Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

There is no real security except for whatever you build inside yourself.

what doesn’t kill you
leaves scars
ruins your lungs
dries out all your tears
leaves you lying awake at 4 in the morning
wishing you weren’t alive

It’s not my job to make you a better man and I don’t give a shit if I’ve made you a better man. It’s not a fucking woman’s job to be consumed and invaded and spat out so that some fucking man can evolve.

I want to live in a world where little girls are not pinkified, but where little girls who like pink are not punished for it, either. We can certainly talk about the social pressures surrounding gender roles, and the concerns that people have when they see girls and young women who appear to be forced into performances of femininity by the society around them, but let’s stop acting like they have no agency and free will. Let’s stop acting like women who choose to be feminine are somehow colluders, betraying the movement, bamboozled into thinking that they want to be feminine. Let’s stop denying women their own autonomy by telling them that their expressions of femininity are bad and wrong.

Antifemininity is misogynist. What you are saying when you engage in this type of rhetoric is that you think things traditionally associated with women are wrong. Which is misogynist. By telling feminine women that they don’t belong in the feminist movement, you are reinforcing the idea that to be feminine and a woman is wrong, that women who want to be taken seriously need to be more masculine, because most people view gender presentation in binary ways. This rewards the ‘one of the boys’ type rhetoric I encounter all over the place from self-avowed feminists who seem to think that bashing on women is a good way to prove how serious they are when it comes to caring about women and bringing men into the feminist movement.

The past beats within me, like a second heart.

Close some doors. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they no longer lead somewhere.

“Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.”
—Gandhi 

(via runningtoescapethetruth)

Without running, I would have missed the joy of rain. What could be considered an inconvenience or a bummer to the inexperienced is actually a gift. Without running, I would miss a lot of things—like seeing cities in a certain way, or knowing certain people all the way to the core. I’m glad we don’t experience life through glass, under cover, or from the sidelines. Good things take miles.

apoetreflects:

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”

—Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin (McClelland and Stewart, 2000)

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.