Are you really self-made?

There is literally nothing you can do alone. Someone built the home you live in, harvested the coffee you’re drinking, and laid the road you drove on today. Even your breath is a shared miracle—air shaped by trees, filtered by oceans, gifted by time. When we forget this, we think we’re “self-made” or should be. We romanticize the illusion that we’ve done it all ourselves, and when life feels hard, we double down—I have to figure this out alone. Yet the truth is: you never have, and you never will.

The next time you feel isolated, overly burdened, or tempted by your negative ego to feel superior, pause and reflect. Practice gratitude for the seen and unseen hands that support your life, and let that feeling ground you. You can practice gratitude for the people, the elements, the communities, the ancestors, and the strangers who have contributed to who you are. This doesn’t undo the harms that have been done to you, yet focusing on them as the only reality takes your power away.

You are not self-made. You are community-made, earth-made, and source-made. When you realize you’re never truly alone, it softens you in a good way, helping you release grasping or proving and instead, remembering how to receive.

What if you focused on everything that helps you rather than what hasn’t?