“Why do you need to go to therapy? You seem so happy! What do you even talk about there?”

When my seeing a therapist comes up in conversation, I am often met with comments like this.

I used to feel a shade of shame and embarrassment knowing the implication here was that “unhappy” people are the ones that need therapy… and yet, there I was, returning to sessions week after week.

 But now, years—many years—later, I have shed the shame and replaced it with love.

Self-love.  Love that runs through me and floods out to my children.  And I am proud of that.

Tonight, my three year old daughter wore her Elsa AND Anna dresses with her way too big, dress-up, pink high heel shoes on the wrong feet, three beaded necklaces, seven fancy hair ties worn as bracelets that made their way half way up her right arm, and a super sparkly purse perfectly placed over her shoulder.

She commanded, “ALEXA, PLAY FROZEN!” and when her trusty friend obeyed, she went near her and whispered, “Good girl, Alexa. Let’s dance.”

I am a 32-year-old middle-class, millennial mother of two and I call bullshit on this “millennial shame-game.”

According to many articles and memes that have recently inundated my newsfeed, there is an entire cohort of entitled, unmanageable, lazy, and narcissistic young people scuffing up the shiny gold standard of those who walked this Earth before them.  And, apparently, I am one of them. 

Now, I am not a politician, an economist, an analyst, or a sociologist studying the trends of generations.  But, I am just like so many of you.  I am a smart, well-educated, hard-working woman and a mother who loves her children more than anything else on this planet.  And so, as I look back on my journey to where I am now and consider what I do every single day presently, I can honestly say that I would like to confidently and as politely as possible tell anyone who called me any of the adjectives listed above to please knock it off.

1.     If you ever have a gut feeling that something is wrong with a person you are with or a situation you are in, trust it the first time. I have a very close friend that my dad adores greatly.  One day years ago I started to tell him about a particularly terrible situation of betrayal that she was in.  I started with, “She had a feeling…” and he cut me off there.  He said, “Honey, if you ever feel like something is not right, you need to trust that feeling the first time you’re aware of it and do something about it immediately.  Don’t wait around for things to get worse…because they will.”  It was a reminder that my own intuition is like a built-in compass that will always point me to my “North” if I am paying attention.