Deep breath (calm yourself)

Understand that life is not a straight line. Life is not a set timeline of milestones. It is okay if you don’t finish school, get married, find a job that supports you, have a family, make money, and live comfortably all by this age, or that age. It’s okay if you do, as long as you understand that if you’re not married by 25, or a Vice President by 30 or even happy, for that matter. The world isn’t going to condemn you. You are allowed to backtrack. You are allowed to figure out what inspires you. You are allowed time, and I think we often forget that. We choose a major right out of high school because the proper thing to do is to go straight to University. We choose a job right out of University, even if we didn’t love our major, because we just invested time into it. We go to that job every morning because we feel the need to support ourselves abundantly. We take the next step, and the next step, and the next step, thinking that we are fulfilling some checklist for life, and one day we wake up depressed. We wake up stressed out. We feel pressured and don’t know why. That is how you ruin your life.

You ruin your life by choosing the wrong person. What is it with our need to fast-track relationships? Why are we so enamored with the idea of first becoming somebody’s rather than somebodies? Trust me when I say that a love bred out of convenience, a love that blossoms from the need to sleep beside someone, a love that caters to our need for attention rather than passion, is a love that will not inspire you at 6am when you roll over and embrace it. Strive to discover foundational love, the kind of relationship that motivates you to be a better man or woman, the kind of intimacy that is rare rather than right there. “But I don’t want to be alone,” we often exclaim. Be alone. Eat alone, take yourself on dates, sleep alone. In the midst of this you will learn about yourself. You will grow, you will figure out what inspires you, you will curate your own dreams, your own beliefs, your own stunning clarity, and when you do meet the person who makes your cells dance, you will be sure of it, because you are sure of yourself. Wait for it. Please, I urge you to wait for it, to fight for it, to make an effort for it if you have already found it, because it is the most beautiful thing your heart will experience. 

You ruin your life by letting your past govern it. It is common for certain things in life to happen to you. There will be heartbreak, confusion, days where you feel like you aren’t special or purposeful. There are moments that will stay with you, words that will stick. You cannot let these define you – they were simply moments, they were simply words. If you allow for every negative event in your life to outline how you view yourself, you will view the world around you negatively. You will miss out on opportunities because you didn’t get that promotion five years ago, convincing yourself that you were stupid. You will miss out on affection because you assumed your past love left you because you weren’t good enough, and now you don’t believe the man or the woman who urges you to believe you are. This is a cyclic, self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t allow yourself to move past what happened, what was said, what was felt, you will look at your future with that lens, and nothing will be able to breach that judgment. You will keep on justifying, reliving, and fueling a perception that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

You ruin your life when you compare yourself to others. The amount of Instagram followers you have does not decrease or increase your value. The amount of money in your bank account will not influence your compassion, your intelligence, or your happiness. The person who has two times more possessions than you does not have double the bliss, or double the merit. We get caught up in what our friends are liking, who our significant others are following, and at the end of the day this not only ruins our lives, but it also ruins us. It creates within us this need to feel important, and in many cases we often put others down to achieve that. 

You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how, you love. There is courage in that.

You ruin your life by tolerating it. At the end of the day you should be excited to be alive. When you settle for anything less than what you innately desire, you destroy the possibility that lives inside of you, and in that way you cheat both yourself and the world of your potential. The next Michelangelo could be sitting behind a Macbook right now writing an invoice for paperclips, because it pays the bills, or because it is comfortable, or because he can tolerate it. Do not let this happen to you. Do not ruin your life this way. Life and work, and life and love, are not irrespective of each other. They are intrinsically linked. We have to strive to do extraordinary work, we have to strive to find extraordinary love. Only then will we tap into an extraordinarily blissful life. 

Doubt

Reward love with loyalty and doubt with distance, the truth is, it's really never that complicated. Love dismisses your fears, doesn't cause you pain. Love doesn't betray you, dismay you or enslave you, it sets you free like no other. Most of the time the hardest choice is to keep trying after everything or to just give up, when is it enough? When do you stop? Sometimes it's better to take a step back, gain a little perspective and then chose. The thing with distance is you never you whether they're missing you, or they've forgotten you. You simply trust that things will work out or the best. Don't expect more from others because you are willing to go the extra mile for them. Expectations hurt relationships because its what you've made up in your mind things should be, other than reality. When you're brave enough to say goodbye, life greets you with a new hello.
It's never to late to have your happily ever after.

No matter how long it is, every now and then I think about you, and suddenly for a moment I can't breathe.

Beauty

When your feelings, your thoughts and your outlook on life is beautiful, the exterior will reflect it. I think beautiful, love beautifully, feel beautiful therefore what I put out to the world is beautiful. Never shortchange your beautiful contribution to the world. Good day all:)

C&J4EVR

Celeste & Jesse 'Forever'...

proof that even the “perfect” couples aren’t perfect, and nothing lasts forever.

