‘The Life we live, is the lesson we teach,’ my friend Jim Kwik mentioned in one of his writings.

I read it just before I was going to sit down and write to you.

And it hit me.

The life I live. Is the lesson I teach.

Thank you Jim, for putting it so simply.

As it allowed me to come clean with myself.

And you might be wondering, what does this have to do with loss? Everything.

Really, everything.

I am doing another reentry for myself. This one will be the hardest.

Living life true to my feelings at all cost is not easy. It is one of the hardest things I will ever have to do. But I owe it to all the people who have died. To the people who wished they were still here. @SecondFirsts (Click to Tweet!)

I owe it to Bjarne. My first husband.

To my firstborn who never made it.

To my grandparents.

To personal friends who died young.

And I know, you owe it to your people too. The people you lost.

This next reentry to life will be brutally honest.

The first thing I do is ask myself this one question.

What lie do I tell myself every day?

I lie about how happy I am.

I lie about that a lot.

I am calling myself out this year.

Stopping the lies about the everyday things.

The lies about what I love to do.

Who I really am.

The lies about the foods I eat.

The things I say.

The way I think.

The people I like. And those I don’t.

How I want to be loved. Seen.

And the biggest lie of all is that there will always be a tomorrow.

As you and I know, tomorrow is not guaranteed.

Now is your turn.

What is your truth and what lie have you been telling yourself instead?

With a lot of truth,

Christina

Christina Rasmussen is the creator and founder of The Life Reentry Institute, Second Firsts, The Life Starters and Star Letters. Christina is on a crusade to help millions of people rebuild, reclaim, and relaunch their lives using the power of their own minds. Christina’s work has been featured on ABC News, NPR, The White House Blog, and MariaShriver.com. She is the bestselling author of Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again, which has also been translated in Chinese and German and is currently working on her second book on expanding the mind in ways that allows co-creation with the forces of the universe. She is also writing her first work of fiction: a science fiction story about a woman on a quest to start over and begin a new life. You can find more information on her website and follow her on FB or Twitter.

Image courtesy of Anastasiya Lobanovskaya.