- Your most difficult relationships are your most powerful catalysts for growth. They’re like search dogs, sniffing out your pain and exposing it to the light, where it then has the opportunity to reach for a rescuing hand or crawl back beneath the rubble to wait for the next dog that comes to dig it out again.
- You can be heartbroken from the right decision.
- You don’t have to finish a book you don’t love. My GOD there are so many books out there that will absolutely crack your soul open. Don’t grit your teeth through the end of something that feels like 8th grade required reading.
- This quote by Terence McKenna: “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is how magic is done; by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”
- Get your check-ups. All of them. As frequently as you’re supposed to.
- Pay attention to your body and use your observations as future guidance. For example, you feel like shit when you have more than 2 drinks. You feel great when you eat spinach and nuts. You feel like shit when you skip meals and rest days. You fall asleep easily when you saw the sun set that evening.
- Life is beautiful and you have time. This will still be true a decade from now, a decade from then, and so on.
- Community is not an accident. Where there is community there is always a concerted effort to create the space for it. Recognize who creates the space for your communities – who hosts gatherings, who plans the events that you slightly dread until you get there, who has spent years cultivating a place which brings people together and uplifts them? Thank those people.
- Keep making the list of beautiful moments. On your shitty days, you will cherish that list as proof of the other side.
- You are usually more afraid of the fear that you believe will accompany a thing than of the thing itself. Death, for example.
- Most of what you’re chasing is feelings. You want a title so you’ll feel valued by others, you want more money so you’ll feel safe, you want to move out of the country so you’ll feel child-like wonder. How can you get a slow drip of those feelings so you aren’t constantly seeking to escape yourself and your life?
- Action is the antidote to anxiety. You will feel significantly lighter after taking the first step, and even more amazed by the momentum it builds. So just write for 10 minutes. Run to the end of the block and back. Put one shirt in the drawer. Read one paragraph. Just take the first, tiniest action possible and then re-assess.
- It is a very beautiful and sacred thing to be a young woman growing up and discovering herself. Respect this period of your life and let go of this urgency to arrive somewhere.
- Let yourself be mothered by many different people. Sometimes those people will be younger than you. Still, let them.
- Love is not a calculated exchange, it’s the highest spiritual virtue. Give it generously without considering the tit-for-tat, the 2-way street, the mutual back-scratch. Give it without exception and entitlement and you will reap the rewards. Love is not a finite resource. The more of the real stuff you give, the more you have. But the thing about this rule is that it only applies to the real stuff. Give pretend-love (the kind that keeps score, that expects the perfect response, that anticipates a big fancy Instagram-worthy dividend), you’ll only wind up exhausted.
- Some things are just sad and wrong and unanswerable. They don’t need to be anything else.
- If something is torturing you, speak it out loud (even if just to yourself).
- Many things are better slowed down: sex, meals, showers, drinking alcohol, frying eggs, growing up, etc.
- Life is an enormous, interconnected, forever-in-flux web of an experience operating completely on its own. In the brief moments of truly believing that, I feel I’ve finally been granted permission to feel peace. To experience the web in all its fucked-up glory is to respect the flux.
- What you do for work doesn’t always need to be “compelling”. It’s okay if it’s never compelling. How you make money is not the most interesting thing about you.
- Actually, you don’t know that you and that one person probably wouldn’t become close friends. Actually, you don’t really know anything. Don’t put people into boxes.
- If the idea of not doing something at all is worse than the idea of doing something terribly, that is something you absolutely must do (even if you’re the worst to ever do it)
- The truth is always risky. Just because someone doesn’t receive your honesty warmly doesn’t mean you can’t be honest with them. It also doesn’t mean they will feel that way forever. Sometimes people just need time to circle back to what was said with a little less emotionally charge.
- However often you’re calling your brother, call him more.
- However often you’re going to the ocean, go more.
3 thoughts on “For 25: Things I’ll Need to Hear (Notes to Self)”
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you are so fucking good at writing, and awesome.
These words of yours are so true at any age❤️❤️❤️
Allow me to add some points of my own.
1. Three things are too wonderful to me. Four I do not understand. The way of a ship on high seas. The way of an eagle in the sky. The way of a serpent on a rock. And the way of a man with a virgin.
2. Under three things the earth quakes. Under four it cannot bear itself up. A slave when he becomes king. A fool when he is satisfied with food. An unloved woman when she gets a husband. A mistress when she is supplanted her maidservant.
3. Three things are stately in their march. Four are stately in their stride. The rooster. The male goat. A lion, who does not retreat before any. And a king at the head of his army.
4. There are six things that the Lord hates. Seven are an abomination to him. A lying tongue, a false witness who breathes out lies, hands that shed innocent blood, feet that are swift to do evil, a proud countenance, haughty eyes, and one who sews discord among brethren.