Finding Your Place in This World

Helping sensitive and smart individuals to overcome anxiety and depression and create meaningful, connected, and authentically empowered lives.

Lauren Nelson, LCSW: Online Therapy and Counsling in Illinois and New Mexico

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” - Rainer Maria Rilke 

You sense that a more meaningful and beautiful life could be possible, and yet it somehow always eludes you. You feel strange, alien, broken: both “too much” and “not enough” all at once. You know that you were meant for something greater… but you don’t know quite what. You don’t know where you belong.

“What you seek is seeking you.”

-Rumi

Maybe you feel…

  • Lonely, like you’re always on the outside looking in. Longing for a depth of connection that you can never seem to satisfy. Like nobody knows or wants the “real” you. Maybe you don’t even know the real you.

  • Misunderstood. You are a multifaceted, walking contradiction. You kind of belong everywhere… but also nowhere. Nothing irritates you more than being “put in a box.”

  • Overwhelmed and anxious. You may resonate with symptoms of ADHD and neurodivergence. You have so many passions, interests and talents, that it’s hard to find your true purpose. You could be good at anything, but what if you choose the “wrong” path?

  • Exhausted and burnt out. The weight of the world is on your shoulders, and nobody is coming to save you. At least, that’s how it feels. You’re strong, resilient, responsible. But sometimes… it would be nice not to have to be.

  • Consumed by the intensity of life. “Chill” and “easygoing” are not in your vocabulary. You do not have an “off” switch. You are in the heights of ecstacy or depths of despair. There is no inbetween.

  • Disppointed. Maybe cynical, depressed, or even suicidal at times. You see the harsh realities of this world as well as its beautiful possibilities and suffer the painful distance bewteen the two.

  • Displaced. Like you were made for a different world. Like you’re in exile from an unamed homeland to which you can never return.

You dream of a new life where you belong, just the way you are.

Imagine a life where…

  • Your gifts are wanted and needed. You are creating something meaningful and beautiful in the world. Where “what you do” and “what you love” are one in the same.

  • You have close, meaningful, and authentic relationships. Kindred spirits who not only accept but also appreciate your idiosyncrasies. Who want to know the real you.

  • You are able to find meaning and beauty. Despite (or maybe becasue of!) living in a very imperfect world.

  • You are able to understand and meet your unique desires and needs which probably look a little different from what you were taught you “should” want and need.

  • You are confident enough to live authentically. You have greater clarity about and appreciation for about your personal “flavor” of giftendess, no longer judging yourself for being “bad,” “wrong,” or “wierd” for your differences and respectfully refusing to tolerate those who do.

You’re not broken, just different. And this world needs your difference.

“Instead of giving in and conforming, or rejecting them all together in futile rebellion, she opted for a third alternative.  In the midst of the concrete wilderness she began to construct, to preserve, her own liveable worlds.”

- Preface to the Diary of Anais Nin