it's not true anymore.

i don't love you anymore.

sometimes i wonder if it is because i saw you for who you really are. what if i saw all you faults and decided you weren't worth it?

i don't wanna be that person.

but however else do people fall out of love?

why did i stop wanting the only person i ever dreamed of?

time is a peculiar thing and sometimes i am afraid that i am unjust or unable to feel the way people should.

on other days i realise that maybe there is no right way to feel, and that maybe,

most of all, i feel relief.

ever since starting uni, i've felt stupid. I'm not as smart as i used to be, and i wonder what happened. did i hit my head? am i just not meant for this? apparently i am not as smart as i've always given myself credit for. most of the people i know now are way smarter than me, and that hurts sometimes, because my intelligence was my identity for a very long time. i am no longer the smartest person in the room, ever. but- maybe i don't have to be. maybe my intelligence isn't what's important about me, what's important in others. i want to be smart, yes, but i also want to be diligent, and humorous, and approachable and witty and curious, and i want to be so kind it heals people. and i want to believe i can, in fact, be all of those things.

Your life has been to happy

my mother told me

for you to ever be extraordinary

maybe i need someone who knows what it's like to be sad, someone who has sat, alone, for months, wondering why they are one of those who are not good enough

maybe i should stop looking for the happy people, the opposites of me. maybe i should look for a hand to hold in my sadness.

#yes

…the reason I am cruel to others is because I have low-self-esteem. Because I don’t love myself, I am unable to understand those who do love me in spite of it all, and so I test them. ‘You love me even when I do this? Or this? Or this?’ Even when the other person forgives me, I am unable to understand their forgiveness, and when they give up on me, I torture and console myself with the ‘fact’ that no one could ever love me.

Baek Sehee, tr. by Anton Hur, from I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

this is awfully sad, because it's so very true

“How do you make someone love you? For the very young, there can be nothing harder in the world. You may try as hard as you like: place yourself beside them, cook their favourite food, bring them wine or sing the love songs that you know will move them. They will not move them. Nothing will move them. You will waste days interpreting the simple banalities of a phone call; months staring at their soft lips as they talk; you will waste years watching a body sitting in a chair and willing every muscle to take you across the room and do a simple thing, say a simple word, make them love you and you will not do it; you will waste long nights wondering how they cannot feel this — the urge to embrace, the snow melt in the heart when you are near them — how they can sit in that chair, or speak with those lips, or make a call and mean nothing by it, hide nothing in their hearts. Or perhaps what they hide is not what you want to see. Because surely they love someone. It simply isn’t you.”

— Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage

I want to escape. It's such an urge to get out of this place i'm in. I just want to say screw it to social standards and expectations and money and all the beliefs society has imposed on me.

in reality, i know i don't need a boyfriend, i don't need to have a constant internet connection, i don't need perfect grades and a job on the evenings to be happy. in fact, maybe that's why i'm- not unhappy, but restless. far from content.

truth to be told, i am a simple girl. i think that's not very usual anymore. i connect with things in a way few people have time to. maybe that is why i connect with very few people. i feel like nobody knows the true me.

i don't need tons of followers gushing about my prettiness. to be honest - i'm not an instagram-pretty girl. i am pretty in a wild sort of way, in a way that is not captured by a selfie. i stumble through life and my hair is messy and i am shy and overly emotional. i am too tall and i have so many freckles and i care a lot about the small things.

i like to believe i am pretty in the way i love books. i rarely feel so much peace as i do with a book in my hands. i love words and reading and writing, and the chill morning air, and i love harvesting the first vegetables in my grandmother's garden in early fall. i love music and trying new beverages and picking the flowers growing on the side of the street outside my house. i am pretty in the way i always notice when something is off with one of my friends, pretty in the way i cook for people and bring them homemade cinnamon-buns as a way of saying I love you, take care. I think i am pretty. but since nobody sees it, i often forget that it's real.

i feel too wild to be captured in this squared everyday life, yet somehow also scared of leaving. but i have such a strong feeling that - as a human - i do not belong here. i belong in a cabin in the mountains with no internet and an old oven and a window with a view. maybe i belong in solitude. i just wish for calm. i don't want these worries. i want to wake up feeling energized, not stressed about getting an education and then a full-time job. why should money matter? i want a small cabin for myself where i can play the piano and read my books and go for long walks. i want to breathe. i want to leave all this behind and not come back for a long, long while.

it's a weird f*cking feeling,

loving someone who will never know. convincing yourself that you're overreacting, that surely your feelings can't run that deep. until you see them again, that is,

until they wrap their arms around you or you make them laugh and feel giddy inside or you notice your eyes being drawn to them, again and again

and you think i would give you everything. i would hold you and love you and care for you, and most of all i would listen. i would want to understand you, because you are my favourite thing. i want to know you like nobody knows you. i am capable of so much love, and i would give it all to you.

