hope is a skill

nobody is irrelevant. nobody is invisible. your neighbors know your name and see you set off to school or work or the backyard everyday, sometimes with a spring in your step and sometimes with hunched over shoulders. there was this one time some stranger pointed you out to their friends and said “that’s the haircut I want” or “I have that shirt, too” or “they go to my school”. someone has admired the way you carry yourself or gave a presentation or even the way you’re so polite when you first meet a person. you’ve made comments or jokes that have stuck in minds of overhearers and eavesdroppers. when old classmates of yours think back to kindergarten or fourth grade or sophomore year they remember you and have an opinion of you. you’ve made recommendations of songs and restaurants and even cookie brands and actually introduced people to their all-time favorites. the cashier at the grocery store knows exactly what laundry detergent your household uses, or even if you don’t do your laundry at all.

you can never be irrelevant. there’s pieces of you everywhere, in a dozen lives, in a hundred dreams, in a million memories. maybe it’s true that you don’t have any friends, and you have a sucky relationship with your family or no family at all and no-one ever checks up on you, and you’re really very lonely, but that doesn’t determine your worth. you do. and so do the billions of small attributions you’ve already made to the world, both long-term and short-term. so thank you.

you will surprise yourself. you will be stronger, kinder, gentler, than you ever thought you could be. don’t let yourself be limited by your own perception of yourself. 

we are literally all going to be ok 🥰. unless we won’t be 🧐. but we will 😋.

Sudden wave of an immense love for humanity has hit me once again…

“Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019)

can’t wait to be a 40 year old woman who’s healed from her trauma and loves going grocery shopping and lives with lifelong but manageable mental illness. and gives people nice presents on their birthdays. and I’m looking forward to being 75 and sitting on the porch in the summer when the sun is shining.

"Do I deserve this?" "Am I worthy of this?"

So irrelevant. Do you want it?

you naturally grow out of a lot of unhealthy habits and I think that something that seeing obsessive self improvement culture in the early twenties crowd makes me sad about like. you will start to drink less as your world changes, you will get better at habits as your world stabilizes. your sense of self will solidify as you make mistakes waste time and figure out what works for you and what does not thru your own bodies rejection of it. you’ll be called to sleep earlier and wake sooner and to move your body bc it won’t bounce back with out stretching it out first like there are reasons older people are more regimented bc they don’t need to experiment as much anymore to find out what’s functional. It’s not 1 size fits all

it’s soooo hard to romanticize where you are now and like i get it, it always feels like the least beautiful time to be in, the worst point in history, your flop era etc, but it’s like Not though. every day i am amazed at the nostalgia i get for the past where i was objectively worse and more on fire than i am now like it doesn’t make sense until You Realize… nostalgia is often just you feeling regret that you didn’t fully experience what you had at that time. and it’s a call to enjoy where you are now because it truly is a unique part in ur life, no matter what is happening because life is a fleeting gift man. like IT IS!! experience every moment fully… it’s what your future self deserves when she looks back at you now

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, August 31st 1928 [ID in alt text]

it’s like when i choose to see the good side of things, i’m not being naive. it’s strategic and necessary. it’s how i learned to survive through everything btw. if you even care

i love you people who hold doors i love you people who let others pass on the driveway i love you people who make funny faces at babies i love you people who pick up litter i love you people who say please and thank you i love you people patient with service workers i love you people who share an umbrella i love you people who are casually kind

sad to still see so many people talk about how gross signs of aging are and people aging “poorly”. those are signs of a life that has continued to live and it is a blessing. age is coming for you too btw

The dominant culture lies about aging. Losing my youth is one of the best things that’s happened to me. In spite of some devastating personal and global circumstances, my brief time in my 40s has been fucking wonderful.

I’m kinder, wiser, and more present than I’ve ever been. Grandiose narratives that always led to disappointment are being replaced by a compassionate engagement with what is. I know and love myself and other people and the earth better. I have less to prove and more to appreciate. I’m less objectified and this is freeing up my subjective experience. I do work that has meaning to me and I’m respected in it. I’m increasingly connected to my ancestors.

The human life course can be very hard, and we live in a world that makes it much harder than it ought to be. But clinging to youth isn’t the answer. So much more becomes available to us when we loosen our grip on what we think we should be and open ourselves to what we are: creatures who need care and are here, miraculously, for only a brief time.

“I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp. Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

— What People Really Look Like