND (do not disturb) is hard. To know someone or something needs you and only you, there is no feeling like it. We all want to be wanted, even if the thing that wants us harms our holistic health. When the phone rings and the caller ID reads "work, school, etc", please remember that you, the individual, are so much more important than whatever obligation is calling you.

You, my love, are worth way more than rubies. Please, for the love of yourself, start acting like it.

Your Obligations can wait. Please, don't answer the phone.

#stayencouraged