and yet, the insight that this will never happen. the knowledge that this is a one-sided love. i will love you in silence because words will not do it justice, words will not make you ready to recieve my love.

i feel the world has robbed me of something magnificent, and it has robbed you of something you won't ever know the name of.

i'm so sick

of hearing people ask about my height and my weight and the cute boys in my life. how do i make them take a genuine interest in my brain and my thoughts?

a thing about love

i'm not pure. i don't love like that, in that in-my-eyes-you're-perfect kind of way. i don't seem to have it in me, the kind of love people so often talk about, romanticise. i never gaze longingly, thinking "i love you" in a nice way. i think that you're too kind, gullible almost, and it annoys me because the world is cruel and you should know that. But i'm also mad at people who think the world is cruel (constantly, at myself mostly). I can never decide what i feel or why, and i gaze longingly and i don't think "i love you" in the most romatic way, because i'm thinking Why wasn't i good enough, what did i do, what didn't i do, how come this perfect thing will never happen, and how come you still got everything you wanted, how come you chose her, how come i got left behind again and how come i'm always walking two steps after everyone else and how come i don't hate you when maybe i really should.

some people

are all about their self-improvement and their goals and their hustling. on some days i envy that. they seem to have their sh*t together, you know? they seem to have a purpose.

on other days, i just can't. i can't even be bothered to wish i were like those people.

i know i haven't lived a lot of years, but i'm so very tired. i need softness. i think i need to compensate for the lack of self-compassion in my life, and give myself the kindness i didn't know i withheld from myself as a child. i don't need getting up super early and taking a cold shower and efficiently murdering my muscles at the gym before starting my day. i've come to realize that maybe i can't be that person, no matter how much they are idolized and praised.

I like getting up semi-early. i truly enjoy mornings. i like putting on coffee-shop music and starting my day slowly. i'm always chilled to my bones, so i like showers hot enough to nearly burn. i like taking my time to make breakfast. i like cutting fruit and drinking juice. i like using colourful pens in my calendar. i like stretching and breathing the morning air and reading a few pages of my book on the subway.

and i like to have the option to snooze for half an hour on the days i truly need it. i like this kindness. it makes my eyes fill with tears, but in a good, i-finally-get-it kind of way.

i understand now that i can't be the hustling kind. not like that. i demanded too much of myself while i was way too young, and that has taken it's toll. i don't know if i was ever truly a child- in that free, mindless sense. and maybe that's why i'm so tired. and maybe that's why, right now, all i need is my own kindness. i need my slow mornings to remind myself that even though i don't have these grand goals and sky-high amibitions, i still deserve to feel content. i don't need a gold medal to deserve happiness.

i don't know

how to do this. 'this' being a relationship. romantically. i know exactly what i want, what i think i need, but i'm starting to question whether i'll ever find it. i get so annoyed with all the people i date. they lack depth, they don't seem to have dreams, they laugh as much in a month as i do in an hour, and i just- i need more.

i know i can't just want things, i have to give them, too. it's a give and take, loving someone. But maybe, when you feel like you're giving too much and getting too little, love never gets the chance to form. maybe that's why i'm resignedly disliking the people who i'm dating.

am i in the wrong? i know i can love. i've been in love, once. and i love my friends more than anything in this world, because i see their ambition, their kindness, their dreams and their cleverness, their inspiration and their joy and their genuine laughter. my heart is capable of so much love. maybe i'm simply in the wrong trying to create those feelings for the wrong people. but where do i find the right one?

i need more than a boy who says 'Study less' when i tell him that i'm stressed out. i need more than someone who lies to my face, who doesn't form his own opinion because he is afraid to be honest with me. i need more than a person who shrugs and says 'Get over it' when i open up about my worries.

these boys- they make it so simple, somehow. essentially, i think they ask me to stop feeling so much. but to not feel- that would mean erasing me. and i can't. i won't. instead, i need someone to take my hand and feel all those things with me. someone who will go for a stroll through our hometown and find a new cozy bookstore and stay there for a while, comforted by the presence of words. someone who will take a lazy weekend walk with me, without needing the smartphone thrill of never being truly present. someone who will sing loudly with me, who will cry when watching a movie because it's just that good, someone who will stay up late to gaze up at the infinity of space with me. someone who will not think i'm weird when i want to run out into a torrential summer rain, but whose eyes will light up as they grin 'I'll race ya', and case me out into the storm.

is that too much to ask?

i met this boy

and we had the sort of connection i've never felt before. one hour with him was better than all hours i've ever spent will all the people i've dated before. he just felt like the most precious soul. and he had freckles and dimples and i'm so stupidly into that adorable sh*t that i'll never stop thinking about him.

he lives in another city and i'll probably never see him again, of course, but for a split second i felt something so real and it just made me really happy. then i felt sad because maybe, in another life, this would have meant something. so apparently i'm into tumblr now.

sometimes i wonder how to be what i want

and then i google how to be kind cause i need to do better

ok so i'm new

how do i do this?