This film brought up mixed emotions and almost broke my heart. If I could describe my life through a movie this one might relate to the way I feel the most.

The film is about the break up and subsequent angst that comes from two people who are best friends who slowly watch their marriage fall apart and everything that follows.

Celeste and Jesse are life long friends, who after separating, decide to still be in each others life. They are so close that they hang out all the time and act like nothing happened, which their friends find weird. It starts off with them being inseparable. Its almost like a symbiotic relationship in the fact that one cannot survive without the other. Celeste depends on Jesse because it is the norm, whereas Jesse depends on Celeste in the hope that they can get back together. Each of their friends is telling them to move on.

After a night together, and an awkward morning after, Celeste leaves. Soon after she realizes that she misses Jesse, meanwhile Jesse moves on, so much so that he is having a child. This starts the decent of Celeste. The rest of the film is from her point of view. Her having to go cold turkey without him, going back on the dating scene, among other personal ghost she deals with not allowing her to move on from what she had with Jesse.

The feelings come out, with Celeste and Jesse arguing. Celeste resents having to have waited for Jesse to grow up only to never get there, that is until he met the new girl. Although Jesse changed himself dramatically to be with her he resents that Celeste pushed him away, and now blames him for their failure. Celeste is in denial about Jesse and him moving on. Ultimately she takes the blame for the relationship disintegrating and realises that she was the one to blame, and after they divorce, she realizes she would rather watch him be happy elsewhere than unhappy with her.

If we’re being honest, though, I maybe cried less at the love story and more because I recognized in Celeste the most dangerous parts of myself. The parts I’ve turned down to low, but which still crouch and flicker and stand ready to rage at all the wrong moments. The parts I’ve managed to subdue, but which my better angels haven’t yet learned how to defeat, how to drive out.

Lesson to be learned is, "Would you rather be right or be happy?

Wallflower.

Thanks to the best man in the world for knowing me oh so well! If you haven't read Perks of Being a Wallflower you most def should.

"We accept the love we think we deserve"

Live.

Never know what life brings next. After Saturday i keep asking myself...

Have i done everything i could and want to do before the end?

Live, Learn, LOVE.

 I recently re-discovered a journal I kept when i started college.  I

 was young,  broken-hearted, starting out fresh at a new school with

 not a single friend, on the brink of adulthood but still so incredibly

 naïve (something I only recognize now, because I have distance,

 experience and context).  I was 18 years old, feeling grown and wise…

 and yet at the same time like a failure.  Reading my words in my

 handwriting was almost like becoming reacquainted with a stranger, a

 well-meaning, disillusioned stranger.  I know it is cliché, but I could not help but think if only

 I knew then what I know now, perhaps I would have been more hopeful

 and less critical.

 In order to create reminders for myself in the next ten years, I

 decided to list down the things I wish I knew then and things I may

 need to know again in the next decade of my life.

 List of things I wish I could have told my eighteen-year-old self…

-Maturity is a process and is less about age and more about experience, and actually learning from those experiences.
-Don't be overwhelmed by the disappointment of rejection or the confusion of disappointment.
-You are beautiful.  Without make up and in the middle of the night and outside of being sexy.
-Tell yourself you are beautiful frequently and abundantly. And mean it!
-Listen to your gut, the truth is that the feeling that something is wrong, NEVER GOES AWAY.
-Be kind to yourself.  You tend to be so hard on yourself.
-You are strong. Your capacity of strength is so much bigger than you think.
-Your vulnerabilities and mistakes make you human, not weak.
-You have incredible judgment—use it.
- Do an inventory as often as possible and purge relationships that don't add to your life, because
 they will inevitably take from it.
-Friendships only matter in Quality, not Quantity.  You will be grateful for the few amazing people who are there when it matters.
-Love yourself more—more than anything else and anyone else.  If you don't, no one else will.
-Set higher goals and follow your dreams!  They will take you places you have not even imagined.
-Stop stressing over the little things you cannot change.
-Don't settle.  Life is full of choices, don't ever let anyone talk you out of having standards. Keep your heels, head and standards high. You are not picky, or greedy, or unrealistic. You are worth it!
-Live passionately!  regrets are for people who live with out living & feel with out feeling.
 - Learn to just LET IT GO.
 -Your destiny will never walk away. Friends, Boys, and Jobs will come and go. Learn to play your cards wisely.
 -Your faith will not always look like this. the more you open your eyes to the world the more you will believe in, and less you'll trust.
 -Never be tolerant of injustice. Speak when the moment calls for it.
 -Take risks and do things that scare, intimidate & inspire you. That's how u get to the top.
 -Love deeply, intentionally, reverently.  Even when it hurts!