You are an apartment with a pigeon.

There is a very loud corner of the internet dedicated to screaming at you.

It lives on your feeds, sandwiched between photos of your cousin’s baby and an ad for a vacuum cleaner that you will inevitably buy at 2 AM. It tells you to conquer the morning. It tells you to control your mind. It tells you that the best revenge is a massive success, and that you should wake up before the sun to plot the downfall of everyone who ever doubted you.

It is very aggressive. It is very sweaty. It involves a lot of cold plunges and journals.

And if you are anything like me, your reaction to all this screaming is to pull the blanket over your head, hold your iced coffee a little tighter, and wonder why everyone else seems to have the energy to be a main character.

Let’s start with the mind.

Motivational speakers—with their jawlines and their green juice—will tell you that you need to "control your thoughts." They make it sound incredibly dignified. Like you are standing at the helm of a majestic ship, wearing a fancy captain's hat, steering boldly through the turbulent ocean of your own consciousness.

You are not steering a majestic ship.

You are sharing a tiny, overpriced studio apartment with a feral pigeon. And that pigeon found a stale french fry under the fridge at 2 AM, and it will not stop screaming about it.

That pigeon is your anxiety. It is your sudden, vivid memory of something embarrassing you said to a cashier in 2014. It is the thought that maybe you left the oven on, even though you haven’t used the oven since Tuesday.

The trap—the real, insidious trap—is that the wellness industry has convinced us to treat every single thought our brain generates as a VIP guest.

A thought walks into your head, completely uninvited, drops its bags on the floor, and says, "you are ruining your life."

And instead of showing it the door, what do you do? You pull up a chair. You offer it a beverage. You ask it to elaborate. You sit there and debate it. You let it invite its friends—Anxiety, Regret, and a guy named Imposter Syndrome.

Now you are hosting a cocktail party for your own destruction. The music is too loud, someone spilled red wine on your favorite sweater, and you're the one who paid for the catering.

You do not defeat a feral pigeon with a PowerPoint presentation of positive affirmations. You cannot reason with a bird that eats discarded gum.

You defeat it by simply stopping eye contact.

When the pigeon screams, you don't argue. You don't try to find the root cause of the pigeon's trauma. You just look at it, blink twice, and say:

"Cool. Anyway."

And then you think about a completely different french fry.

But the internet doesn't just want you to fight your internal pigeons. It wants you to fight external ghosts, too.

“Prove them wrong,” the captions say, usually set over a video of someone running in the rain. “Show up to your high school reunion in a suit made of money while a string quartet plays in the background.”

Here is a profound, beautiful, and deeply liberating truth that will save you thousands of dollars in therapy:

They are not thinking about you.

Whoever they are.

Zyair from your sophomore year biology class is not sitting in a dark room, wringing his hands, plotting your downfall. Zyair is currently standing in line at a pharmacy, stressed about the price of allergy medication, and wondering why his left knee hurts when it rains.

You are giving free rent in your head to a guy who used to chew on his pen caps and now wears muted khaki cargo shorts.

The trap of "proving them wrong" is that it secretly means they are still your boss. They are still directing your movie. If you spend five years building a business just to spite Zyair, you didn't beat Zyair. You just got tricked into working 80-hour weeks for a guy who doesn't even know your current last name.

So how do you actually win?

You bore them into submission.

You don't explode onto the scene to shock the masses. You do not post a vague, deeply unhinged quote on your Instagram story at midnight. You just quietly build a life so comfortable, so warm, so aggressively cozy, that their opinions can't even get past the doorman.

True audacity isn't yelling, "Look at me now!" from the top of a mountain.

True audacity is whispering, "I didn't even notice you left." while eating a bowl of cereal.

So right now, you have a screaming pigeon inside your head, and a Kevin-shaped ghost hovering outside your door. And the whole world is telling you to fight them both in hand-to-hand combat.

Don't fight.

Stop trying to be the weather—chaotic, unpredictable, demanding everyone's attention. Start being the window.

The storm still happens. The pigeon still screams. Zyair still goes to the pharmacy. But you are inside. You are sitting on the couch. You are running on iced coffee and a quiet, unbothered audacity. You are watching the chaos like a bad reality show that you didn't pay for, and you have the remote control in your hand.

You didn't tame the pigeon. You didn't prove Zyair wrong.

You just outlived the conversation. And honestly? That is the most beautiful kind of success there is.

Take a sip. You're doing fine.

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Life Drawn Simple — life is messy