A long time ago, when you were a wee thing, you learned something, some way to cope, something that, if you did it, would help you survive. It wasn’t the healthiest thing, it wasn’t gonna get you free, but it was gonna keep you alive. You learned it, at five or six, and it worked, it *did* help you survive. You carried it with you all your life, used it whenever you needed it. It got you out—out of your assbackwards town, away from an abuser, out of range of your mother’s un-love. Or whatever. It worked for you. You’re still here now partly because of this thing that you learned. The thing is, though, at some point you stopped needing it. At some point, you got far enough away, surrounded yourself with people who love you. You survived. And because you survived, you now had a shot at more than just staying alive. You had a shot now at getting free. But that thing that you learned when you were five was not then and is not now designed to help you be free. It is designed only to help you survive. And, in fact, it keeps you from being free. You need to figure out what this thing is and work your ass off to un-learn it. Because the things we learn to do to survive at all costs are not the things that will help us get FREE. Getting free is a whole different journey altogether

Things that are cool: being productive & motivated & functional. Things that are not cool: being a mess, melodrama, laziness.

I got the accounting job with the big fat salary and I couldn’t be happier!! 2013 has been fucking amazeballs!!!

I choose not to lurk people who piss me off or who I actively dislike because my head is not a rental space for losers.

I’m really glad that I worked out that being functional & productive is cool & being a fucked up, strung out mess all the time is not.

I have the deepest affection for intellectual conversations. The ability to just sit and talk. About love, about life, about anything, about everything. To sit under the moon with all the time in the world, the full-speed train that is our lives slowing to a crawl. Bound by no obligations, barred by no human limitations. To speak without regret or fear of consequence. To talk for hours and about what’s really important in life.

The underlying denominator between all of us is that we are so severely, so completely, beautifully and unfairly human. There is a lot that I will never understand about other people, just as there is even more that I will never understand about myself. We ask each other questions. We ask for facts. for step-by-step instructions, for manuals on how to be ourselves. We ask so much when the only person who can truly and completely understand the bumbling mess of being that you are is yourself.

We stumble through our days, bumping into strangers and bumping into walls and thinking that all of the answers are in each other, in our environments — but the only place where we can look for utter solace is in ourselves. Over the past couple of years i’ve become increasingly content with myself and with life as a whole because I realized that in the end, the only one who has the power to save me is myself. People are beautiful, strangers even more so. The ones you love are mirrors where your hurts and your memories are pinned. 

We can only ‘get on each other’s level’ in a shallow sense of the phrase. The boy I love wanted to melt into me. The boy I love told me that I looked ‘home’ the other night. We yearn so fervently to submerge ourselves into another person’s skin. We’ve all written about it, have all tried osmosis through each other’s flesh but when it comes down to it — this life is your own. You have all of the power to make it what you want to make it. You have all the power to neglect the blue skies. You have all the power to find the strength within yourself to make the changes that you know will only make you stronger.

We’ve all been emotionally hurt. We all have daddy issues and mommy issues and abandonment issues and not enough tissues — and that is what we have in common. We’ve all been sad. We all, to a certain degree, have known depression and degression. What i’m trying to say is that you are human and you are so unique but so is everyone else. Let the world grow at their own pace. What does it matter if you consider yourself more ‘mature’ than another human being your age. What does it matter?

Everyone learns the hard way, and that way may not be your way but that doesn’t mean that it’s less difficult or easier. It’s all subjective, my friend. All of our human lives, all of our individual fleshy selves — it’s wholly our own. There’s no use in comparing yourself to someone else. There’s no use in any of that. You will never know another human being and chances are, you’ll barely know yourself but that’s the beauty of all of this. We just don’t know and we’ll never really know. Instead of fighting that, we should just let it be. Yearn to find connections between humans play cat’s cradle with commonalities. But don’t think your story more interesting, don’t think your tale something more worthy of telling than another’s. 

My 12 month contract with DuluxGroup is up as of today and I am so excited for the next step in my future. I have been graced with so many useful opportunities and had the pleasure of working with some real characters this year.

Now I am going to be setting long term goals and getting what I want by doing a duel degree of business and finance part time, while working for an accounting firm of a major corporation if everything goes to plan over the next few weeks. 

I’m happy with the huge turn-around in my life this year, I can’t wait for more good things to come my way. 

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. 

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions—predigested books and ideas, weekend encounters guaranteed to change your life, taking “gut” courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing solid work, marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others.